Zynerji wrote: ↑08 May 2020, 23:35
I don't invalidate any point made so far, I simply do not agree with all of the concerns.
Mercedes team has made prosthetics for a child. They took a very specialized field that is beyond the F1 realm, and used their expertise to maximize the performance of the limb in question.
Other than the obvious humanity that endeavour shows, it also shows a certain amount of over capacity at the team to pull it off.
If each team sent 2 engineers to a working group with the express purpose of designing high-speed, additive manufacturing machines, they could contract the actual construction out to someone like Haas, and lease them to the auto manufacturers. That working group would still meet quarterly, and continue refining each machine for performance and durability. The profit from this product line would then feed back into the F1 Championship purse.
The product would not be owned by the teams, but F1 itself. That may not seem fair, but the cost to the individual teams is relatively minuscule, but the cost savings in F1 manufacturing as well as the possible labor/time savings for any manufacturer that ends up buying the end products would be monumental.
I am open to disagreement, but have yet heard a single point failure about this idea. I am a business guy, and I learned a long time ago the difference between can't and can't. One is impossible, the other is simply not figured out yet. This can be figured out.
Mercedes made a prosthetic while partnering with Touch Bionics. I would bet all the money in the world they stayed in their lane during that transaction. It reads to me like a marketing exercise... so I googled, it was...
"After receiving the letter in June, Mercedes invited Matthew to their headquarters, where he toured the factory and met racing legend Michael Schumacher.
The company said they were unable to pay for the hand but agreed to help Matthew raise the money, by asking fans and sponsors to make donations. Touch Bionics also agreed to fit the hand and train Matthew at their state of the art facilities for free, which would have otherwise cost £25,000."
So what did mercedes do besides raise funds? They made the condom like exterior skin which was their personal customization on the existing I-limb 100% developed by the prosthetic company.
Ok onto the 'working group' discussion, cause now I think we may be moving in the right direction. Here is how I have seen some classified or high tech technologies go about doing what you are proposing. Company A has the rights to a patented and lab tested technology but they want to inform its development by actual use cases. They reach out to companies x, y, and z and ask if they want early access to this technology if they are apart of developing its use case in their markets while also contributing to the funding.
I have seen the above process fail more than I have seen it succeed and the flybrid is a great example of said failure. 10's of companies signed up for that, and the market wanted electric motors and different types of energy storage. My personal example was a project almost 20 years ago, a synthetic nose, or a chemically sensitive device which was disposable and could indicate visually the state of things like sourness of a gallon of milk or whether someone had lung cancer or if mold was in your home, or the tannin in wine, or the location a coffee was produced. The markets were endless, they still are. I worked for pennies on the dollar to help build out the prototype production tools.
Millions was invested, by major multinational corporations... they did medical trials, proved they could detect cancer from someones breath, etc... and yet other technologies proved more profitable and they failed to commercialize. For all I know the professor who published said work in an article not unlike the one you original posted, is still fighting the good fight to make that technology commercial.
How do you know Stratysys(ssys) hasn't already paid for a first right of refusal and isn't creating that developmental working group as we chat? What makes the F1 teams more suited to develop this technology than the experts in the field? Wouldn't they really just be a minor customer in the grand scheme of things?
What makes you think this is a winner? And can I ask what you are investing in right now? I use my name on this forum so you can search me and know what i'm invested in, and what skin I have in the game, and how i've failed in the past to turn a high tech white paper manufacturing process into a commercial good, and succeeded in yet others.
I personally think the tech listed in the original paper is novel and interesting but can't fathom how F1 would be involved besides a marketing wank like partnership. Or contributing to a working group which this technology is likely 3-5 years from becoming. And I don't think there is much left for me to add on the subject, we may just disagree about how stuff like this goes from theory to reality, and then yet scaled to profitability. The first two are easy, the last one is not.
