innov8sean with Sean Duggan

     Bandcamp is a privately-held music publishing platform that combines digital and physical sales of music and merchandise on its website, Bandcamp.com, and also through its mobile app. Ethan Diamond, who founded the company in 2007 and is its CEO, describes his target customers as those exhibiting “engaged fandom… the type of music consumer that wants not just the digital album but also the vinyl LP and maybe even a poster on their wall of their favorite band.” The Bandcamp user experience is about allowing the customer to focus in on the specific musicians and genres they are interested in, giving them tools to explore new music and also curate their own existing collection, and decide what they ultimately want to purchase. Through the site, digital versions (in a variety of file formats and compression qualities) and physical copies (vinyl records, CDs, tapes) of songs and albums are sold. Users can also stream music on a free and limited basis, with unlimited strea...

Abstract There have never been more active vehicles than there are on our roads today. With this increased access to individual mobility comes tremendous benefits, yet also negative side effects which could prove to be unsustainable. However, advantages offered by Highly Autonomous Vehicles (HAVs) could mitigate these problems while increasing safety for road users and quality of transportation experiences for all. Realising this potential and forecasting for this eventuality, automakers, technology companies, policymakers, and regulators continue to refine their long-term strategies. As R&D efforts continue to drive progress in HAV technology, so too does the viability of autonomous transportation fitting into the daily mobility needs of the average consumer. This research examines current progress in vehicular technology in terms of incremental increases in the capabilities of driver assistance systems in modern vehicles. Consideration is given to offer designations delinea...

Introduction For many people the daily commute has become something of a ritual. Children go to school and adults go to work in adherence to society’s expectations that humans fulfil their productive capabilities by being in certain places at certain times. From this collective need has risen the transportation industry in all of its vehicular manifestations. The mass adoption of the personal automobile in particular has given the individual much greater freedom to travel within cities, regions, and even long-distance as they see fit. Those who can afford to do so drive daily, while applications on mobile devices allow the sharing of rides and vehicles with increasing regularity. This has resulted in many vehicles in daily operation on roads and highways around the globe, particularly in urban areas. This level of current use may prove unsustainable, with major drawbacks concerning public safety, traffic congestion, and environmental impact. Proponents of the Highly Autonomous Veh...

The Research Barriers to Adoption                It is often argued that autonomous vehicles are inevitable and will one day saturate the motorways of this planet (Waldrop, 2015) (Cutts, 2014) ushering in a new age in automobile safety (Fleetwood, 2017). Yet to assume success is to invite failure, as is often the case with futurology (Russell-Carroll, 2014). The challenges of implementation combined with the known and unknown negative side-effects of HAVs shall determine the degree and speed of their widespread adoption by the general public. These issues are multifaceted and complex; how they are dealt with in the immediate and near future will determine the extent to which HAVs will be accepted and adopted by the commuters of the future. To better understand and investigate these challenges, this research seeks to group them into three categories of “barriers” which were developed by conducting a literature review on the subject. These bar...

Happy Innovation Day! As a recent graduate with Masters of Science in innovation, people often ask me what I do, so I think today is a good opportunity to elaborate a little bit on this subject. My favorite academic definition of innovation is "finding new solutions to problems using pioneering and/or underutilized methods". Despite this, a lot of people tend to think in terms of "invention" when they try to understand "innovation". This is understandable, for as the comedian Reggie Watts points out: "innovation is a word that was invented 50 years ago”... before that, humans didn’t really have systems that were complicated enough that we needed a new word to describe this concept of inventive actions. These actions—innovations—result in significant changes to the systems within which they are undertaken, to the point that they can be scaled and potentially change the entirety of the systems themselves. It is my personal belief that we are at somewh...