The next speaker, Elle Shelley
from Launch Forth, a division of
Local Motors. If you haven't
heard of Local Motors, you just
got to go Google it because the
cars that they make are insane,
so cool. What is cooler is I
was at a NewCo Boulder Festival
hearing a NewCo presentation
from Local Motors. Elle got up
and told me about this new
manufacturing platform that they
spun out of the work that they
were doing in that they just
needed a way to rethink how to
design and manufacture things at
smaller scale, but that could
scale to massive scale. She
spent about 20 minutes
explaining this thing. I was
like, . I said, "
You have to come and do the same
thing here, but I'm only going
to give you half the time."
Creative boxes, we
love it. Please, for ,
a palate cleanser if you will,
welcome Elle Shelley, the EVP of
Forth from Local Motors.
Thanks, John. I feel like I
should
say
and a task accepted. We
have eight minutes and I have to
explain to you all kinds of
crazy things. First, I'm going
to go a little bit off script
and tell you a story about me.
When I was 17, I graduated from
high school. I'm from Arizona. I
moved to go to high school in
Northern Utah. The second
weekend away from home, I met a
group of friends. We decided to
take a road trip from Northern
Utah to Half Moon Bay,
California, actually. Four of
us jumped in my friend's Toyota
4Runner, packed our bags, ready
to really be adults and start on
our way. About halfway through
the morning, we stopped in a
little teeny, tiny town called
Elko, Nevada. We filled up on
pancakes and other deliciousness,
got back in the car where I
promptly fell asleep. This is
where the story takes a darker
turn. I woke up two months
later in a hospital in Phoenix.
I didn't have any recollection
of what happened, what happened
to me. We never actually made it
to Half Moon Bay. After the
doctors explained to me where I
was, my parents made me read the
police report so I could
understand what happened. What
happened is all four of us got
back in the car. The driver put
the car on cruise control at 85
miles an hour. Just like I fell
asleep, he fell asleep. The car
drifted from the far left-hand
lane all the way over to the
right-hand lane. The gravel
actually woke him up where he
then realized that he was in the
wrong place. He turned the wheel.
When he turned the wheel, the
car flipped over and rolled
eight times. I was, like I said,
asleep in the backseat. I was
ejected through the sunroof and
flew 183 feet away from the rack.
The other three people in the
car, one stayed in the car. The
other two were ejected. The
three people in the car were
ejected within a 10-foot radius.
When the police and the
ambulance came to get the first
group of people, the driver
heard...this is hard for me to
tell you, sorry. It's very
emotional...heard the ambulance
driver say, "We got all three of
them. Let's go." The driver then
said there were four, and then
passed out. That ambulance went
on its way, and a helicopter
actually came and found me where
they thought...I was in really,
really bad shape. They flew me
back to Phoenix. My parents came.
The doctors actually told my
parents that I was going to be
brain-dead. Good news, I'm not.
This whole story
framed my life because I started
asking questions. I started
saying, "Why is this happening?
Why are we still having mass
recalls? Why are cars still so
unsafe? Why is all this
happening?" I really started
thinking deeply about this.
Then I found that there were
other people thinking about this.
This is where my personal story
actually intersects with Local
Motors, which is what John was
talking about. Raise your hand
for me if you've heard of Local
Motors, raise your hand. OK,
enough of you. I'll breeze
through this fast because I know
we're tight on time. You might
know Local Motors from the
Strati. This is the world's
first 3D printed car. Maybe, you
know Local Motors from the Rally
Fighter. This is actually the
world's first co-created car.
It's colloquially known as the
car the Internet built. It's
pretty cool. You might know
Local Motors from the DARPA XC2V.
This is a purpose-built vehicle
specifically designed to keep
all of our frontline troops as
safe as possible. This is one
very close to my heart, too.
Maybe, you've had your pizza
delivered in one of these
Domino's ultimate pizza delivery
vehicles, another co-created
vehicle from our world. Maybe,
you've met Olli, which is our
newest and really the crown in
our jewel. It's a self-driving
cognitive shuttle. It's powered
by IBM Watson. It's completely
autonomous. All of these
vehicles actually have two
things in common. I'm going to
get real bookish on you and
explain what they are. The first
is that they are made in a micro-
factory. What is a micro-factory?
It's a physical operating space
for rapid prototyping, modular
experiment, experimentation, and
small batch manufacturing of
products. It's also a solution
to how we can stop mass recalls
of bad products that get on the
road. They're also co-created.
What is co-creation? An active
process where brands and their
customers work together with
software designers and engineers
to accelerate product and
technology development. These
two things together are the
fundamentals with which Local
Motors is built upon. What
ended up happening is that Local
Motors saw so much success
bringing really hard things,
vehicles, to market faster and
cheaper using co-creation and
micro manufacturing that all
these other brands started
knocking on the door. It became
very apparent that we actually
had a service business on top of
a product business. We realized
that all these other brands
wanted to figure out this magic
secret sauce that Local Motors
had, like John was talking about.
We created a whole practice to
do exactly that. Wait, first, a
moment about our community.
This is really, really the
secret sauce in where we're
going in the future. We believe
that anyone can innovate. We
believe that anyone can solve a
problem. We believe in the
democratization of ideas and
solutions. That is the
fundamental basis of our
community. Who's in our
community legitimately? If you
went from an astronaut to a
zoologist, to your grandma, to
anyone. Like I said, Graham
started coming to us and said, "
We want to try this. We want to
do this." We created a whole
team of people that I lead,
actually recently out of Boulder,
that focuses on building our
practice. We call this Launch
Forth. This is where it gets
very buzzy, but we're in the
Valley so you'll like this.
It's a community-powered SaaS
platform that unites the world's
largest engineering and design
community with companies to
design and bring products to
light faster. It's really,
really cool. I'm really inspired
by it. It's three parts --
service, then the Saas platform,
and a community. I'm going to
buzz through these slides really
fast because I only have two
minutes left. I want to talk
about the community model
because this is really what
makes this different. What we
have developed is this large
shared community of solvers
underneath. This would be our
community-powered. On top of it,
we have a SaaS platform. The
big companies, like GE and
Airbus, actually use to tap into
and solve problems with our
community. It's a really
revolutionary idea because, like
John said, it doesn't end just
online. We're not just another
SaaS platform. We're not just
another platform. We're not a
social network. But we're that
paired with digital
manufacturing. Someone in, say,
Colombia could have an idea to
design a product and actually go
online, submit the design, work
with engineers from GE, solve 257 00:08:32,185 --> 00:08:31,290 problems with engineers from
Airbus. Then in a micro-factory,
physically work to bring it to
market. That's the world that we
envision and the world that
we're working to create. Why
are we doing this? We believe
brilliant ideas are everywhere.
It's our business to find and
empower as many of them as
possible. I love thinking about
that. When we think about our
community, that's exactly what
we're doing we're listening.
The co-creation process. We
start with inspire, then we
ideate. We generate. We refine.
Finally, we make. This is a
critical part that's different.
Then a lot of the "innovation
washing platform" that are going
on right now in the space. We
believe it's critical to
physically make a product to
understand how innovative it is,
to understand who the market is,
will they buy it, will they buy
it at that feature. Then to
actually bring it full circle
and remunerate the community for
any of the potential sales from
that product. That really is
our brand promise to the
community, that we're not just
taking ideas and reselling them,
but they get to be a part of the
entire process including
financially, a part of any of
the successful products. I'm
going to go really fast. I've
got a minute left. I feel like
this is a good place to keep
going. People always have a
million questions. what I wanted 301 00:09:53,275 --> 00:09:53,130 to see, if you want to spend
some time with questions.
Inspire, what happens? In this
phase, this is where we think
big. What we know about our
community is the bigger the idea,
the bigger the solution. We know
that our community is willing to
solve what we say is to solve
the unsolvable. A lot of what
we talk about is how can we
actually come up with really,
really big ideas. We call them a "
moonshot mission." What's
ironic about that is when we
talk to our partners about
moonshot mission, we got them so
inspired that we have a partner
that's actually coming to us to
dream bigger than the moon,
which is Mars. We're actually
going to co-create Mars with
this whole community. That's
going to happen in the next
couple of months. A moonshot
mission is comprised of a couple
pieces. We have all these co-
creation tools that make
projects that then make up the
moonshot mission. Then we go
into inspire. Once we have the
moonshot, we then create our
product strategy. We assemble
our project teams, and we have a
roadmap. This is another part to
talk about from understanding.
This is just interesting. When
we talk about a community-
powered SaaS platform, our SaaS
platform is what internal
engineering teams use to do
their product development. We're
positioning it. What we work
with our partners on is to show
how internal teams can actually
use the power of a community to
do their job better. This is a
fundamental shift in trying to
convince engineers and product
designers how to think about
their job. This has really been
a challenge for us and one that
we think about often because we
don't want the concept to be
that GE has partnered with us to
basically crowd-source all these
engineering jobs. That's not
what we're doing. Instead what
we're doing is we're creating a
new tool for engineers and
product designers to get better
at their job. It's part of the
shift in thinking about how we
can actually move into the
digital transformation with big
companies. Like I said, we are
nothing if not makers. We
believe in generating the PDFs,
the CAD files, the PSDs, all of
the actual geometry and
algorithms that you have to
actually do to make a product.
That all happens on our platform.
Again, collaborating between a
community and internal subject
matter experts. Then we refine
it. This is again where we tap
into the community and where we
are going to be exploring
artificial intelligence to try
to understand how peer to peer
interactions or the community
can regulate itself doing
comments, voting, design
modifications, upvotes,
downvotes, etc., etc. Then we
make. If you get nothing out of
this conversation, I hope it's
that you understand that making
physical products is the key to
our future. We have to make
products and we have to make
them here in order to make an
economy for all of the next
generation. Anyway, .
Our community is home to 75,000
plus solvers. We've been doing
this for a long time. We really
understand how to do innovation
challenges, how to talk to a
community and how to actually
ask the right question to get
the right answer. We've had
over 7,100 entries to challenges
and counting. Like I said, case
studies, Dominos, we talked
about that. There it is. That's
what we're doing. Any questions?
Thank you.