George F. Baker's Profile

Totally agree with the comments above – very interesting article. The one question that popped in my mind was how truly can open innovation and big pharma companies come together. Although the idea itself is pretty compelling, it is tricky to establish a genuine consensus among these drug giants. Even they start rolling this out with good intentions, I think it would not be unrealistic to question if one of them would secretly diverge from this sharing culture by just to gain some competitive edge. Maybe Gordon Gekko had a point by saying greed is good in his own opinion, but greed in this context could potentially cost lives. Fascinating topic, thanks!

Very well done! I really didn’t have a clue that Lego was struggling at all – I’ve always assumed it was a cool brand, probably due to having wonderful childhood memories with it – I personally think Lego’s success was pretty much associated with its capacity to utilize creativity in different angles. I think this principle could be applied in here. Although I still believe that it is pretty challenging to replace the true joy of playing with an actual physical toy, it is also a clear fact that the digital disruption is taking over in children’s life. Lego can also expand in that category – for instance introducing its own tablets and electronic games that brings the Lego-style with technology, and support this with crowdsourcing.

Well done! Nicely put questions, and I found them quite valid. However, I still believe that the OEM relationship is hard to break. I once had a client who were the headlight manufacturer for Toyota. I remember the manufacturer was simply investing in a brand new, multi-million dollar facility to just produce the headlights of Toyota’s then-upcoming C-HR model. Given that how those companies see Toyota as their bloodline, I find it very difficult to see how this relationship should be replaced by 3D printing. Not only those companies very much rely on their relationship with Toyota, but they also use the know-how they acquired from Toyota as well as the “Toyota Supplier” brand into their other operations. I would anticipate a lot of resistance against this.

I think your points are not only valid for autonomous driving, but also but also valid for the future of automation. I think we are still far away from having a network of AV dominated structure. Apart from the technological advancements necessary, I believe the concept of liability is not totally applicable in this context – I think if we reach to a point where having AVs is widespread, that level of technology and the intelligence of the cars makes it really difficult for the liability to be associated with the manufacturer. The car would became almost a human in terms of thinking capability, and how could us associate anything after that with the manufacturer? I hope we would have a better answer to this once we have some more visibility about the technology to be developed in the future.

Very good one! – I believe Disney has this “untold” mandate to lead the way by moving forward with AM anyway. I believe this is due to the fact that it is one of the leading entertainment companies in the world, and as Matt pointed out as well, if it doesn’t act accordingly, someone else will do it and take the all shares. And this idea of moving with AM totally resonates with one of the key pillars of Disney’s success – which was “always be improving”. For the challenges ahead, I think Disney has enough history and experience in its repertoire that it can apply to resolve any upcoming problem for this technology moving forward, whether it is marketing, supply chain, sales, or anything else.

The question about the human workforce is a very valid one. As traditional manufacturing becomes more “humanless”, I believe the job description of human workforce would change drastically in the future, as technologies that will allow us to create automated workforce, which will be disrupting the human workforce, will also create new jobs for humans. We just don’t have the visibility for that yet.

Very good points – For privacy, I believe Spotify became too powerful on knowing a lot about what we listen and music taste is some sort of a reflection of personality. I think the company was particularly hit by EU’s GDPR legislation and they tried to navigate by acquiring a company called Echo Nest and started keeping the user data encrypted with their technology. If the user would like his/her data to be removed, the identity associated with the data (i.e. data key) is removed. The consumption data is still in Spotify’s database, but the user associated with that data is no longer known. It looks like they are complying with the legislation, but I think the question of privacy is still unanswered.

Very interesting article – Precision farming is indeed a space that has a room for growth. There was a company in California that raises agricultural products with minimal but very effectively used resources – such as just releasing the water drop on the crop with the exact amount that it needed and with the perfect spot for the water to be absorbed. Given the scarce resources and constraints, the world is going to a zone where using what we have as effective as possible will be a great deal.

I agree with the open ended questions and they are totally valid. However, if a change is necessary in the industry, I think John Deere, being one of the largest agricultural machinery producers in the world, is definitely on top of the list of who should be leading the way. Even though it would have short term financial consequences for the company, it will definitely yield long term benefits for everyone and definitely for the company. The company should take short term hits, maybe by spending a significant amount of capital just to educate those farmers, but I believe it is one of the responsibilities of being a leader in the industry.