TOM – Tikkun Olam Makers

Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation, Remote Working

Roughly one billion people, or 15% of the world’s population, live with some form of disability, and millions of these people located at the bottom of the pyramid face neglected challenges. A neglected challenge is any challenge without a universally affordable and accessible market-based solution. Neglected challenges exist for two main reasons: (1) barriers to full social and economic inclusion are higher for people with disabilities, and (2) societies are struggling to channel an abundance of talent and innovation towards those who need it most. In 2014, Gidi Grinstein founded Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM) because he believed that neither geographic location nor socioeconomic status should limit someone’s access to assistive technologies and devices, and that the abundance of talent and innovation in the world today could be redirected to solve neglected needs. Grinstein realized that the untapped potential of Industry 4.0 (makers and makerspaces in specific) could be channeled to help those at the bottom of th

TOM - Tikkun Olam Makers - is a global nonprofit venture that creates and disseminates affordable, open-source solutions to neglected challenges of people living with disabilities, the elderly and the poor via volunteer communities across the world.

Roughly one billion people, or 15% of the world’s population, live with some form of disability. TOM seeks to address a massive societal failure where the acute needs of millions of people living with disabilities and the elderly have no affordable market or government solution to their needs because their conditions are rare or require significant customization.

To address and solve this societal failure, TOM is building a systemic ‘clearing mechanism’ between these unmet needs, and the people and resources to solve them in the form of a global movement of TOM communities engaged in TOM’s 4-step process:

(1) Challenge: Identifying neglected challenges that either do not have a market solution, or the existing solution is unaffordable;

(2) Prototyping: Creating working prototypes of affordable solutions to local TOM Challenges through two to three-day "makeathon" events and/or weekly developer groups in which teams of 'Makers' (engineers, designers, programmers) and 'Need-Knowers' (people with disabilities) create solutions together.

(3) Productizing: Upgrading or reverse engineering TOM Prototypes into digital product files, with a detailed bill of materials and step by step explanation on how to manufacture the product in Makerspaces.

(4) Dissemination: Dissemination of the products to end-users through the TOM web-platform, which is designed as a marketplace between Digital-Files, their users, and local makerspaces that can manufacture them (at universities, schools, corporations).

Every solution developed in a TOM Community is deposited in the Public Domain (no IP) and is accessible for free on the TOM Website.

Our moonshot goal for the coming decade is to improve the lives of 250 million people through affordable, customizable, and easily replicable community-driven solutions. Since 2014, 60+ TOM Communities of over 4,500 volunteers in 21 countries have worked on 400+ prototypes and products. Learn more about you can help impact 250 million lives by visiting www.tomglobal.org

TOM – Tikkun Olam Makers

Where BOLD Leadership Meets AI