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.