Session 7

This week we talked more about Bio-Business. We were talked mainly about agriculture and issues such as world hunger, food security and biotechnology. The prof also reiterated his point about the classification of opportunities. He talked about the summit, valley and cloud opportunities. It came to mind that we are looking at the summit of one of the greatest opportunities in agribiology and agriculture. In the next 20-25 years we will have to increase our food production substantially to care of burgeoning population needs. However we have the capability now to feed 10 billion people but to due to poor change management we haven't been able to take advantage of it.

In keeping with this point, the paper that really caught my eye was Ending World Hunger by Norman Borlaug. The point he made ties up with that of disruptive innovation in week 6. People don't accept change because it would require them spending money, time and energy in understanding the implications and requirements of the new technology. And that brings us to where we always been at, the fact that change management and change leadership are almost as integral as the development of the technology that causes that change. In the future we must look to people to push disruptive innovation until it becomes the market norm.

Also there was this debate about vegetarian vs non vegetarian food. And also the prof also told us about food that is made from faeces. He talked about how they can make vegetarian food taste and look like non veg and how it can be genetically engineered to give the same nutrients present in non veg food such as proteins etc. Again I think the acceptance of food such as this depends on the marketing and the development of the product, which takes us back to the idea of change management.

Food security was also of the major points that was discussed in the class. I think that the definition of food security needs to be amended. We need to think about food security in terms of self sufficiency. The world is becoming an increasingly urban place and we need to think about food in terms of being self sufficient, even in urban areas. And the technologies that we talked about in class such as microbe manufacturing etc.

The key take aways in this class would be the ideas about world hunger and the green revolution as given by norman borlaug, the wonderful presentations the ideas on food security. I did not know that the world food situation was so volatile and will try to contribute at a personal level as much as possible.

I rate the session a 8/10.