Braigo Labs was founded in 2014, by the thirteen-year-old Shubham Banerjee of Hasselt, Belgium. The function of this “Braigo Labs” was beautifully innovative; it transcoded text from web documents and printed it out as Braille. Its original design consisted of several interesting parts, including pieces from a Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit and a print head made out of Legos as well. What’s so interesting about this invention is not only the concept itself, which has already been done before, but rather the cost aspect – instead of the $2000 or so you’d pay for an old-fashioned Braille printer, the Briago 2.0 will only cost around $350 when it is released. This just goes to show how important it is to not overlook spaces of innovation that might seem dormant or unchanging. Personally, Shubham’s story is one of incredible inspiration; not just because he saw something that could be changed in a relatively dormant industry, but because he was so young when he did it. Even at his young age, he was still able to take a look around himself and look for spaces of innovation. Hopefully, this will inspire others – and not just young people – to reach inside themselves and to find their highest potential.
Below is the official product video for this company.
The amount of creativity Shubham must have at his age to come up with this idea and to execute on it is very impressive. It is also very insightful that he could see the need in this dormant industry. An inspiring and extraordinary story indeed.
I found it very interesting that Shubham used technology and materials that are widely available to a large amount of people for his original design, but no one else ever had the same idea or made use of those materials in the same way. This let me know that maybe you don’t need to fully innovate every aspect of your idea, but instead take something that already exists in some way and use it in a completely different way.