Eric Levine's Profile

Very interesting article… To your question, I wouldn’t be surprised if Medtronic’s strategy at this point would be to let an upstart tech company (with lower downside of failure) be more at the fore-front. Pushing the boundaries from a regulatory and legal standpoint would potentially impose costs on a large company with a lot to lose. Then once the tech is more proven out, MDT may try to acquire via M&A… effectively using as outsourced R&D in which they wouldn’t own the legal / regulatory risks until they felt that they were sufficiently proven out.

But thank you for the article!

Thank you very interesting article.

Question on the idea that GE should free up dollars from M&A and shift them into internal R&D…
Might it be the case that hungrier start-ups who can give stock options and afford to take risks to fail are better positioned to innovate at the forefront? Is there anything inherently wrong with using M&A essentially as “out-sourced” R&D in which others take on the risks and than GE helps them scale the technology later on?

Eric

Fascinating article. I do worry that the skill-set of being a bank requires a different skill-set and core competency (avoiding the 1% bad scenario) than that of an upstart tech company. I could see them doing better with all of their data at recouping investments, but curious within the cost bar the share that is due to “bad debt” vs. “customer acquisition” – which might be higher at least initially if they start with less credibility as a bank. I wonder if there’s a way that Square could leverage their technology but offload a greater share of the loans to third parties. This would also allow Square to maintain it’s relatively capital-light business model (vs. all the capital you’d need to have if you were a lendor)

Great article! I’m curious the how AI and telematics can be used to increase the ability for more patients to be released from hospitals and monitored closely at lower-cost facilities or even home, depending on the severity of the issue.

If you could ever get past the liability issues that plague health care, this would have the potential to lower cost and even potentially improve results. Hospitals are cess pools…

Fascinating post thank you Nancy!

A few questions on my mind:
(1) How can the government attract the brains of top tech talent on these issues?
(2) In using data, does the government merit a higher bar for privacy concerns than the private sector?
(3) To address the concern on longevity, could the “Chief Data Officer” and his or her office be enshrined as a non-political appointee, similar to running a city’s water and sewage authority, Bridge and Tunnel Authority, or the Fed?

Related to this article, my brother started a non-profit focused on helping local communities leverage nearby universities in building smarter cities. This is one approach to helping to plug the capability gap and attract smart, fresh thinking into solving some of these challenges. I believe he has met with San Jose.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2018-11-14/metrolab-brings-academic-research-to-local-communities-radio

Very interesting article. Machine learning seems to have the potential to really separate Alibaba and JD from any other competitors or would-be competitors with massive moats from up-front investment, data, on top of the network effects from the platfrom. I wonder how much of Alibaba’s interest in owning inventory (or products) comes as a result of ceding some Tmall market share to JD. Seems like they are stuck between a tough decision – react and greater control over product – perhaps even doing private label – but potentially risk upsetting all your B2B partners. If Amazon the “vampire squid” has proven anything it’s that you can consistently put your own interests over retail partners and still dominate the market… you just have so much more negotiating leverage as the platform with the connection to the customers. This would suggest Alibaba should in fact more into launching private label. This would in turn allow it to better capitalize off of ML investments.

Agreed on the simulation

I find the concept of gene editing to present a fascinating ethical question. Why stand in the way of progress that could save millions who suffer from genetic diseases? But where would you draw the line in gene editing? One day might we edit genes to live for hundreds of years? To create smarter or better looking children? To create children less prone to fall into the traps of our cognitive biases, or shallow and anachronistic way in which we even think about other humans as being physically attractive?
Would love to understand more about the challenges that unsupervised machine learning must overcome to actually cluster genes by their phenotypical expression – seems like there would be a ton of complexity given the way genes are inter-twined and interact with environment in their ultimate expression.
Finally (and most importantly) (1) Love that you are 1.2% Ashkenazi! (2) Your Italian DNA > Ukranian DNA… where is our Italian section flag?!?!

“but with the caveat that patients who have submitted their samples consent to this commercialization, and in cases where it is warranted, these patients should be compensated.”

Is it realistic to assume that patients really understand what they are consenting to?

Interesting article! To me interesting how prizes and competitions can be leveraged to spur innovation in the public sector. How you can unleash the power of the markets within what is traditionally a slower-moving bureaucracy ;). What I particularly like is that the article recognizes the limitations of “flashy contests” and notes the importance of the idea selectors, and the front-line health care professionals on the front-line. Really exciting what happens when the command and control idea selectors running a top-down program can effectively combine with the innovation from the bottom up. Like the reunification of East and West Berlin.