Mark Hatch

CEO, TechShop

Boom!
Making a Creative Revolution

Recent advances and the rise of extreme making is driving the next industrial revolution and improving our world.

We are living at the start of the greatest explosion of innovation the world has ever seen. Take the renaissance (knowledge explosion), Gutenberg (cheap information), the enlightenment (self-determination), the industrial revolution (capital and tools), and information revolutions (the delivery of free knowledge and information), then mix and ignite. BOOM! You get the Creative Revolution.

I will highlight how “Free, Cheap and Disposable” is changing the cost to innovate, I’ll explore some of the implications and, in the “Show and Tell” portion, highlight the early accomplishments of some Extreme Makers.

Mark Hatch is the CEO of TechShop, a focal point in the emerging Maker movement and one of the few physical embodiments of that movement. Like a trade school it teaches members how to use a broad range of high- and low-end machinery to design, prototype and produce their ideas. It has become a hothouse for radical innovators, but is open to anyone including students, entrepreneurs, artists and the likes. TechShop currently has 2 locations and many more planned for cities nationwide. It has been featured in the Wired, Inc., and Forbes magazines, as well as, newspapers like The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News and The Wall Street Journal.

Mark is a seasoned business executive with experience across multiple industry segments. He is adept at driving growth through innovation, strategy, and operational execution. He has worked in both small and large companies including Avery Dennison, Kinko's (where he ran a $225 million product management group), and HealthNet. Mark received his M.B.A. from the Drucker Center at the Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Irvine. As a former Green Beret, he is also a trained revolutionary. De Oppresso Liber!