Where there’s nothing, you find innovation
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
So there I was browsing one of my favorite blogs “Make Magazine” .. It’s a blog full of things that I will probably never make, but that being said, it’s nice to know that if I ever did need a personal submarine, I could make one out of a pig trough (no, I’m not joking).
Moving on though, one of their features was about an African mechanic who repairs automobile alternators with nothing more than bamboo, copper wire and a few other materials. It struck me that innovation is truely incredible in Africa, and that sometimes where you have the least ammount of resources to work with you can often find the greatest innovation. I can remember as a kid watching Clive James in Cuba, and being astonished as people made car oil out of old hair shampoo!
Anyway, as it turns out, there’s an entire website devoted this African innovation. http://www.afrigadget.com/ I highly recommend people keeping an eye on this. One project that particularly caught my eye on the site was the “Playground Pump” … a water pump that’s generated from a children’s playground merry-go-round, and then wouldn’t you know but I found out the same day that a colleague just visited them in Africa.