September 27, 2014 Comments Off on Biotechnology lessons for robotics: Adapting new business models to accelerate innovation Posted in: General Biotechnology Abstract – The robotics industry is achieving a level of commercial maturity as evidenced by innovative products brought to market, and by the increasing pace of emerging robotics companies being acquired by larger players in a diversity of industries. However, there are challenges with accelerating the rate and scale of innovation in this industry. Our hypothesis is that while there are remaining technological challenges, the largest challenge is for the industry to adapt by exploitation of business models that focus more intently on validating product/market fit, building teams to span seamlessly from laboratory to market, and on developing creative structure and vehicles to provide the needed resources to commercialize. To this end, we suggest that the robotics field could adapt approaches from the emerging “business model playbook” that are now being used in the field of biotechnology. These industries do compare somewhat in that they are each technologically driven, have long, high- risk development cycles, and have the need for high levels of capital, compared to the software industry. In this paper we review what has been accomplished in biotechnology, and also suggest how these lessons could be implemented in the field of robotics.
September 27, 2014 Comments Off on Genetic engineering technologies for Ethiopian agriculture: Prospects and challenges Posted in: General Biotechnology Genetic engineering (GE) technologies can contribute to improve crop productivity and quality in Ethiopia. Adoption of commercialized insect resistance and herbicide tolerance technologies can help to protect major crops such as cotton, maize, sorghum and small cereals from their main insect pests or prevent heavy weed-inflicted loss. Moreover, key production constraints such as bacterial wilt of enset, late blight of potato, drought stress on crops like maize and wheat, lodging resistance on tef as well as low nutritive quality of native crops like enset and grasspea can be addressed by strengthening domestic GE research capacity and international collaboration. Cognizant of this potential, the Ethiopian government has made significant investment in modern biotechnology capacity building in the last decade. There has also been specific interest by cotton sector to boost its productivity by adopting insect resistance (Bt) technologies. However, the GE regulatory system based on the existing biosafety law is so stringent that it is not possible for the country to access useful technologies from abroad as well as initiate domestic GE research. Consequently, no GE experiment is approved so far, leaving the country at risk of missing out on the global GE revolution. To catch up and harness the benefits of GE technologies, the country needs to create conducive regulatory environment, strengthen domestic GE capacity and devise a farsighted strategy.
