Opex Analytics History (Part 4)- Five unique-ish things we did for outreach and three reasons why
We didn’t follow traditional marketing approaches. Instead, we focused on educating the market. And, we hoped that would work.
Here are five things we did.
One, we built a Beer Game.
In 2017, reinforcement learning was getting a lot of exciting press for learning to play Atari games.
Larry Snyder, a professor at Lehigh and part-time with Opex Analytics, didn’t want Atari to have all the fun. He wanted to show how reinforcement learning could learn to play the classic MIT Beer Game. He wanted to create something to make reinforcement learning real for supply chain professionals.
We wanted in on this fun.
We made a big investment to create a free online version of the game. Try it, it is fun. It quickly got to over 10,000 plays— my high school daughter taught herself supply chain and and worked hard to beat the AI agent.
We used the game to help educate supply chain professionals about deep learning and reinforcement learning.
To increase the educational outreach, we would rent out rooms in small breweries and host a “Beer and The Beer Game” events where we would sample the local beers, give a talk on AI, and then play the game. (this picture is from an event at Goose Island Beer in Chicago).
Two, we ran a monthly educational webinar
From the start, in 2013, I wanted to create a monthly educational webinar— no sales or marketing allowed. I wanted us to teach managers and business analysts about the exciting world of AI.
We finally launched it at the start of 2017 and did about 35 sessions until we were acquired. We covered topics such as analytics talent, building an AI team, deep learning, inventory, forecasting, common pitfalls, and much more
We invested a lot of time into creating each of these sessions. I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be.
Three, we gave lots of talks
We spoke everywhere we could. And, mostly, our talks were educational.
We gave talks at industry groups like CSCMP, forecasting industry groups, and INFORMS. We gave guest lectures or talks at Universities, like Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Loyola. And, we spoke at our customer’s educational events.
Four, we ran TechGirlz events
We sponsored and ran several TechGirlz coding days. This is a program to inspire middle schools girls to consider technology careers. The picture above is from an event we co-sponsored with Unilever. Clara Quigley did a nice write up of the event.
Five, we blogged
OK, this is not unique. If there was something unique, it was that we encouraged technical blog posts, blog posts about any topic in AI (even things we didn’t do), and kept it educational.
Why did we take this approach?
All of the above took money and a lot of time from our leadership team. Why did we do it?
I wanted to do it. I’ve always been a part-time adjunct professor, and I just like to teach and educate.
We felt like we were opening a new space in the market. We were bringing AI concepts to supply chain and operations. To open a new space, education is important. I like to think, but could never prove, that we helped speed up the adoption of AI within the the supply chain— with our customers, with people who consumed our materials, and even with our competitors.
As a small company, it helped us create brand awareness and gave our customers confidence that we knew our stuff.
* Here is blog post giving five reasons why we created the game- This has a little more detail than this post.