Bruce Wayne's Profile

As a previous consumer of Lego back as a child, this is one of my personal favorite uses of crowd sourcing that I have seen so far. Using their dedicated fan-base to design some Lego models of the future not only re-invigorates their older fan-base, but it provides thousands of ideas that the Lego Model Master Builders and designers may never have come up with. My only concern is that they may be missing out on an important segment of their customer base by continuing to push focus toward only the younger consumers (even with these crow-sourced ideas). The people who are on the site, designing the new products on Lego Ideas are likely older fans of the brand. While obviously steering away from provocative or problematic directions – I think that they should not only accept ideas that cater to the children who are their current target market, but there is room to possibly connect further with those older fans by specifically accepting some ideas that are proposed that may cater more toward them. not only will this further spur the creative fans to produce in the crowd-sourcing, but it will keep them connected to the brand that they love.

This was one of the more interesting concepts that I have read so far, it brings forth a convoluted argument between the first and the second amendment – do we stop the proliferation of possibly dangerous digital designs or impinge upon what some people in the country would consider their second amendment rights. I personally think that the company should ethically consider the possible danger of compiling and/or creating these designs in the first place. I don’t believe that there is any particular positive in being able to create highly dangerous weapons secretly in your own home but it is impossible to control something digital as soon as it gets on to the internet. The company needs to consider how to control the spread of their IP and if they cannot safety control where and to whom the designs are going to (possibly create some sort of DRM between the data and certified 3-D printers) then I would say that they will ultimately bear an inescapable part of the responsibility for any damage or destruction that comes from their products.

I am hesitant to embrace this trend in clothing manufacturing using Open Innovation. Although Bertabrand has done well so far, the process is to easy to replicate (as Bertabrand itself did to Threadless) and the customer base may not be lasting and fickle in their choices. I do, however, agree with you that the company needs to re-evaluate its longer term strategy and how it will respond to competition from the larger brands as well as how it will be able to show that it is actually creating value relative to the other options out there for custom crowd-sourced clothing items beyond just giving a small discount to the early voters.

This is extremely interesting, I would never have imagined a high fashion brand to break away from the traditional roots and embrace new technology in the production of their branded items and clothing. I am extremely interested in items like the Boyfriend Skeleton watch- it truly seems like an innovative way of both utilizing the new additive manufacturing technology and creating an item that shows off the Chanel brand. I only wonder how the customers will respond if the company starts to get more into the 3D printing technology as the high fashion customers normally respond well to hand made items and less so to machine made items.

Reading the Christie’s article about the portrait of Edmond Belamy, it is interesting that an artificial intelligence has been able to create what humans would think of as “Art”, but I note how the machine only created the portrait after being fed numerous other pictures. I am skeptical that a machine will be able to truly create art using past data analysis. While chaotic on a larger scale, human thoughts and feelings can in some way be anticipated and expected (as studied by psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, etc) and a sufficiently advanced learning algorithm may be able to analyze these trends to determine whether or not a song/piece of art will have mainstream appeal. I do think, however, that this would probably only work on a shorter time scale. Emergent memes and cultural phenomena seemingly change at random, what is viral today may be forgotten by tomorrow, a machine algorithm based on past data will almost certainly miss the most current or upcoming trends and will probably respond much slower than a human mind looking at that same cultural movement. With enough data on a large enough scale, New Big Sound may have found the solution but I will remain doubtful for now.

Great writeup! I love the Idea of trying to reduce the seemingly never-ending amount of decisions that one must face everyday. I do wonder, however, if vacationing/travelling is truly the place to try though. Does reducing the decisions of a person who is using TripAdviser help or hurt their business. I travel a lot and I know that when I use TripAdvisor, yes I am looking for something to do in an area of the world that I’ve never been before, but I am also looking for something new that I wouldn’t have thought of before. My concern is that for the person who has never before expressed interest in diving or surfing, would the algorithm still suggest that person go diving when he/she is in Cairnes or would it suggest surfing when in Bali?

I think that this technology and this particular idea does have merit, however, predicting the future tastes of a person (especially one who is in an unfamiliar location) may lock them into decisions that reflect their past actions and not actions that may be novel and worth trying.