Gbubemi's Profile

Really interesting article. I agree that this technology has a lot of potential in the middle a segments for the rapid-prototyping of custom-made rings. However, I am skeptical of its success in the higher end segment. Luxury jewelry is usually an emotional purchase that people are willing to pay and high premium for because of the craftsmanship/uniqueness. It is likely that consumers will regard this as an inferior product and t will be incredibly difficult to change customers’ perception and buying patterns.

Great article!
I think such partnerships with suppliers have the potential to be advantageous to both parties, and more companies should look to innovating in collaboration with their suppliers. However, there are challenges to accomplishing this. To your question, companies need to create the right long-term financial incentives for suppliers (ex. revenue sharing) to make their suppliers willing to enter such agreements. In addition, trust is critical – there must already be long-standing relationships between the companies.

Great article – it is interesting to see how NASA is leveraging open innovation. It is definitely not an organization that comes to mind when I think of crowdsourcing. I think it’s a great strategy – the Challenge 9 example you gave shows how much can be accomplished in such a short amount of time through open innovation. For an organization like this, I agree that strict control measures have to be put in place to ensure the contributions meet some quality threshold. I think a screening process for volunteers should be required.
To your question on distraction, I think NASA should have clearly defined problems in line with it’s long-term goals and solicit input from its volunteers for the defined problem, vs soliciting any and all input from the external community.

Interesting article! The topic of cybersecurity is especially important as we continue to move toward an increasingly digital and connected world. Every new application of technology (connected devices in cars, smart devices in our homes etc) is a new potential point of entry for data breaches and other forms of cyberattacks.
Ultimately, I think the reliance on machine learning to deal with the cybersecurity issue is inevitable. Even though I anticipate the cybersecurity skill gap will narrow over time, unsupervised machine learning algorithms will be needed to deal with the dynamic and evolving nature of cyberattacks and the massive volume of data that need to be analyzed to predict/detect potential threats.

Very interesting article. It is great to see that Comcast is finally investing in Machine Learning to improve its customer service and existing offerings. I definitely agree with your suggestion that this is a crucial first step to re-gain customer trust. However, I think it might be too late to establish itself in the home-related space, attempting to compete with Google, Amazon etc. It certainly has a chance competing with other cable companies, where machine learning could potentially be its competitive advantage, but the tech giants are much further ahead in this arena. I agree with the comment above that a partnership with a tech company will be the better approach to take.

Great article!

I am skeptical that construction can become a truly DIY market in the US in the short/medium term because it will require drastic shift in consumer behavior. I think only individuals with construction expertise would even be willing to take on such a project because people tend to rely on experts regarding investments as critical as their homes. We saw even in the Aqualisa case where there were DIY solutions for the showers but people still tended to rely on the plumbers.

The issue of unemployment that could result from additive manufacturing advancements is not unique to this company or this specific use case. I think it’s ultimately the role of the government and policy makers, not individual companies to address it.