Sean's Profile

Fascinating read- and you covered all 3 topics! I’ve personally felt this pain before and completely agree that the entire process is ripe for disruptions. What would make it even more interesting though would be partnerships with company’s such as Protolabs. Protolabs does instant quoting on machined components. I think it would marry well with the LEGO approach and allow them to offer a complete solution. It would be quite incredible if every company did this to some degree. Arguably it would erode competitive positioning, but I wonder how much better off it would make the entire human race?

Very interesting read. I absolutely agree that rapid iteration and prototyping is the new status quo. Its just a price to play. But I’m more in the camp that 3D printing has been fairly well represented within the automotive sector from the beginning and has been a key component to compete against companies like Ford. As the product development cycle for cars is squeezed, I don’t think GM could have even survived other competition outside of Silicon Valley. No doubt, as you point out though, that Silicon Valley automotive groups are putting the entire industry under a microscope though. Fascinating read.

Hey neighbor – great post! I think it is very intriguing to open up innovation on this type of sector. I’ve read of many companies using open innovation to fuel product development, but arguably this is more of a social reform. Perhaps there is more depth to these tournaments, but I wonder how much of the output is more hardware (i.e. systems, apps, devices) than software (i.e. policies, cultural reform). I think we need to be concerned that open innovation solves the right problem. Its an incredibly powerful tool, as you put so beautifully, but is it focusing on a symptom rather than the root cause? It reminds me of all those times that police crack down on drug traffic, which limits supply, drives up price and attracts new drug dealers. There’s a deeper societal issue that I think needs to be addressed for an open-innovation solution to have a long lasting effect.

Its somewhat eerie how close this mimics the “God Eye” in the Fast and Furious movie. I think society always gets nervous when we find out how much information companies have (i.e. Google and Facebook). Sometimes I wonder if we need to just accept that is the state that we are in and, if so, can we unleash the legal hurdles so that companies like this can go out and do tremendous good in the world. Privacy I think is almost a myth now. Even when we think that we have privacy – do we? Very thought provoking article.

Very interesting read. It would be interesting to see how much of the benefit that John Hopkins saw is a result of getting the 24 folks in the same room and how much is attributed to advanced algorithms that enhance doctor synthesis. What would also be interesting to consider is how does the algorithm adapt with time. You had mentioned in your post that one of the risks is that medicine is very subjective. I also think it is always evolving. Machine learning algorithms favor getting to a steady state and enhancing the algorithms confidence levels over absorbing new and upcoming medical research. I wonder how the industry plans to rectify the two.

Thank you for the article Bernie. I’ve always been fascinated by 3D printed organs. Some critics argue that it is more of a science experiment and is so far off from reality that its likely never going to materialize. However, if it were to happen, and organs could be printed, I think it would begin to bring to light some interesting ethical questions – i.e. how much can you print before it begins to feel like cloning? Also, if you print enough to create a living organism, how does society treat the use of that organism – similar to the concerns revolving around stem cell research. An interesting company to compare the technology against for in vivo testing would be Emulate and their microfluidic emulation system.