Liz Delozier's Profile

I really like the idea of producing “trendy” items with 3D printing because it significantly cuts down on the waste of overproduction and obsolescence. This creates a marketplace for independent designs to match their designs up with buyers without the capital intensive burden of buying tools and manufacturing their designs. Unpopular designs can easily be phased out and popular ones brought back with a simple change in programming.

I think Gantri runs the risk of being replicated, especially if they choose to compete on cost. There is still capital investment involved in renting 3D printer equipment, but they will likely compete on all variable costs (designer royalties, advertising, labor, etc.). I think an investment in many independent designers, however, will help them to differentiate.

This was super interesting, Emma! While I was reading, I thought a lot about how Prellis should move forward with clinical trials. From a manufacturing perspective, I wonder if regulators would require quality control of each printed kidney, or would they rely on the proven clinical trials of past printed kidneys as an indicator? If they require the latter, would product efficacy expire? Would Prellis need to requalify and test every year? My fear is that regulation and bureaucracy could slow this process to be equal with waiting for a human organ in its early years.

There’s a tremendous need for these transplants, so I imagine regulators would be pressured to move forward with a time-saving method to approve quality and bring this technology to market. I imagine that UNOS would be highly skeptical of printing kidneys, but I think they’re a valuable partner for logistics and distribution of organs. I’m envisioning a system similar to what exists today, but with more inputs.

I think Pinterest’s ability to learn from it’s users is critical to it’s success. As they plan to scale in the future, I think they need to consider the two teams you mentioned: the black ops team and the monetization team. A risk that both of these teams have to deal with is the advertised content on Pinterest, which can have an adverse affect on the user experience. Pinterest must have some boundaries in place to keep advertisements from over-optimizing with searches. For example, I don’t want my “wedding dress” search to be filled with the same photos I would see in paid ads from a magazine. Understanding the balance between paid content and original content will be important for growth and scale. I’d also be interested to know if Pinterest shares user data or monetizes it. As a merchant, that data would be extremely valuable insight.

After looking at Pinterest’s website for vendors looking to purchase ad space (https://business.pinterest.com/en/why-pinterest-ads-work) it seems like a great opportunity for inbound marketing. As the website, it seems much more natural for a seller to suggest items to interested buyers in a “pull” system versus “push” marketing.

I’d also be interested to see how Pinterest’s machine learning would be altered by a more social networking aspect being added to the user experience. With the use of influencers on Instagram and Facebook, these “informal” ads may also help add in new trends and opinions that are missed with data mining.

I love that Spotify uses their Machine Learning capability to improve user experience and is focused on the customer, not just data mining for record companies, marketing firms, etc. I think to keep their competitive advantage they’re going to have to continue to be aggressive in their M&A strategy to find new technology before it goes to a competitor. I think they also need to stay true to their listener base on stay focused on the experience of their customer. I also think they need to be careful not to allow artists to “game the system” with their inputs into Spotify. I drew parallels to our Big Data case with Gap, and how information started to develop the same “fashion” at every store. The consumer is not a good predictor of what they’ll want in the future, so I would encourage Spotify to focus on developing and promoting smaller artists who can set the “trends” for us. I think this is a big risk to record companies as well to continue to sign creative, original artists. What would Spotify be like if everyone wrote music to optimize for number of “Discovery Weekly” playlists it could penetrate?

The pharmaceutical industry is a great industry to bring open innovation to, but I agree that CO-ADD needs to gain credibility in the community. From your statistics, it seems like they’re a very productive non-profit, but I’m curious how they make money off the relevant molecules they actually find.

If the goal is quick go-to-market development to help address the growing need for antibiotics, I would challenge the idea that CO-ADD can actually do it quicker than a large, established firm with plenty of resources. I’m also interested in the idea of a partnership with the government for CO-ADD, I think this would be a great control to keep the platform focused on patient need, not the goals of large pharmaceutical companies.

I think CO-ADD could also lower the barriers to entry that researched have in the pharma industry. We need more capacity, and I think the generation of more minds across hundreds of different labs will help to address this problem. One roadblock I think they may face is how to manage their non-profit across several different locations and cultures, because their productivity is paramount to discovery.

This article does a great job of demonstrating the trade offs between open and closed innovation. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook users were exposed to how their data is used within these “private” ecosystems and though its difficult to monetize, users realized that there is true value behind their preferences and their footprints left all over the internet. We’re creating value with our clicks and time every day, and I’m glad you mentioned block chain as a disruption to this lock & key moat protected user data model.

Don Tapscott does a great job describing this simply in a TED Talk found here: https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_how_the_blockchain_is_changing_money_and_business/transcript?language=en

Don proposes an ecosystem (13:57) where independent users are in control of their privacy and can actually reap the benefits of their data usage at their own discretion, not within the walls of Facebook or Uber. If we’re in control of our transactions and digital histories, will these services have new incentive to improve experience? Will this decentralization allow new players to enter the market?