TOM Student's Profile

As a Lego fan, this article is very interesting! I think it’s important for Lego to make open innovation into a way to help its designers team. The consumers ideas could be used as a source of inspiration for the designers, who still should have the freedom of creating new things and combining different ideas. The consumers ideas should not be the only source of innovation, but instead a complement to the designers’ job.

Very interesting article! Personally I would not trust an aircraft if it was fully autonomous neither if the pilot was not on-board. For two reasons:
First, I think machine learning has great potential and should definitely be used in systems such as the one described by Akash. However, machine learning depends on training with past data. When facing new, unexpected events, the creativity and ingenuity of a pilot may be a critical competence to prevent accidents. I believe the automatic pilot should control the aircraft during most of the time, but we need a pilot to take over the control if such new, unpredictable events happen.
Second, although I believe the pilot may effectively control the aircraft remotely, I would be concerned about situations in which some unexpected events harm the communication between the pilot and the aircraft. Besides, and maybe a controversial topic, I would also be concerned to whether the pilots would have their full attention and would be performing at their full potential if they are actually not in the aircraft. I’m sure they have the best intentions, but placing the pilot in the aircraft itself is the best way to make him fully committed to prevent accidents, as his life is at stake.

It’s interesting to think that machine learning could potentially destroy hobbies because human players cannot beat AI. Hobbies are important for people to re-energize from their day-to-day challenges and so many people enjoy playing online games. However, I believe AI’s performance in games will not discourage most fans from playing, because there is a socialization component to playing games. Many people play to interact with their physical-world or online friends, and they are not discourage by the fact that there are players much better than they are (whether those players are real-people or in the future, AI players). I would be more concerned about game companies using AI not focused on performance, but focused on sociability, to entertain users. I wondered whether AI applied to entertain users may bring they far from their “real-people” friends, potentially having bad psychological effects.

Very interesting article about an unsuccessful use of open innovation by the giant Amazon. I agree with the author that very popular big bets seem to be the way that competitors are succeeding. I hypothesize that this happens because of the importance of word-of-mouth to bring new consumers to watch a movie/series in these online platforms. Big bets usually become viral and when many of your friends are talking about a movie/series, you will probably watch it too. The same is not true for less popular movies/series, that can’t benefit from this viralization.
However, the author poses an interesting question about whether crowsourcing could succeed in spots further down the innovation funnel. I believe yes, it’s more likely to succeed further down the funnel. If we have a very competent creation team coming up with a range of scripts, we could leverage crowdsourcing for prioritizing among the possible scripts and also for fine tunning some characteristics of the winning scripts. People may not know in advance what the want for the next movie/series, but they probably know which one they prefer when they have to choose from a pre-defined menu.

This application of 3D printing is very impressive and inspiring! In the end, the author questions whether training community members will provide enough impact to make the investment worthwhile. I believe it will be very hard to train the community members, and especially to encourage continuous learning through online training. Only in Nepal, there are 123 Nepalese languages spoken as first language therefore it would probably be very difficult to prepare training for a such a diverse public. On the other side, preparing training in so many different languages would be very costly. On top of that, if people are not familiar with computers, they probably need to be trained in very basic topics, besides 3D printing itself, further increasing the costs. So finally, while the application of 3D printing by humanitarian organizations has been successful, I’m afraid it will be very challenging to foster adoption by community members.

This is an amazing topic! I didn’t know 3D printing has been used in the food sector. Both applications – personalized designs and personalized nutrition – are interesting, especially the second one, because it directly impacts the health of the population. I think the author wrote important questions about how to use 3D printing of food to make health and nutrition available to all, especially the most poor. The benefits are clear for the affluent consumer, but it’s unclear for me if this is the path to address the health and nutrition problems of the majority of the population. I’m concerned that 3D printing of food may be a costly way of fine tunning the nutritional ingredients to one’s needs, while people living in poverty don’t even have their basic needs attended, because of lack of money and/or accessibility. Having basic regular food items supplied to those poor people would solve most of the problem and I expect to be cheaper and more scalable ways of doing that. Still, very interesting application of the 3D printing technology and I believe in the very long-term it may become accessible to most people, but in the mid-term it’s important to address the needs of the poor through other paths.