Eager TOM student's Profile

I think Lego’s first use of open innovation with their physical products sounds really compelling as they used feedback from their key customers- kids. I think inclusion of this demographic as they move to digitization will also be key. I found your idea of “over-innovation” very interesting—I wonder if in this case, they simply pushed to production too many unsuccessful ideas and did not have an efficient vetting process.

Really interesting company! I agree with the points raised by Amina. I think the interaction between students and teachers can inspire an important, early interest in education that cannot be replicated by a machine. However, I think that DreamBox could be an extremely useful supplementary tool in personalizing the education across a set of students that do not have the same capabilities. Essentially, it could ensure that less students fall behind, as they receive the adequate level of help based on their level. I see a huge value of this service, like you mentioned, in regions with fewer quality teachers and could see it being supplemented with AR/VR potentially in the future as well.

I agree with some of the points raised by Colm above—I think there may be a space for non-competitive airlines to collaborate on common challenges. However, I would be concerned that if the contest was open to the public, it would be challenging to facilitate an innovation process in which competitors would not share equally in the ideas. With this issue in mind, I find it hard to believe that Singapore Airlines would be willing to contribute the necessary internal data for people to be able to contribute valuable ideas. Furthermore, I think Singapore Airlines would need to be creative in incentivizing their customers to participate in the project—something like free airline miles could work.

This was super fascinating – appreciate you choosing a topic that is clearly so many years out, with its full potential still uncertain. Even looking at the nearest term use case—the drug testing on an artificial human tissue—you can see the challenges that arise in the application of 3D technology to human beings. Even for drug testing, I think it will be so challenging to disassociate the lived human reactions to a drug, which can have psychological or system-wide impacts. If Organovo was to expand out to organ replacements, I think the trajectory (if it exists) would be much longer than any 3D application in the manufacturing world. Humans are so much more complicated than machines and the interplay between all of our bodies’ parts can never be fully understood, particularly as the parts of deteriorate over time as we age and there aren’t good replacements. A brain transplant in particular raises a lot of questions for me of how our personality and life history could ever be replicated in an artificial organ.

To your second question – is this just a fad—I think that depends significantly on how much value consumers derive from personalized 3D printed shoes. Is it just a party trick or is it something that allows consumers to run faster and perform better? In my opinion, I think personalized 3D shoes feel like more of a niche item for elite runners and wealthy individuals, as it can’t be mass produced or fully commoditized. I thought it was interesting that you focused more on personalized consumer shoes, as opposed to using 3D printing in the manufacturing process. I worked on a consulting project for Nike and I was blown away by the significant difference in manufacturing steps across the large number of SKUs. This made creating a standardized process (and capital investments in machines) very difficult and is an area I could see 3D printing having a huge impact.

I really enjoyed learning about how Tesla is incorporating machine learning into its autonomous vehicles. I think you very cleverly laid out how all of Tesla’s fleet (autonomous and normal) can be thought of as both a source for data collection as well as a testing ground for machine learning. My perspective on your question is that humans will become more and more comfortable with self-driving cars, particularly because the first versions of most autonomous vehicles allows for humans to override the car as needed. Additionally, although autonomous vehicle deaths are highly publicized, they are still much less frequent than humans driving cars, which I think is often left out of the conversation. As a last point, I’m curious how you see Tesla fitting into the conversation around ride sharing, particularly as more people move to urban areas and personal vehicles become less necessary.