Hello!
I attended Jodie Wu's talk, and it was absolutely amazing. As she said, 10% of entrepreneurs make it work, and hers is working.
When she started out talking, my first thought was : I want to be an entrepreneur! Look at the difference she's making, with her idea under her instruction brought to fruition. She's making it happen.
Then she started talking about all of the challenges-- ie the details of how she got this company to work :). The engineering part isn't even half of the challenge... she had to go into the business world to get sponsors, to learn about when you can sell things, to learn about how to sell things, to learn how to earn trust from people... She has to work in so many different worlds that she (and I) aren't trained in. She has to work with people in the US, who are funding this, and people in developing countries, who are the consumers, and run this operation almost completely on her own with no indication of whether she'd succeed or not. You always hear about the amazing stories of the people who succeed, of which she is one, and yet you don't hear about all of the people who failed. And all of this work went into making a product that it really quite simple from the outside-- an existing technology, a corn scraper, hooked up to a bike. Now, of course, she's going into solar lamps, but SO MUCH WORK to get a corn scraper on a bike to people! It's amazing.
So her talk was really inspiration, but also shows the difference between straight engineering, which can be done in a university (and as she said, often ends in a university), and actually making a difference to people. It seems so sad that the people who are trained to engineer things aren't the people who need the things who are engineered, because I bet it would work much better if the consumers were also the producers. But you make do with what you have... or give education to those consumers! Education's the key to everything :).
So in summary, I'm so impressed by all Jodie Wu has managed to accomplish, and that I don't think I could accomplish, and I've definitely received a new perspective on the difference between doing something in a university setting and doing something that is actually useful, and gets to, the consumer.
Monica
I'm glad you found the talk enlightening. I believe you could strive to do similar work if it was of interest.
ReplyDeleteThere is some effort to link the engineering capability to the end user need, but it's also true that the world would be problematic if everyone were an engineer (or any other discipline), so the need for engineers to produce for people who are different is a given, though not necessarily at the current scale/mismatch. I'm glad you were able to see the reality of the challenges within the success story, as the latter is often all that we see.