Gidi Grinstein
TOM: A Moonshot to Help 250 Million
Summary
Gidi Grinstein discusses the role of TOM to democratize innovation and empower those living with disabilities, as well as the project’s roots in Israel with a vision of Israeli and Jewish people making a significant distinct contribution to humanity on a global level.
Gidi Grinstein
Gideon (Gidi) Grinstein is an Israeli serial social entrepreneur, leader,and author. He founded the Reut Institute, which specializes in societal disruptions. Within Reut, Gidi initiated TOM, which is a bold global social project with the goal of helping 250 million people within a decade through global open innovation by using 3D printing. TOM has been recognized by the Blackstone Charitable Trust, Inc. and Forbes magazine. Gidi’s seminal book, Flexigidity: The Secret of Jewish Adaptability (2013), offers a unique systemic view of the Jewish People. In 2000, Gidi served as the secretary of the Israeli delegation for the Camp David Summit; before that he led the Israeli team that designed Birthright Israel, which is the largest generational project of the Jewish People. Gidi is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School of Government and of Tel-Aviv University Schools of Law and Economics. He is a long-distance runner and is married to Betty with whom he has 5 children.
Carly Maisel
Carly Maisel is the global CEO of Kirsh Philanthropies.
To start a TOM community, the most important thing you need is a social entrepreneur that is committed to the vision. This person then engages us, engages our team, we sign a licensee agreement. The essence of the licensee agreement is not money, there’s no money that is being moved from one side to the other, our licensees around the world don’t pay us. There is one major thing that they commit to in this relationship, and that is that everything that will be created within the framework of TOM will forever be public domain intellectual property. Which means that all the innovation that will be created by the local team will add up to the global repository of solutions that exists.
We’re using all sorts of approximations to assess how many products are being delivered, but this is definitely something we have to work on.
Our vision is to create a project that is exponentially growing by the fact that you can have metaphorically, 1000 products with thousands of distribution points, all these makerspaces that I mentioned in universities, and then you actually get to multipliers that get you to millions of products. But it’s obviously very ambitious project and we’re creating the infrastructure to allow it to grow.