Welcome to the How of Business with Henry Lopez and David Begin, the podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business.

And now here are your hosts.

Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. This is Henry Lopez. And my guest today is Beth Colco. Beth, welcome to

the show. Thank you, Henry. We're excited to have you here. It's such an extensive background and

experience that you have that we're going to get to chat about today. Beth is an academic turned

entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of multiple technology-driven culture shifts.

She was one of the first academic researchers involved in the early days of the internet

when she studied text-based virtual worlds, early messaging platforms and social networks,

also digital games, and technology for international development.

And we'll have her explain what that means a little bit.

She helped kickstart the academic makerspace movement with her HACA academia project.

I think I pronounced that right.

Academia project at the University of Washington, where she built the

first SMS-based transportation apps and early digital health tools for emerging markets.

And she has pioneered work on non-expert innovation influenced by the maker and hacker communities worldwide. And I said a lot there.

So this whole concept of the non-expert having influence over things like devices, medical devices,

is something we're going to chat about. Very interesting topic. So shift labs, which again,

got its help through Y combinator, you create medical

devices that improved health care delivery and emerging markets. And we're going to talk about

that specifically. ShiftLab combines excellence in engineering and human-centered design to create

new kinds of products that outperform traditional devices

in what you call austere regions.

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