Chris Anderson, co-founder and CEO of 3DR, describes how the grassroots community of drone makers that his company helped grow disrupted the aerospace industry by cutting out the high cost of sending a pilot into the sky for aerial observations of things like traffic congestion and land management. Anderson says the victory was short-lived due to Chinese drone maker DJI, prompting 3DR to pivot away from consumer hardware and toward business applications.

3DR Co-Founder and CEO Chris Anderson discusses how the drone-maker movement outpaced the military-industrial complex's efforts by going the opposite way on all strategic fronts: aiming for low production cost, embracing unreliability, minimizing regulatory exposure, and targeting large numbers of consumers. This allowed 3DR and the do-it-yourself drone community to speed up innovation, Anderson says.

3DR's Chris Anderson talks about the importance of structuring open-source projects, like the drone-maker community he helped start, in a way that they can be commercialized later, if that's the ultimate goal. He explains how businesses, because of proprietary concerns, avoid software created under open-source licenses that require all derivative work be published for the sake of engaging more developers.

3DR Co-Founder and CEO Chris Anderson explains how Chinese drone maker DJI crushed U.S. competitors by outdoing them in all areas: design, marketing, software, pricing and product-release strategy. Anderson says consumer-hardware companies in America must know that Chinese firms don't just copy others, but present a real threat due to strong engineering, low-cost manufacturing and rapid innovation cycles.