Talitha Kirchner

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On November 15, 2018, Talitha Kirchner commented on FOLIO: Challenging the Status Quo Through Community-Based Development :

In the larger context of open source innovation, this article makes a strong case for exploring the application of crowd sourcing in areas that were traditionally considered too complex to disrupt through crowd sourcing. With Library Service Platforms – like other professionally used platforms (e.g., CRM-platforms) – designing developing all parts in a harmonized effort by one entity and then pushing updates to fix emerging problems after implementation has been a standard. Non-individualized solutions have led to many problems, e.g. low data quality and low functionality. This open source project has the potential of disrupting traditional providers through offering superior, customized functionalities to its users.

On November 15, 2018, Talitha Kirchner commented on FOLIO: Challenging the Status Quo Through Community-Based Development :

In the larger context of open source innovation, this article makes a strong case for exploring the application of crowd sourcing in areas that where traditionally considered too complex to disrupt through crowd sourcing. With Library Service Platforms – like other professionally used platforms (e.g., CRM-platforms) – designing developing all parts in a harmonized effort by one entity and then pushing updates to fix emerging problems after implementation has been a standard. Non-individualized solutions have led to many problems, e.g. low data quality and low functionality. This open source project has the potential of disrupting traditional providers through offering superior, customized functionalities to its users.

Thank you for your local insight Jad, I agree that the prospect for e-commerce grocery in the Middle-East is immense. While Amazon did a great strategic acquisition with the local e-commerce player souq.com, I still believe Carrefour has a key competitive advantadge that has not been fully realized yet – it has years of experience in personal face-to-face customer interactions which lead to building the much needed trust in grocery shopping. In my mind the challenge and chance for Carrefour going forward is to find ways to bring that warm, human interaction element online, so that their service is clearly differentiated from Amazon’s.

I was intrigued by you comment that “not all tasks can be fulfilled through external participants” and that led to my conclusion that “not all tasks should be allowed to be posted and fulfilled through an external participant”. One related underlying concern for me, that I did not find in the outlook, is that there seem to be no mechanisms to prevent misuse of this open innovation platform to source ideas for societally unadvantageous or even illegal actions – creativity of the crowd can become a danger when it is focused on devious plans. I think that prevention of abuse of the platforms innocent purpose to connect people for idea sourcing is a topic that needs to be adressed urgently.

On November 15, 2018, Talitha Kirchner commented on Crafting a Tailor-Made Bone – Leveraging 3D Printing in Healthcare :

Thank you for this insight – it is interesting to see applications of 3D printing expand to the healthcare space. With all these new inventions, one important point you touched upon and that I will explore further is how to ensure that the masses can benefit from these new solutions. Driving production costs down to those of alternative solutions is only the first step. What counts is the overall cost of treatment – so as a next step I believe it is key that Meticuly establishes strategic partnerships with hospitals to figure out how to drive overall costs of treatment down through improved treatment efficiency – in the long run, this will also benefit Meticuly who can then become the primary provider of their product.

On November 15, 2018, Talitha Kirchner commented on Training Robots to Curate Individualized News :

I agree that Newstags value proposition compared to long-established newsfeed providers such as Feedly is one of the key challenges. Feedly, as newsfeed that pulls together news from all your preferred newspapers, has been in business since 2008 reliably serving its users with their news for free.
The only component that is missing is content recommendations – a service that many newsreaders are sceptical of due to the growing concern that, in order to engage users on the platform longer, providers like Newstags will present you with the news you want to hear instead of giving you a fair representation of the actual events. With that in mind, services like Newstags might not offer enough value for consumers to switch from long existing platforms and they might face criticism in terms of a fair representation of the news.

On November 15, 2018, Talitha Kirchner commented on Maison Me-chine :

It seems like Maison Me is setting itself up for solving the two important challenges in women clothing – style and fit. However, I have some doubt around the viability of their growth strategy. I like how you touch on the question of whether Maison Me will manage to maintain its couture position once if caters to the masses. I would even ask more provocatively “Does Maison Me have clarity on the mass customers needs?”. Currently they are targeting women with good purchasing power and a keen interest in having their unique clothes. This is clearly different from the mass customer at Zara that they want to target going forward. I would argue that the “stylish individualism” Maison Me offers is less appealing to the mass consumer who is relieved that Zara is making the style calls and translating the latest runway fashion trends to something wearable. Also, fit for everyday clothes is arguably less of an issue as opposed to fit of special dresses/suits. So even if Maison Me does manage to make their service affordable to the masses, does the average Jane want to design her own clothes and stand out or does she just want to wear something fashionable that fits just well enough? If she does, Maison me looses its key competitive advantage moving into mass fashion.