Yaping's Profile

Viria, great article to read! Thanks for sharing. I really love the way IDEO leverage its design thinking process as a tool to solve social challenges, and use open innovation not only to collect ideas but also call for attention on those social challenges. I guess there are two challenges : (1) who would be responsible for taking the ideas and implement them? (2) Some challenges requires a lot of technical expertise in certain fields to come up with good solution, how to ensure those people get reached?

PK, thanks for sharing! It’s interesting to see how 3D printing is used in healthcare. I believe it has huge benefit for future. For the cost challenge you mentioned, I am thinking of: can they use less skilled orthopedists and engineer or less expensive materials to reduce the cost? Can insurance be leveraged to cover the cost? They can think of partnership at this early adoption stage, such as government, NGO, special funds. Once this stage was passed and a bigger scale is achieved, there would be great economy benefit I believe.

Interesting to read! I believe Alibaba has actually started to make their own private brand products, which is quite similar with what NetEase does. The products are mostly in the narrow category of home and clothes, under the brand “TaoBaoXinXuan”, and sold in a TaoBao store. I think they are intentionally low profile in private-brand launch, without using a separate platform yet. Given the price advantage of many vendors on the platform and big varieties of design brands, I think Alibaba has to carefully select the product category for private label development, for which quality should be much valued and stylish design is mot a must.

Interesting article to read! I agree that Macy should move into the omni channel direction by enhancing the in-store purchase experience and more diversified service. It’s interesting to see that both traditional retailers and E-commerce giants are moving into omni-channel strategy, even they start from different place. Amazon acquired WholeFood to expand it’s off-line grocery business. Alibaba also put up the “New retail” strategy and use “HeMaXianShen” to pilot the off-line business. Obviously grocery and restaurant business are still very local and off-line based, but for Macy, how can it make it’s off-line business more irreplaceable? I think Macy has an opportunity to review it’s product portfolio and start to offer services such as hair cut, salon, photography taking, kids playing center, etc. which are still mostly off-line based so far.

Jad, it’s interesting to read about the digitalization change in ME! I remember when we held a E-commerce workshop in China in 2016, our Dubai manager shared that the on-line business was not yet there at the time. Thoughts about how to compete with Amazon: I think being local would be a great competitive advantage. That means finding out where ME market is different from other global markets, which could be consumer’s trust level, preference on delivery speed, influence of purchase decision, etc. Then Carrefour should focus on those areas. Amazon is a great global business and no doubt it has power of using big data, but localization is a different skillset. For example, during the Alibaba case we mentioned ebay but not touched on Amazon. Amazon China offers similar on-line purchase service as it’s US biz does, but the service was not preferred by the Chinese consumers. In my view, an important reason that JD got it’s advantage position over Amazon in B2C area is its decision to strategically focus on logistics and make claim on “delivery the next day”, which meets the needs of the consumers.

Sophia, it’s a very interesting topic to read, thanks for sharing! For me, I think there’s probably an “emotional skepticism” towards algorithm compared to pills, which we are used to for so long time and the mechanisms are pretty transparent. Taking this into consideration, I do think a higher standard on accuracy is needed if it seeks for an expanded use from the public.