Week 6-- Biobusiness Revolution: Health care and biomedical sciences

            Entering week 6 and focusing on individual topic, we were first introduced to a video on how  biotechnology is going to change our life especially in the medical field where the doctors are able to detect medical problems faster and also making it more convenient to the extent that they can examine their patients at anywhere in the world. I find this amazing and exhilarating because it has shown the immense advancement in the technology to help save more lives and also to make medical help available in everywhere we are. Seeing the animation on how the doctors actually able to detect the problems and with the aids of technology come out with the solution in a short time has made me feel excited to be able to witness this interesting and  astonishing gadgets in time to come. 

        Our attention was brought to the white board where prof wrote down this two statements for us to think about: 1) The Biobusiness revolution will transform our lives (eg: Our health, clothes, material, food and energy) and our economies 2) Biobusiness is likely to be the means by which we achieve sustainable development. With the statistic given that biobusiness contributes to over 25 per cent of global GDP and 40 per cent of the world’s labour force, we can see that the emphasize on biobusiness is huge especially biotechnology. Although biotechnology occupied only a small portion of the market size, it plays a big role in the development of other related industries in the biobusiness in terms of the skills and knowledge past down.  Take for example using of algae to produce renewable oil taking over the petroleum thus allow the plastics to be biodegradable.

       Looking at the world we are all living today, I find it heartwarming to see many companies giving back to the societies in term of charity and helping those who are really in needs. Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates set up a foundation in 2000 focusing on the improvement of health, education and poverty.  This foundation has a total fund of more than 22 billion dollar with Bershire Hathaway CEO, Warren Buffett who also contributed billion of dollar. These philanthropies with these large pools of fund invested heavily on research and development in the hopes of creating better ways and technologies to improve the current systems in the world.  Nevertheless, they are people whom I feel all the wealthy businessmen should follow, with the understanding that corporate firms are actually acquires revenues more than the GDP of one of the top few countries in the world. Having them step up to push on the technological field to innovate, more people especially from the rural area would be able to benefit from it. Having seen several millions of people dying from virus like common flu, these people were spur on to come out with more vaccines to be distributed to the poorer people as fast as they can. There will definitely be times when the research will fail and millions of dollar could be lost due to that, but they never give up and strive on. The scope of their contribution in the society has four major stream mainly are discovering new health solutions; developing effective vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics; delivering existing interventions; and advocating for supportive global health policies and resources. Having the abilities to change the world, push on a change in the market and policy making and saving million of lives, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation would eventually reach the heart of many lives and motivate more businessmen to become philanthropies to help the needy and society to become a better place to stay in.

            I do like the presentation by Elaine touching on the nanotechnology which i trigger the curiosity in me because it studies objects and particles in the atomic and molecular level. Despite having several jargon appearing and with the lack of any biology background, i was still able to understand how the nanotechnology works and its significant impact on the world. This is definitely a breakthrough in both the medical field and advancement in technology. With that we are able to better understand how certain virus strain is like and producing relevant vaccines to counter them, in addition we are also able to understand deeper in to the complexity of DNA and find ways to ensure that people are able to live healthier and stronger. This topic led to the talks on nanobots which are machines being design at the nano scale. Prof Shahi felt that it was quite scary to even imagine that having ultra small robots in the body controlling the tissues and cells in side us and with most of our cells acting on their own, he felt that it was already quite amazing as they are like the "nanobots" in us. Just like in the movie G.I.JOE with that technology appearing it could destroy the whole effel tower. Imaging the nanobots in our body and it goes berserk just like how several technologies breaking down after some time, we could all well be dead.

           This week lesson i would rate 7/10 because biobusiness is very broad with many insights related to biology and tend to be dry thus there are some parts which are hard to understand. Nevertheless, prof did a great job to impart his knowledge to us in  a simple way allowing us to absorb quite easily.

WEEK 5--INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY(ICT) & World Change

       This week we focus mainly on information and communication technology which comprise of wireless network, mass media, internet and many other interactive telecommunication. This topic is very interesting because it has now been all around us affecting us in one way or another. Firstly, the Mass media has changed from their traditional way of only providing news and thoughts to readers to the modern way of interaction which allows readers to be part of the reading by commenting on the issues online. Secondly, internet is now moving towards web 3.0 which is believe to be a continous from web 2.0 with more and more appliances connected to the internet and social networking. Allowing us to know our current location and even recommending the best food place around, we can see that the world is changing to allow the technology reach us even closer. Despite many points being mentioned, Prof Shahi believed that gaming is currently the one of the most influencial area of technology which is affected many other fields such as medical and the military. Take for example the using of joystick has been adopted by both fields to use to aim targets with great precision and accuracy.

         In addition to those points, one of the reading was reviewing on cloud computing which enthralled me because the technology has advanced to the extend where we are moving away from stalling our information mainly in the desktop to stalling them online. All these informations can be retrieved and used anytime we need them while on demand. This is a new scope that has been tried out and experimented as mentioned in the article, using the case study that had been done on Europe where several small to medium range enterprises exists. The result shows that adopting the cloud computing allows companies to cut cost and also to increase the employment rates. Furthermore, it also suggests that in time of another global crisis, cloud computing could play an important role to promoting recovery and fostering growth. The commonly used of cloud technology would be stuff like google doc., spreadsheet, usage of facebook, linkedin,twitter to store informations. However, this also means that people can be able to gain access to them also such as hackers thus the question i wanted to ask is if it is considered save? Storing private informations online i would not deny that it brings us alot of convenience but it also has some risks in the invasion of our privacy by others.

                 Prof also shows us three quotes including one that he wrote on the whiteboard: ‘ Any Sufficiently Advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’by  Arthur C Clarke,‘The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21^st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human’ by John Naisbitt and prof shahi, 'ICT is the catalyst that facilitates the knowledge revolution' All these actually related to ICT about how technology is able to create things that are extraordinary which we will find it fasinating as this are stuffs that we thought can never happen such as the invention of robots that are able to react and talk with emotion to human being. The ability to communicate beyond boundaries such as using skype and get through to anyone around the world, would have been seen by the ancient times as dream or fantasy but now everything has come true.Moreover, ICT provides a platform for us to move ahead to the next stage of human development, changing the way we read , write and interact with people around us. It allows us to be more innovative and believing that anything can happen.

         Thoughts were flashing through my mind when i watched the YouTube video on Virtual boy, Milo interacting with Claire and reading through the article. I astonished after watching the video as this could well be the next 5G technology that is hitting the world or market. Currently, with the concept of 3G being planted in many televisions sets and movies, we are able to experience the characters being close to us and making us more involved in the show. Nevertheless, with that kind of amazing technology advancement it can contribute to a major change in human life as mention in the article too. Benefiting people of all ages and walks of lives such as children would be taken care of, working personnel can use it as personal assistant and they can be a companion to the elderly. I anticipate that every households will have this technology and impacting the life of each and individual person in the world. However, there are always pros and cons to every issues and topics thus will this lead to social decay where children would be too obsess with this virtual portray of humans and forget that they are still living in a world where they still have to leave their house to mix around expanding their social cycles. Adults would be relying heavily on them to deal with matters and settle administrative things that make them even lazier thus if any breakdowns happen the consequences will be quite devastating. The main purpose of having technology is to allow humans to ease their workload and allocate their time efficiently on other areas and also to allow better accessibility to places, knowledge all around the world and better communication. Therefore, i hope that this advancement would allow people to rip off the benefits and not a bane to us.

                 I would rate this lesson 8/10 because there were several constructive ideas that were put across and topics being raise were worth thinking through. I learnt alot from this lesson and do look forward to the next one just like any other weeks.

Week Four--Drivers Of Change and The Human Factor

Focusing on this week issue on what factors drove technology and how we actually manage all these changes. Just like any other week, we were being directed to those words being written by prof Shahi, " There are essentially 3 options for changes: 1) make it happen 2) react when it happens 3) wonder what happen" All these three points do lead us to the different people in position in a company like the leaders to managers and employee who just follow instruction and not knowing what is the end product of what they are doing. After that we move on to discuss on factors that allow world changes such as in term of environment drivers, scientific and technological advancement, society and ideological changes and a few other points. Having mentioned of those points, the thought of human evolution was mentioned and prof actually gave us a short history of how germs changed the world with the starting of dark ages when the roman empire broke apart to the European Renaissance of the 14th-17th centuries.

We went on to discuss quotes by Charles Robert Darwin and George Bernard Shaw just to name a few but it is these two that make me think through. Charles stated that human must be responsive and adaptable to changes and the one who is able to do that will survive which i feel is logical. We are living in the world of survival of the fittest thus it is like people who are street smart and those who only excel well in schools. The former tends to survive better though they might not do so well in class because they know what to expect in the modern world and with their vast social networking, they can seek help and advise easily. On the other hand, for the latter, they tend to follow the thesis and facts presented to them and indeed they have high IQ but due to the lack of exposure to the real world,somethings will seem foreign to them. The quote by George Bernard Shaw states that those people who are unreasonable and keep questioning about the present and moving away from status quo will lead a change. I feel that this is quite interesting as it presents the fact that we should not always accept what is present to us and must constantly critic on it. Through this way, new ideas could be discovered or a new way of looking at things can be observed.

Next, i shall discuss on two readings " The Drivers Of Global Change To 2060- Natural England" and " 2050 Global Trend Final Report".Both articles in general discuss about the foresight of how the world will evolve to in the next few decades. Ranging from food securities, technological advancement to detrimental effects on the marine life or environment, lifestyle and culture and demographics and many others. As we know that no one in the world is able to accurately forecast what the future will be liked but this does not mean that we cannot draft out a some sort similar structure to that through research and trends.Mother nature is constantly changing and terrains are being changed every year by natural disasters such as typhoon, Hurricane Katrina, Earthquakes and volcanic activities. Year after year, we will hear in news reporting that this region is being hit by the worst Hurricane or earthquakes ever experience in the many years. Hence, we realize that due to weather condition changes and might possibly due to moving towards the ice age by some report, we are experience ferocious natural disaster heading towards our direction. The worst of all we can only take precautions to reduce the amount of damages that is done to us and not stopping them. Hence, this plays a important role in the forecasting of the near future and not mainly seeing the side of human factors. We must not forget that humans survive by the supplies provided by mother nature thus it is only logical that mother nature can destroy us too.

From modern world, we can see that the world population is increasing because the life expectancy of individuals are increasing too. More and more people are living longer thus it is obvious that ageing population is occurring all over the world. From the article "The human race is increasing and is rapidly migrating to urban centres. The global population (currently 6.8 billion) is expected to peak at around 10 billion before the end of this century. Pressure on resources must increase, and ecosystems and the services they provide are under threat. Most growth will come from lifespan; by 2060 the population will everywhere be much older than it is now" which substantiate my points mentioned above and also the articles also question on whether " will supply rise to meet global demand." and comparing with the stats presented in this link, http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats where millions of people actually starve to death every year with 1.02 billions of people not having enough food. This is an alarming numerical value as it is more than many developed countries. With the advancement in technology, there are many articles suggest that the world supply now is able to sustain the global demand in the future but if that is so why are there still so many people starving? Shouldn't that be an issue to talk about rather than discussing or squeezing out brain juices on whether future supply is sufficient?

The possible answers to that is either the statistic provided about the ample food supply is fraud or it lies in the distribution of food to the people. I highly doubt the former is true as they are many other sources stating the same points thus it is only left with the other point. Due to the natural disaster such as prolonged drought, it constitutes to losses of livestocks and crops failure. In addition to that, due to poverty trap, the people have no income to purchase seeds to grow crops and also build infrastructure to develop the land such as irrigation plants, thus making them weaker and can only starve to live on.Furthermore, globalization also led to many foreign companies entering their areas to obtain timber plus the natives poor farming leading to over exploitation of the environment. This resulted in many land being not arable. Hence, distribution of food supplies to these areas from all around the world must be emphasize to help them. With rapid improvement in transportation, there is definitely no excuse that the places are inaccessible. The governments of this countries should focus more on these people and not only on economical growth and major power like The United States should send troops into this regions to send food supplies to them rather than sending their soldier to battle and destroying so many lives and households.

We also touch on the change management and change leadership where we did a comparison between a leader and a manager. It came to an agreement that leader is the one that gives the vision and inspires everyone to look forward to while the managers are the one that implement ways to obtain the goals.

The picture above depicts how businesses progress from the initiation stage of brainstorming interesting ideas to and taking in interesting thoughts to implementing them with lots of administration work and the peak is the part where it will determine whether one will make it or not. Overcoming that will lead us to the completion zone.Furthermore, the topic on how the world is responding to changes is shown by the traditional model  where ideas is  unfreeze and freeze back again while modern model is focusing on constantly changing which i feel is better. This is due to the fast pacing society we are facing where things are changing very fast thus we cannot afford to wait till decades later before choosing to change the ideas. It will be too late.

Points to takeaway are the ways things are moving and progressing now. If we cannot keep pace with it and be ahead of it, we will definitely lose out in many ways. I feel that being an open minded person who is receptive to ideas is definitely encouraging but we should also have our own stand of views and not blindly following what other people suggest. Using those suggestion to improve, our current idea would be the best solution out of it as this gives us a wider exposure and perspectives to seeing things.

I would rate this lesson 9/10 because i get to learn alot of new innovation and also new ways to approach ideas and critic on them. The insights provided are also informative to enhance my knowledge in this field.

WEEK THREE--Technology and Industrial Development + innovation Management

Overview and my own evaluation:


     I was kind of disappointed at myself for being late again in class but luckily i did not miss out on any important things in the class. Entering the class, we were being directed to the whiteboard behind us and it writes,
                "Sustainability requires a shift from linear to circular thinking.
                Old industrial Model            :
                 Development verse Environment Well-being
               Sustainable Industrial Model:
                 Economic Development & Environment Well-being"
                                                                                                                                               by Prof Shahi

After which he showed us a video from YouTube on " Story of Stuff, Full Version; How Things Work, About Stuff " which talks about how today world is actually moving away from linear sustainability where the raw material being extracted will only end up being dumped once they are of no use. Hence, the video also suggested that the world should move towards circular way of thinking such as recycling the products once they are no use. Due to finite amount of resources that we have in the world, we have to adopt this so as to ensure that our future generations would be able to use them too. Looking at the rate of how The United States is using up resources in spite of having only five per cent of the world population, is definitely stupefying me. Imaging if every countries in the world consume as much as them, we would indeed need more than 6 planet, Earth, to sustain our needs.
   
         We move on to the readings where different people touch briefly on what those readings are about. Having read the article for : " Environment Fact Sheet on industrial development" i share the same view suggested by one of the classmate regarding the point the source was biased towards the European side and logically, it will be so as this is being publish by the European Commission. This article illustrates the need to increase the standard of living of people through better health benefits, education, better insanitary  etc. but we should not neglect the existing environmental problems like pollution, deforestation, increase in landslides etc. Five different facts are also presented for this article mainly talking about what has been done to ensure that all the visions and goals are achieved.
       
            After the discussion of the readings, prof Shahi touched on the point that when countries move from less develop to developing and lastly developed. The environment damage can  actually depict by a inverted "U" shape graph which i look up online and found this interesting article title "The Environmental Kuznets Curve: Its Validity and Implications". It illustrates the point that as countries start to industrialize or develop, their level of environment degradation will increase until some income threshold is met and afterwards decrease.However, this article provides a different viewpoint on the EKC where it is stated that this curve is different for different countries and also it does not seem appropriate for policy maker to use this curve to structure out their policy as the time frame is not taken into consideration in the curve. Furthermore, the fact that the income threshold of every single country is different and unpredictable thus by the time this threshold is achieve the damage on the environment would have been irreversible. Points like developed countries could have lesser environmental damage shown is due the the production of toxic materials oversea before importing back to the hometown just trigger my curiosity as how many countries actually do that. Despite implementing policy to achieve lesser environmental damage and investing in innovation of greener technology, developed countries like the United States are still having increasing sign of greenhouse emission. Have they not reach the income threshold? If dominant player like them are still not reaching it, then when will the other world achieve them? All these are the question for us to ponder over and thing about.

          Next comes the part on individual oral presentation where Bernadette presented the topic on urban aquaculture,Yu Hui presented on Clean technology in Israel and lastly Leon using a different style of presentation did on the growth of google and influence around the world. Eventually, the lesson move towards innovation management. Prof Shahi showed us a code by Tom Peter and it inspires us to think of ideas and doing "something else" which i feel is differentiating between those existing products and to improvise on them to get something new. Hence, we move on to this picture below that depicts what companies can do to fully utilize the opportunity given to them.

The ideal place would be valley to summit or cloud to summit as summit accommodates the market with new products as having high barrier to entry, lesser competitors is sound just like a monopoly states.
          Mainly, when talking bout innovation and technology the first thought that will come in mind is research and development. This is where many companies, corporations and government will adopt when they need to achieve new methods. Apple for example has always been coming up items ahead of time and amaze the people. They are constantly doing R and R to achieve better and new products unlike Microsoft that is remaining at status quo. Apple is always improving and introducing the market with the idea of best desktop, best tablet, best Mp3 all these happen in just 3 years and an article in New York Times shows that Apple could have already overtake Microsoft http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27apple.html. Hence, come the question if innovation should be technologically driven or market driven? To me, i feel that Brainstore where they will help companies to think of a new way to come out with new products or even new approach to some issue.

CLASS RATING

I would give this week a 7/10 as definitely i enjoy the class every week where i get to be exposed to different viewpoints and insight of the interesting topics being discussed. I will look forward to the next week class on driver of world change , change management and change leadership.