week 6-Biobusiness Revolution

Words that appeared in my mind where bio business is concerned are R and D, expensive, only in the developed world, ever-changing and profit driven. Sow at exactly is bio business? According to prof, it is the commercial activity based on the understanding of life sciences and life science processes, such as bio medical and agri-veterinary. Unfortunately, our class discussions and presentations circles around medical healthcare which I feel would be easy to relate to since it is closer to us.

As we all know, the bio business revolution will transform our lives and our economies and may well be our best hope for achieving sustainable development. Think about how our healthcare, food and energy resources have changed. Surgery used to be open but now surgery is done without slicing method. Food is now standardising in size and shape as genetic modification method was used.

Today’s lesson was also bombarded with readings but the one that I particularly like is reading 4, entitled “Will disruptive innovations cure health care” by Clayton M.Christensen, Richard Bohmer, and John Kenagy. Before I read it, I took the word disruptive at face value and wonder how disruptive cure healthcare since they are from 2 different dimensions. Then when I read it, it gave me a whole new perspective. It talked about new innovations threatening old business models and how these new innovations that may ultimately raise the quality of health care for everyone was rejected not due to its innovation but due to the how it could disrupt other businesses. After all, the article points out those disruptive technologies have caused many of history’s best companies to plunge into crisis and ultimately fail. An example would be photocopy machine or cameras that took away the once highly professional jobs to amateur. Oh and I like the way the article use the phrase “return to days of corporate mainframe center”. So bio business is much like any other business where competition is at its peak and profit outweighs the philanthropic idea of helping people.

Something needs to be done and reading 5 clearly shows the solution to it. It uses an interesting comparison of economists versus biomedical. Many biomedical inventions failed because the pace of sustaining innovation nearly always outstrips the ability of customers to absorb it. People must first see the long term benefit of it for it to succeed. Thus, these companies will not survive without any help from the government body. It requires a right mix of incentives to safeguard the maximum benefit of safe and effective innovations and practice. We need should not embrace innovations that seek to lower the cost of medication and ensure that everyone can seek medication help should there be a need for it.

Therefore, both articles gave me great insights into the bio medical industry. It is like gaining knowledge from the backdoor, knowing something that the masses could not have known.

The question on medical tourism where people will shift to the less developed countries to seek for medical health if the bio medical field upgrades itself is not much of a debate. I think even if the medical field is cheap; people from developed countries would want a safe medication diagnosis and treatment. They definitely would not risk their lives so this explains why many foreigners particularly people from Indonesia are tapping on medical tourism in Singapore. I think it is more of trust in the medical field than cost. Of course, that applies to those who are not financial declined or burden.

The key takeaway that I had from this class was the bulb to imagine how our future bio business will be like. Whether it would be throat cutting or everyone would be on the same goal of trying to help elevate diseases and illness both from the poor and rich.

I rate this session 7 out of 10 because I could only get the perspective of bio business from the medical point of view.

Week 5

Overview

Information communication technology is a highly debatable concept that encompasses all areas of our life, from economic to politic and social. It is interesting to see the transition in our lives and back then where computers and communication tools were not invented, where people communicate via snail mail and life was slow. Think back to the times when Singapore was hit by the Sars pandemic. Life would have stopped if there were no forms of ICT but since we do have it, everything continues, even for assignments and teachings.

Today’s lesson was filled with videos, from cloud computing to the Natal project( Milo guy). Cloud computing was a concept that I was unaware of which fascinates me. I never really thought about how facebook functions and how it is so convenient to use. It just never occurs to me that I did not need to install any applications to use facebook which is cool stuff. As for the milo guy, I was just awed at how technology could do what I thought was impossible. I mean the sensoring and replies from Milo was fascinating enough but I was blown away when the girl drew the diagram and pass it on to Milo and he receives it and even comment on it. Think about it, this may just be the new way of us uploading assignments!! No more uploading it on smuvista!! =D

Interesting observation

The presentations were all good as I get to learn a lot from them, be it in the technical aspects such as user interface which seeks to recognise face and gesture. It reminded me of the video that I saw on Shahi’s facebook page. The one where the table itself was a touch screen and it auto connects to the microwave. So you click on what you want via the drop down list and the item will be cooked. It is interesting to imagine myself surrounded by such technology but it also scares me as I feel overwhelmed by the technologies. The burning question in my head is that will technology eventually make the average human beings dumb and lazy? I mean we no longer need to think as the technologies do the thinking which is seen as convenience for us. Will we end up like the fat human beings with short hands in the Wall-E movie?

Another issue of interest was the thought of using wireless internet to link us to the developing countries as illustrated by Xiong Wei. This links me to reading 2 where it talks about how technology must match with needs in order for it to be used massively and create change. It focused on the change from human-to-human communications to machine-to-machine communications and that linking everyone up will create change. Yes, I agree that by linking up with the developing countries, there is a chance to closing the digital divide but it requires heavy fundings and there may be issues like how the powerful people will maintain power and so refuse to empower the powerless. So until these powerful nations are able to be more benevolent and think of helping the developing countries without other motives, it is difficult to achieve the vision of interconnectedness between all nations.

Lastly, would be the issue of ICT and interpersonal communication which was pretty interesting to think about too. The question on whether the absence of ICT would reduce the number of couples is something that I would agree on. Someone said that 1 in 8 of the married couples met online and that is a huge number. So I can say that ICT is actually continuing the human race/population. Without it, Singapore’s birth rate would have been lesser than 2.1 and Lee Kuan Yew would have relaxed the citizenship regulations. After all, I believe that ICT is the tool that holds distance relationships and pulling people from the west and east together.

Key Takeaways

· ICT, one that is beyond our imagination, will be the next big thing especially in the gaming arena.

· There is no way to escape from ICT as we unknowingly embrace it and move on with the flow, just like how we first embrace handphone and later on iphone etc at a faster rate. Thus, I believe that humans will embrace technologies once they are exposed to it and the rate will double each time.

Issues for further discussion

I guess we could go about more on how we could link developing world with the developed world via the use of ICT. I mean the idea of using technology via speech recognition would decrease the need for educating the less educated ones. The ease in using such technology will be way more sustainable.

Rating

10/10. I learnt lot from this lesson especially after listening to the presentations.

week 4

Overview
Today’s lesson circled around “drivers of change” and “change management and changed leadership”. We talked about what exactly drive change and I realised that it is endless. However, the presentations for the day seems like concern was placed upon competition being the main driver of change. How competition forces one to change to keep up with the times. Then there are those that were concern with humanity change such as the global strategic partnerships between MNEs and NGOs while others were concern about the change of our individual life, a life where there is no privacy.

As for changed leadership and change management, I guess the most important point to know is that people are habitual creatures who do not like to change, especially under harsh orders. Thus, like what prof had mentioned, the only way is to give them ownership of what is going on and make the changes their own decision instead of yours. In my presentation, I mentioned Carlos Ghosn and I believe his method of changed leadership and change management worked really well. He is able to influence people of different background, change the culture and make things work within the given time frame.

Interesting observations
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” By George Bernard Shaw. I love this quote. It is just peculiar yet logical. The unreasonable one would have been deemed as stubborn but yet these are the people who would change the world. For instance, Steve job could have adapted to the current phone but he decided that he wants the phone to adapt to him and from there, developed iphone.

I believe in this competitive and fast paced society, change is ongoing. Yes, things get obsolete very quickly for instance this laptop that I bought last year is now considered old. Somehow we can relate this to Shahi’s landscape model for technology. When one innovation is at its summit, it will quickly fall to the valley especially when other technologies enabled people to copy the idea. In china, it is said that they are able to copy and reproduce the same product in less than 2 days which is amazing. One thing that strikes me is that if technology innovation is spurred by human’s lack of satisfaction in what they have or is it by profits. Who made us technology hungry in the first place? Would the world be a better place if we were not? Less rubbish will accumulate and reduce the impact of destroying our ozone layer and so on. I’m still sticking to my idea that humans should greatly reduce their consumption and not produce more to tackle the outcome of the consumption.

Key Takeaways
1. Crisis is the key to change since it forces people to of any circumstances to change for the better.
2. The theory of freeze, unfreeze and refreeze. It is a cycle, we stay stagnant, we unfreeze the stagnation by engaging in changed leadership and changed management and then we refreeze when things improve.

Personal rating
7/10 as I was too nervous for my presentation that I did not absorb as much as I want to. =/