Aptly numbered podcast episode #666 of Planet Money named "Episode 666: The Hoverboard Life" explores the discovery of the "hoverboard" phenomenon from a couple

Aptly numbered podcast episode #666 of Planet Money named "Episode 666: The Hoverboard Life" explores the discovery of the "hoverboard" phenomenon from a couple of years back -- "The hottest toy this holiday season has no identifiable logo, no main distributor, and no widely agreed upon name". The podcast (I listened to it a long time back) goes into how the Hoverboard invention was fueled in late-night drinking sessions by Chinese engineers / businesspeople trying to make a more accessible and more fun and less dorky Segway. All those people bounced ideas off each other and made incremental improvements to get to the form that was commercialized by umpteen companies. Maybe this product was developed in a prototypical "Chinese model" where ideas are cheap, widely shared or purloined, improved on, reverse-engineered, etc. -- with the obvious downsides of rushing low-quality products to market that are subject to exploding batteries with no accountability. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/episode-666-the-hoverboard-life https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/epis...