Lecture Series
Smart Hardware from the Street
David Li
Online event
18 March 2026, 14:00 CET
David Li has been contributing to open source since 1990. He is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Innovation Lab, a member of the Free Software Foundation and a committer/contributor to Apache projects, and is associated with Shenzhen’s open innovation ecosystem through Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab. This talk traces how Huaqiangbei evolved into a fast, bottom-up innovation engine—where components, repair culture, copy/modify practices, and dense supplier networks let entrepreneurs prototype and scale quickly. It will look at the street-level mechanics of iteration: sourcing, small-batch runs, ecosystem matchmaking, and the informal knowledge flows that turned Shenzhen into a hardware capital.