WTFWIT: Robotic Bees?!?

A message to those who mock the MBA: It is incredibly valuable.  Especially if you pursue the Entrepreneurship angle.  Moreso if you come from a technical background.  Below is an example of why. But first, a clarification: WTFWIT means WTF Was I Thinking.

January 2008, in an email to myself, I wrote:

I once heard that there is a dwindling of honey bees in natural environments around the world, which is causing a pollination issue.  My suggestion would be a distributed network of hierarchical robots, the size of bees, that act in accordance to the natural structure of the bee hierarchy.  They would be individually programmed with a very, very simple task (eg, find brightly colored things, land on them, do stuff, then try to head home).  By virtue of the environment in which they exist, they would be subject to a wide range of outside forces that would serve as the anarchy and randomness that we wouldn’t have to program.  In other words, instead of trying to program the way the world works, take one of the simplest cases of a natural structure and mimic it.. and let the world do it’s thing.Things to consider:  how do these drones communicate in the hierarchy?  Does the hive involve the continued construction of the bees in the same way the queen would have babies?  What happens when birds eat the bees?  Or the bees run out of battery power / solar power (i.e. die)... how do we make them biodegradable or edible?This project could culminate in an AKRRA institution – the Aga Khan Robotic Research Agency (or something) – objective / mandate: to develop *sustainable, environmentally-friendly, culturally-delicate* robots that are meant to foster and/or maintain the natural order of things or to help counterbalance the effects of the non-sustainable technology industry.

Well, I certainly overcomplicated the solution.  Assuming I even found a real problem.  Based what now appears to have been an anecdote.  Without evidence.
And the solution itself requires such advances into the field of robotics that PHD students would probably jump at (or cringe from, if they had any business acumen) the research.
Then I jumped so far into the future that c from e=mc2 took notice.  I assumed, nay, asserted (!) that an entire agency could be created from my brainchild.  In an organization that is focused on developing countries and therefore has probably blacklisted words like "robotics".

Today, thanks to knowledge gained from my MBA, a patient wife-slash-sugarmama, and a lot of sage advice, I am pursuing a much simpler solution based on existing technologies that satisfies a known customer need and solves a ratified business problem.

And I still probably won't make any money.

An Entrepreneur On Campus??

For my MBA, I am double-majoring in Marketing and Entrepreneurship.  I am now in my final four courses, one of which is Introduction to Entrepreneurship (ironic that my last ENTI course is, theoretically, the first one... but then, what's the point in being an Entrepreneur if you aren't going to do things differently?)
As part of the course, we write PLJs - Personal Learning Journals.
This is a PLJ about formalized entrepreneurship training on campus.  Start by reading this article.

Initial thoughts:  Yes, entrepreneurship deserves recognition at an institutional level.  Yes, it deserves research and teaching in a structured format to explain away some of the mystery behind what entrepreneurship is, why it exists, why > 90% of the businesses that exist are small (a stat from memory, check in with stats can for current figures), and what the motivations are for individuals to throw caution to the wind.  And yes, it definitely needs to have some non-traditional teaching methods infused to give it a non-academic feeling to those who are actually interested in being entrepreneurs, rather than observing / understanding others who are.

Reading the last paragraph, I disagree wholeheartedly.  Monetary sales and entrepreneurship are distinctly separate.  I agree that an entrepreneur is constantly selling his/her idea... but not always for money.  Sure, money is incentive for the endgame, but enroute, the entrepreneur must build teams... must convince people to buy into the idea... must garner partnerships... and ultimately, must do something about the idea to bring it to reality.  Does the entrepreneur need to sell the product itself?  Maybe, if that is a strong suite for the individual, or if no one believes in the idea.  But if it isn't in his/her nature to sell for moula, why not recruit someone who can?  After all, an entrepreneur, above all else, must be honest about his/her limitations.
In fact, "honest" is a factor I rarely hear cited when describing entrepreneurs, but is absolutely necessary as a building block.  Not just honest, but straightforward as well.  It's probably why we rarely hear of entrepreneurs moving into honesty-sparse fields such as law.

Mind you, there's little to prevent entrepreneurs from marrying lawyers...