Patrick Toller's Profile

Fascinating topic and great article. I do think that HackerOne needs to bring on more expertise to establish the company and move beyond being a community of well-intentioned hackers to a viable business has mass appeal to companies across many industries. The experts I would look to hire would be a community manager to keep hackers engaged and recruit the best talent, subject matter experts in cyber security to objectively evaluate the hacker community, and some senior sales individuals with business expertise that can relate to the concerns of business leaders and can pitch HackerOne as a solution to those needs.

Your article reminds me of the participatory budgeting that the City of Cambridge (along with a few others) currently uses (https://pb.cambridgema.gov/) Essentially, citizens get to vote with their taxes on which projects the city if going to fund. Everything is extremely transparent and citizens are more engaged and they have an actual, measurable voice in each proposed project.

Unlike the previous comment, I do think that open innovation will help us come together and bridge the political and social gap that is plaguing the United States. Especially in the past few years, politics has become less about the issues and more about “us vs them”. Even if people agree with some aspects of the opposing political party, they are forced to eventually pick a side (or lose as an independent) and we become even more polarized as there essentially is no middle ground. As you indicate in your essay, open innovation might help us solve this issue as we isolate ideas from political party and have people work together to come up with beneficial solutions. It’s a tall order to think that it will impact the US in the short term, but I hope that eventually open innovation will help us to work together to solve problems and help us overcome the divisiveness in America and around the world.

Very interesting article and concept! I’m actually curious how additive manufacturing will impact the used car and automotive maintenance industries as well as new-builds. Will we ever have the ability to manufacture our own replacement parts for our cars, or go to a local 3D printing shop that can manufacture nearly any part for any car on the road? How will this impact new car sales? Although I think it’s still many years down the road, I’m interested to see how this plays out!

Fantastic analysis, Chrissy! As for your question on how we can protect consumer identity and data and smart city technology proliferates (which I believe it most certainly will), there’s been a lot of development going on around using the Blockchain and decentralized networks to connect people to each other and to government services in a smart city, in both an anonymous (at least peer to peer) and extremely secure way. One example of how I envision this working is if I’m walking to my car (driverless, of course) to leave a parking spot, you could get a notification that my parking spot was going to be free in a couple minutes (while I’m still walking there), and your car would be rerouted to take that spot immediately after I left. Maximizes revenue for the city, quick and easy for us, and completely secure. I’m really excited to see the future of smart cities!

Here’s an interesting read on the blockchain for smart cities: https://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/publications/2018/blockchain-the-next-innovation-to-make-our-cities-smarter.pdf

This was a great read with some very comprehensive and thorough analysis. Well done! I think your question of how Sephora can use data to individualize the customer’s brick and mortar experience is a great one – not just for Sephora but for all retailers looking to offer a unique in-store experience to compliment their online presence. I don’t have a solution for this, but I believe that finding the solution starts with adopting the same online data gathering tactics that companies like Sephora for online marketing. Specifically, retailers need to find a way to measure the actions of customers in their brick and mortar locations. Just like ecommerce is able to do with understanding what products a consumer has looked at, what items have they searched for, and what pages they’ve visited; brick and mortar must find a way to dig beyond what products people end up buying. To actually individualize the brick and mortar experience, companies like Sephora need to find a way to identify what products consumers looked at without buying, what part of the store they spent the most time in, how long they were in the store before they decided to purchase a product, etc. I think this is the way forward with actually individualizing a consumer’s brick and mortar experience the same way ecommerce does. As for how this will be implemented, I’m interested to find out!

To take a shot at your first question on whether Salesforce should focus on taking incremental steps or great leaps forward, I suggest that they focus primarily on incremental steps while also establishing a small team in their R&D division that is entirely dedicated to pursuing great leaps forward. While Salesforce is certainly in a dynamic space and faces increasing competition, they are still an enormous player with a well-established global infrastructure and proven results. Any innovation in AI that Salesforce makes, even if it is small by Salesforce’s standards, will have an enormous impact on the market due to Salesforce’s sheer size. To me, the added benefit of focusing entirely on great leaps forward is not worth the risk of failure, especially when Salesforce already has such a hold on the market. However, I do think that adding a small team focusing on large ideas will allow Salesforce to identify opportunities for great leaps without risking the incremental and steady progress of it’s AI advancements.