Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech: Christina Rebel of Wikifactory On The 5 Leadership Lessons She Learned From Her Experience
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Make your mission your glue with co-founders. Most startups fail because the founders give up. What keeps us motivated is having a purpose deeply embedded in our founders’ DNA. Our glue has been our mission — we are building an infrastructure, not an application, and we are socially driven.
As a part of our series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Christina Rebel.
Christina has worked at the intersection of digital fabrication, social innovation, and sustainability. As co-founder of Wikifactory she has grown the community to over 140,000 designers and engineers from around the world working on physical product innovation. She is also leading Wikifactory’s contribution to the EU-funded program Critical Making to promote diversity and inclusion in hardware development.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My interest in technology sparked around the age of 7. I was testing any software available on the market in the form of CDs, whether CAD design, spreadsheets, games or animation. As new hardware began to flood the markets, I would tinker with whatever I could get hold of. Growing up in China in the 90’s meant that over the years, I’d come to see how globalised production was transforming the markets and consumption worldwide. I had access to the brands and software the world was consuming at marginal prices from the street markets. Seeing how a new technology would first launch in China, gather critical mass in Europe and suddenly become part and parcel of society, made me wonder how technology could exponentially shape our lives.
Over the years, my family and I lived in different countries that suffered significant events that both shocked their economies and startled a greater interest in how societal, political and economic systems work — from the financial crises in Argentina to geopolitical tensions in the Middle East during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Living in many countries meant I had the opportunity to learn new languages like Chinese and Arabic, which I now appreciate for helping me understand and be more empathetic to other cultures at a deep level.
With many questions about how the world ticked and with hopes of developing my capabilities in qualitative and quantitative research methods at university, I moved to the UK to study a BA in European Politics and an MA Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham. Both courses were attractive to me because they offered the flexibility to combine my interest in politics, economics, philosophy, law, and even languages.
The turning point for me that sparked my interest in manufacturing technologies and the future of the production industry was when I opened up my laptop for the first time at University. I loaded up BBC news and stumbled upon an article about 3D printing and it blew my mind. From there, I would study these disciplines with the thought that the production systems of the future could be distributed, as a network.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?
At the outset of COVID, it was simply remarkable to see the network of people with 3D printers coming together to design, test, and distribute supplies. As Spain was one of the first countries to exponentially spread the virus and where the maker network was strong across the country, the online coordination they demonstrated to engage hospitals and sanitary workers in providing emergency face shields, cloaks, and valve separators through to new ventilator systems was outstanding. In record time and out of a wish to support them with online infrastructure to manage their collaboration more effectively, we launched viralresponse.io to bring our tools for free to the community driving those efforts. But it was more than just tools that were needed.
Given the emerging growing network worldwide that followed, though locked in rural Toledo I found myself distributed around the world as I spoke to initiatives across continents about their efforts on the ground. Questions would emerge like, how could Wikifactory ensure that LATAM could learn of the early efforts from Spain, before things would spread there? We started to host webinars that are still available on YouTube to bring the global community together in the discussion around the difficult questions — like how to audit open medical supplies or how to build community through resilient supply chains.
More than 5 million face shields were supplied by the network of 100,000 in over 100 countries, a demonstration of epic collaboration. What we learned was just how fragile supply chains can be in the face of shocks and agility was made possible by the effort of a productive community. The last year has only accentuated this further. We need now more than ever, to build resilience.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When you first start learning how to use a 3D printer, failures are part of the iterative process of learning how to set it up for the material, 3D model, and machine settings that starts with huge blobs of strings but start to take form into precision. From this I learned the value of incremental, intentional improvements, and tweaks every day in the mastery of something. And just how, thanks to the 3D contributions of designers and engineers worldwide, I was able to learn how to take a 3D design to a product at hand.
But there was a particular 3D printed fail that I will never forget. At the start of our Wikifactory journey we tested a lot of things to raise some finance to keep us going whilst we built our MVP that we would pitch to investors. As part of this work, one of our activities included offering 3D printing courses in our early office in Chengdu. During these workshops, I would 3D print a batch of whistles that also served as a gift that attendees could take back with them. On one occasion, I was using copper filament and the 3D printer stalled halfway through. Though I cried ‘Fail!’, it took a student to turn around and say — ‘hey, it’s art, even for a necklace’, I was instantly inspired by that. The story of the failed print that in class opinion was named art, then became a special birthday gift whose receiver then proved that it could actually be functional by pure human ingenuity (it would actually work if you covered the side!). We then found out it ended up as a memento during a Glastonbury experience by one of her friends — it was simply absurd. But it isn’t just the absurdity of the story of the half-printed, copper whistle that makes me smile, it’s that you never know how far your failure can inspire you and others. Our 3D printing courses in China were short lived, but that was to make room for a greater focus on finally building the platform we always dreamed of.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Most online platforms for physical product design are just repositories to upload or download 3D files. However, on Wikifactory, not only can someone collaborate on product designs and seamlessly share files, but they can work together on product development, prototype and manufacture with other designers, engineers and makers virtually. Put simply, Wikifactory is creating the Internet of Production (IoP) which allows anyone anywhere to design and manufacture a product with just a laptop and an internet connection. It is about connecting the advances of smart manufacturing with the creative ingenuity of people. We believe it is about powering the human efforts and networks behind the designing, engineering and manufacturing of products with the online infrastructure to work together smarter, easier and faster. This enables us to gather unparalleled amounts of data at all stages of design to manufacturing, which can be used as ‘training sets’ for multiple high-value applications of AI and ML as well.
The IoP enables greater participation and accessibility, but it also opens the door for better innovation in design thanks to its ability to bring people together to collaborate on products. By giving everyone the tools to design, iterate and prototype their ideas we can attract a new wave of diverse and unique engineers into the sector. This increased accessibility means that the products being created are best suited to our society and provide fresh talent with skills and knowledge about technology and new tools that will appeal to companies large and small.
As companies embrace the opportunities available through the IoP by taking an integrated, collaborative approach, we can change the old way of doing things and create a futureproof global manufacturing ecosystem.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Earlier this year we launched our Marketplace, which completed the digital thread for design to production that enables our community of designers and engineers to connect with quality assured manufacturers from around the world to get their products to market. As such, our completely online platform is making it possible for anyone, anywhere to start and scale a hardware or product design company.
We will continue to improve the platform to help product companies iterate faster and easier on our platform. Further expanding our marketplace network with a greater penetration in Europe in terms of manufacturing capabilities and for materials to offer our European clients greater supply chain resilience. Beyond being able to be more agile when facing the supply chain crises with regionalised production, we also see an opportunity for greater sustainability and circularity as well.
Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in STEM? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?
While things are improving for women in STEM, there is still a lack of females especially within the manufacturing industry alone, currently, only 2.7% of companies worldwide are led by women.
It has been said that companies will always be in competition with each other, but perhaps success also can be guaranteed through collaboration. If we work together to improve diversity in the industry, we all end up winning. As well as having our own personal targets or those of the businesses we work for, it is important to adopt a wider view and take steps to create a more diverse and inclusive future. Wikifactory, for example, is part of the EU-funded program Critical Making — an initiative aimed at developing systematic methods to promote diversity and inclusion in open hardware development. So, whether it is in our daily interactions with our colleagues or our involvement with wider projects and schemes, there’s never been a better time to work together to create real and meaningful change through greater diversity.
It’s also crucial that organisations start introducing initiatives for women in order to appeal to them. About two years into developing Wikifactory with my co-founders, I fell pregnant with my son. It was an exciting yet very risky period in our startup journey and we were just a team of four, so naturally I was concerned about how it would impact my contribution to our company. Choosing to be open about my own fears and discussing these concerns as a team enabled us to build a true shared belief that rather than being an obstacle to success, becoming a mother was only going to make me a more creative and agile entrepreneur. This helped cement our core values of openness and diversity plus aided our path towards finding new ways of organising ourselves to accommodate each of our individual needs and strengths.
However, many women still don’t have such benefits, and companies accommodating the needs required for maternity leave is very much a new thing. There’s still much groundwork to be done in terms of formal policies and understanding. Whilst it’s incredible to celebrate and discuss the amazing work many inspirational women have done, and continue to do, these sectors are still very much on this journey.
While it may seem daunting entering heavily male-dominated industries as a female professional, it does help to get you noticed especially when you have a message to promote. I remember when I first started out in the industry, I was often one of the only women in the room at events and conferences, but I made sure I was seen and heard. Making this entrance means you can impact the accessibility and participation of women in that sector. Showing up in the sector with a purpose will rally women and men behind the change we all want to see in our industries. Today, I find myself surrounded by truly inspirational female founders, engineers and product designers from all backgrounds and parts of the globe.
Highlighting women champions also paves the way for younger girls to imagine themselves in STEM because the bias is still strong at an early age. This bias needs to be deconstructed because I would argue that many feminine qualities can be a gift for technology businesses. Women bring a new perspective, ideas and schools of thought that are invaluable in STEM roles. So while it will take more effort from women in spreading the word and talking about the opportunities to break down barriers and perceptions about women entering STEM roles, it will ultimately be worthwhile.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in STEM or Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?
Women face a lot of challenges in STEM that most of their male counterparts will rarely run into by virtue of their gender. This includes:
Unconscious bias
Unconscious biases frequently relate to identifying characteristics like gender, colour, age, and others that have little to do with how competent we are at our work. Unconscious prejudices affect how women in STEM advance professionally or the access they will have to leadership opportunities. This inturn creates the glass ceiling, something all women will have to experience and break through in order to progress.
Lack of support
One of the best methods to advance into leadership roles is by mentoring, coaching, or sponsorship, and a lot of women still lack this guidance. There is a general lack of senior-level women leaders which poses a significant challenge for women in more junior roles to seek advice on how to progress forward. Even when they do find mentors, women have to put in more effort and take more initiative to develop these relationships than their perceived male coworkers did.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a woman in STEM or Tech. Can you explain what you mean?
There is a belief that women just aren’t interested in careers in STEM, but in my experience this isn’t true. Take Wikifactory for example — when we launched our Marketplace it was a team of five women who seeded the first processes to prove the acquisition, conversion, and retention of manufacturing orders we were managing between buyers and suppliers around the world. Young girls are typically not introduced to the wide range of careers in industries like scientific research, mathematics or engineering and manufacturing because of deep rooted gender stereotypes. When informed about the roles available to them though and encouraged to pursue their abilities and interests, I believe more and more young girls and women entering their careers will consider STEM roles.
What are your “5 Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Experience as a Woman in STEM or Tech” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
Find your Hub. It was in joining an innovative coworking space in London, the Impact Hub Westminster where I began to build relationships with members that shared the vision for a more sustainable, circular future for physical products. This is where I met my two co-founders and joined Espians, a Tech Agency that had supported Wikihouse in developing the software package that turned 3D models into sheets for CNC milling for affordable, custom-built housing that could be locally produced. The opportunity for digital fabrication machines to pave the way for global communities working together online, where their products could be produced by a distributed network was deeply inspiring.
Share early, share often. Writing a vision on paper might be the first step in giving your startup idea some weight, but it is easy to fall through in carrying beyond this first scary step. Striking the balance between perfect and sufficient is a tricky task, so remembering this mantra can help to remind you that the truth of whether your idea will stick is outside your door. With our first ideas penned to paper, it was thanks to a mentor from the Sustainability sector, that our first pitch landed in the inbox of Nicolai Peitersen. Nicolai had just co-authored the book The Ethical Economy, where distributed production was the subject of a key chapter. There was such an alignment in our values and vision for more ethical models of production that it was uncanny. Joining our efforts for societal and economic change through our entrepreneurial endeavours felt like the most natural thing.
Make your mission your glue with co-founders. Most startups fail because the founders give up. What keeps us motivated is having a purpose deeply embedded in our founders’ DNA. Our glue has been our mission — we are building an infrastructure, not an application, and we are socially driven.
Build Growth Teams. When my co-founder Tom mentioned his find of ‘Growth Hacking’ on Hackernews by Y Combinator, learning of these new methodologies became a real inspiration to face the challenge of maintaining growth differently. Discovering how to use experiment design to test hypotheses in marketing and to utilise data analyses to inform our product iterations was spot-on. Growth Hacking married concepts of management that I had come to learn through experience over the years with my love of science. These new methodologies were only beginning to emerge back then in 2018, but they sure helped us grow our community to over 140,000 strong.
Don’t isolate Technology from the Arts. Bridging the Arts into STEM so that it is STEAM is comprehensively a gain to science, technology and engineering. Inspiring science through literature and even theatre can only be of value to recognise that science needs to inspire, it is not devoid of narrative. For far too long have we sought to compartmentalise the world into categories, where a lab experiment has to be seen as something radically different to the perfection of a fermentation recipe because one is regarded as advances in science, and the other as home cooking of a more refined kind. The strict boxes are unnecessarily constraining, and I believe that in enthusing the next generation to connect these disparate areas of thinking, that we are more likely to find the solutions we need to current and future challenges.
What advice would you give to other women leaders to help their team to thrive?
It’s important for a team to feel supported and valued. As a leader, no matter if you are a man or woman, a team wants to feel that they can ask questions, be challenged and that their manager is invested in their development. With our team of five women, we were faced with a number of hurdles but together we connected the dots and found solutions for our clients in an agile way and with stellar customer support. This experience showed us the importance of the whole team feeling supported. Each individual should be given space to explore their ideas, ask questions and experiment and lean to data to help guide the path forward.
One of greatest uncertainties for any startup is how to prioritise tech, product, marketing with minimum resources, and organising this exercise in a data-driven way can breathe transparency and can help team members rally for new features on the basis of evidence. Women leaders can benefit from taking research and data analyses under their toolbelt so that we can back things up and relieve decision-making from unnecessary politics. In many contexts, we use the ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) method in Growth Hacking to team source a score on a set of experiments to be considered in a given sprint. I also find it an effective method to get team buy-in and be as agile as possible. Achieving alignment and consolidation as Byung-Chul Han, the best-seller Korean political theorist on power, is what is truly powerful — and this is something that feminine qualities can do very well in fostering. As Simon Sinek says about toxic leadership, champion those who build an environment for everyone to thrive, because they might not be the top performing, but we sure need their leadership to make things happen.
What advice would you give to other women leaders about the best way to manage a large team?
- In the beginning, hire people that are better than you. You can learn with them.
- Build an empowering internship programme that can offer youth opportunities to learn in the business.
- Make learning a deep motivator, so that jumping in the deep end becomes part of coming out of your comfort zone.
- Emphasize the greater WHY and purpose for alignment, breakdown into objectives and key results framework.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I almost went down an academic path, taking an assistant editor role for the journal for Local Economy at London South Bank University, but I came across a position to support a London-based entrepreneur Joseph Tenzin Oliver who was an early sustainability pioneer. I assisted him across dozens of sustainable innovation projects in events, fashion, food through to automotive. With the hype around 3D printing that was kicked off by the Rep-rap movement, with makerspaces and fablabs emerging as a network worldwide — we started helping companies like Daimler that wished to enthuse their companies with such inspirational spaces and a culture of product innovation. I wasn’t from an entrepreneurial family nor incentivised to do business, so I am very grateful to have been shown a path of purpose-led entrepreneurialism thanks to him.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Whilst I saw what inequality meant in practice across the world as we explored the remote areas in the countries we lived in thanks to the geological explorations of my father, it was in the summers and winters spent in rural Spain where my grandparents were from that helped me grow roots and understand inequality within my own family. Whether that be access to education, job opportunities, and cultural experiences, even as a child it was obvious that these could have such an effect in determining your life circumstances. A deep sense of responsibility grew within me to commit my life’s work to give back, to make a change.
My university degree helped me define and refine my theory of social change, but it was in the practice of my entrepreneurial journey that I committed to only work in initiatives that furthered a social or environmental impact. This is why I am so grateful to be a member of the Board of the Internet of Production Foundation. The foundation’s objective is to contribute to and support the development and continuous improvement of global and decentralised ecosystems for design and product development, innovation, as well as manufacturing. With its recent establishment together with members Andrew Lamb, Niels Christian Nielsen, Martin Von Haller, and Henrik Skovby — I am extremely motivated to help drive this mission.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
From wind turbines for clean energy, water filtration systems for clean water, and agricultural systems for biodiversity — product development teams were and are tackling the world’s most pressing social and environmental problems. The movement I am inspired to rally around is for universal access to the tools of creation. If we distribute access to the tools of design and fabrication towards a future where anyone that faces a problem can solve problems in their lives, then we empower local agency to have the productive tools to fabricate, test, and iterate quickly to arrive at a solution.
It is about resilient and inclusive communities where all, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or (dis)ability, can take part in innovative problem-solving. The old adage of ‘giving a man a rod to feed him for a lifetime’ resonates with me. But it is the potential of digital fabrication to realise a more open, distributed, and circular model of design and production that has me thinking, about what if we could teach the man how to build a rod himself so that he could share with others the knowledge, and enable a whole community to feed themselves?
Can you please give us your favourite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Since I could reason with change as a child, every new adventure to a new country urged me to embrace uncertainty and challenges with hope and curiosity. I came to appreciate how much more effective it was to have an end-in-mind, over a plan. As my father always said, “The road from A to B is always under construction”.
I recently found the first career plan I ever jotted down in my storage boxes and chuckled to myself upon reading my young goals of working for the UN or becoming an Ambassador. When graduating from university with a 1st class distinction and speaking four languages I thought I could achieve my goal, but I was faced with a global financial crisis and the job market in NGOs and international institutions was heavily oversubscribed.
Thanks to this failure though, I concluded that I couldn’t wait for an organization or institution to offer me the path to meaningful work. Instead, I would set myself on the mission of creating it myself together with others that aligned with the cause. But which cause to contribute to with the thousands of social and environmental issues?
The efforts of my early entrepreneurial life in refining that end-in-mind started as broad as sustainability, and I began to need coherency and focus. In the run-up to Wikifactory, I felt that I finally had arrived at the core purpose that would be a guiding thread in every step I’d take as an entrepreneur. To realise a more sustainable, circular model of production that could empower the next generation of product innovators to distribute their ingenious hardware solutions to real-world problems. With that purpose in mind, the ‘plan from A to B’ would simply be about persistence, iteration, and greeting every day with love in my heart.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
It may be tricky to meet in person, but it would be fantastic even virtually to meet Christiana Figueres. Besides having heard wonders from people who have met her already, I’ve listened to her Climate Change podcast and would propose a topic on the Future of Manufacturing (which I saw she was missing). It’s one of the key questions to reduce carbon emissions — and it would be such a sincere pleasure to contribute to such a discussion with her and involve others in the fold to pave the way for a circular future for the industry. Who knows? Perhaps she would be motivated to have her country, Costa Rica, become the first circular country?
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech: Christina Rebel of Wikifactory On The 5 Leadership Lessons… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.