One of the thousands of larger-than-life portraits that came out of street artist JR's TED Prize wish last year.
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No innovator is an island unto themselves; all entrepreneurs and innovators have supporters behind the scenes, helping them succeed. This year during the TED conference, three of those supporters teamed up to give the world an inside peak at the entrepreneurial ideas churning just underneath the TED surface.
The big idea behind the Global Village Construction Set is that everyone everywhere should have access to the key tools for creating human civilization.
At the end of years of study and the completion of a PhD in fusion physics, Polish-born TED2011 Fellow Marcin Jakubowski found himself feeling like he was, to use his words, "useless." Believing he needed to get past a consumer lifestyle, he moved to middle America to begin farming. After buying (and then breaking, and breaking again) a tractor, he began to wonder what were the truly essential machines at the core of every society. And even more, he began to wonder why, if open source software had had such powerful impacts, there wasn't an equivalent for the essential hardware of civilization?