Drew Perry's Profile

The question of whether or how to bring an “innovators Brewhouse” initiative to the 300 smaller portfolio brands that make up 85% of Heineken’s volume is an important one. To your point, changing the product itself may take away from the smaller individual brands, which may feel an even greater impact than the more recognizable Heineken brand, may be too drastic for the smaller portfolio brands. One approach to bring in more innovation would be to create a new brand that is known for being open source created, but owned by Heineken. With this brand, in person communities could be created, per your recommendation for improving Heineken, but without the worry of diluting a pre-existing brand. This brand would likely get more awareness for being the first beer brand to operate on the external spectrum for both idea generation and selection.

While it seems like Unilever is able to act more quickly to market trends, based on the above, I would be curious as to how it could implement product ideation funnels directly from consumer preferences before competitors launch products that meet those needs. For instance, could there be a community-platform where Unilever supports an entrepreneur who is trying to launch a product that has generated a lot of social media attention?

Dynamic pricing’s ability to get less creditworthy borrowers loans that they would otherwise not have had is very powerful (though the higher rates may be a concern for less sophisticated borrowers). I wonder what kinds of biases these algorithms may have. In particular, I wonder if there may be a similar issue as seen in Amazon’s recruiting algorithm, where the heavier proportion of male to female skewed success rates towards males, may also be present for demographics that have been less represented in certain success areas. This would be a key area of focus in developing the algorithms to be agnostic to demographic biases.

While IBM Watson Health was concerned with making the functions of AI transparent to garner trust, its interesting that GSK needs to understand why the AI comes to certain results in order to back into experiments such that they can explain why drugs work when applying for FDA approval. It seems that, in order to keep the funnel of possible solutions open, GSK should ensure that there are not biases in how we understand nature today that would eliminate solutions in ways that we do not yet understand. Additionally, there may be a need for a parallel algorithm that can test possible experiments using “successful” compounds from their current AI in order to more quickly arrive at scientific explanations.

When thinking about how new players may enter the market, I think about how easily they could replicate the process. Some factors that I would consider when examining barriers to entry would include startup and variable costs. For startup costs, I would look at how expensive the printers are, compared to the shipping savings from producing locally. For variable costs, I would look at how much the rubber composite would cost to develop or procure. If this price is too high, 3D printed shoes may remain a premium consumer good.

I found your idea of providing CAD files of classic parts for free to be very interesting. While I agree that the benefit of goodwill likely outweighs the potential financial benefits from selling the parts, I think there is potential for ill will as a negative externality to this decision. Once consumers can access the files, they can print the part on any machine, and with any material they choose. This could lead to failures of the printed part which could then cause accidents that may associate Porsche as a brand with safety issues. I think the question of safety and control may be a key area of focus in deciding how to approach production of replacement parts.