I will introduce a new heat flow for harmonic maps with free boundary. After giving some motivations to study such maps in relation with extremal metrics in spectral geometry, I will construct weak solutions for the flow and derive their partial regularity. The introduction of this new flow is motivated by the so-called half-harmonic maps introduced by Da Lio and Riviere, which provide a new approach to the old topic of harmonic maps with free boundary. I will also state some open problems and possible generalizations.