Phil Knight's Profile

I believe that additive manufacturing for Stryker right now is best positioned to deliver increased speed of innovation in prototype medical devices, and not in mass production. However, I think there are opportunities to use 3D printing to provide medical devices in remote areas or in crisis situations to deliver help at a faster pace.

Overall, I think that crowd-sourcing ideas for LEGO products is a particularly effective way to stay relevant at a time where the toy industry / games in general are becoming more digital / online. I think that this is also an effective way to maintain a relationship with the older consumer, who might be more inclined to build as a family activity for a design that is more relevant to them.

I think that the concept of increasing community engagement with the government through open innovation is one that offers multiple benefits for citizens and leadership alike. Being able to foster a community that cares and has accountability for the success and direction of a city / country will undoubtedly lead to more positive and rapid improvement. However, I think the question around the topic of the innovation is important. Topics where there is no political or funding pressures would be far more suitable than those that are more sensitive to other factors. Finding those topic areas and encouraging engagement from the community should be the focus of the government. I hope that other cities learn from this and best practices can be shared across borders.

I think that Eli Lily should expand the program and potentially use it as a conduit to enter new drug markets. It would be helpful to maintain or strengthen their rights to partner and commercialize the outputs from the program in order to enhance the potential opportunity.

I think that the ability for consumers to try out different products virtually would be a huge value proposition, but only for products that are highly visually focused (e.g., make up tones, lip colors, hair colors) versus touch and feel focused (e.g., moisturizers, shampoos, toners) as VR/AR currently would struggle to mimic this for consumers. I feel that using VR/AR to narrow down the initial product offerings could help sales people be more effective in their advice and recommendations, while simultaneously helping to convince consumers that a purchase will satisfy their needs.

I think the impact of 3D printing on manufacturing location and human capital needs for BMW (and other car manufacturers) will prove interesting and likely shift their strategic directions. By utilizing more 3D printing for mass-production there may be a shift of work back towards more developed countries as lower cost labor becomes less influential in decision making. Additionally, the work may require a different type of skill set and therefore a shift in HR organizational hiring practices and overall human capital costs.

I believe that the required confidence interval for a machine to make decisions on the battlefield needs to be in line with what we know about the accuracy / success rate for humans most of the time. I think there is a bias that humans actually make logically superior decisions, when in fact they often face emotional biases which in some times are helpful but can also be harmful. My main concerns with this is the ability for a malicious party to hack the algorithm and intentionally cause mistakes, and the availability of sufficient data for an algorithm to make unbiased decisions. I imagine that many decisions and tasks can be unique, in at least certain aspects, on the front line and therefore the algorithm would be limited by this.