When I finished my undergraduate studies, I met a lot of Professors that used to guide me, some asked me what are my plans after and I say 'most probably masters for big data analytics and management'. Some supported the plan and some criticize, some encourage me to become a teacher, and I want to emphasize only the latter.
I have a fairly good track record in my studies as an undergraduate, I created some startups as the most jarring (incongruous in a striking or shocking way) theme while I was at my studies were 'Innovation and Practicality of Knowledge'.
I didn't find most of the knowledge that I gained in class to have a high sense of practicality and it quite annoyed me. To be more specific, bioengineering has a lot of 'bottleneck' when it comes to practicality, in order to prove myself that I am worthy of 'tools', I need to undergo a long process of graded-exams, well basically quantitative metrics based on tests and quizzes, it's quite hard too to solve them but it didn't satisfy me.
I also need to say that I'm quite fortunate to meet people who I can deem 'hungry for innovation'. There's this government funded program where it practically, incentivizes undergraduates to try to make something that is beneficial for the public. The incentive is well first, your creation can be funded by the government so you don't need to worry if you don't have money to invest in your own project, and also yeah your project can actually help people. The government will filter and grade annually which project's proposal is worthy to fund and I submitted four proposals and none of them went through. I was quite sad but I wasn't debilitated.
I kept the proposal and just submitted to another program or competition. The first project that kind of 'shone' is DRONI, it's a pretty standard name for a drone, I didn't really care about the naming, but the technology was quite spectacular, at least it's what Indonesia needed.
The process of the making of the proposal was quite lengthy as I need to prove that my proposal was what the people really needed, in which in that case I was trying to help farmers so I went to farms well far hundreds of kilometres from my house and talked to them.
They were very supportive with the whole ordeal, well accounting that I'm a complete stranger, but they seem to have been well acclimitized with students trying to help them as other students have helped them in the past. I still remember (despite this was well 3-4 years ago), they say that they were really grateful at one of the most recent installation that optimized the water stream towards the village by some student, it was a magnificent help, they said. They helped install better irrigation system and also general water streams for primary use for the village. They talk as if they don't fully understand why such a stranger would want to help them, but they did. Well obviously, outside of them getting help, the helper actually get incentivized, one way is that when the food supply sustained by the farmers are more streamlined, the economy of the district that relied on their supply are more stabilized, the district will have better welfare and it starts by helping the food suppliers.
The farmers that I talked with were born and raised farmers, they are a farmer since their birth and was raised by an environment full of farmers. They have a well organized strategy to which farmer grow which plant so they don't cannabilize themselves over which one bears the highest profit basaed on the season of the specific plants demand. This was controlled by the chief farmer in which I was talking with.
I am not a pure-hearted saint. I didn't grow my motivation initially just for the sake of helping them, rather I was initially motivated for my own sake, for my own interest that I wanted to pursue things outside my studies and I see this government incentive program to be something that I am hopefully smart enough as it will grow my portfolio as someone who is smart. I was motivated by my own interest to things that I believe has value for myself. Only after I become aware that other people shared a sense of value towards what I believe in, I can indulge but I can never say my main primary motivation was to help them because I love them, that could and would be a lie.
My primary motivation of the quest was driven because I know in order to escape from my bioengineering degree, I must be versatile and flexible with the talent that I can possible sculpt and hone to my name. That is 'Incentive Induced Motivation'.
Ok for short, now it has become sort of necesarry to explain my plans for them.
So farmer sometimes face difficulty in the success of their crops, in which this has direct affect to the stabilization of their income. This is bad, for them, and also for the people who are reliant to their produce.
Plant undergoes photosynthesis to produce energy, and those energy are captured or rather stored in their produce (fruits and vegetables), then the farmer harvest them. The problem is that sometimes farmer face uneven quality of their produce, but how come? All seeds were plant on the same day and all plants were given adequate water and nutrition they need distributed periodically. How do we stop this problem for becoming again in the future?
The problem arises in many levels of complexity, from actually uneven distribution of fertilizers to unknowing infestation that most often are not seen by the eye.
If we come back to the first principle, then it implies if we can measure the rate of photosynthesis of each plant, we can infer the quality of the produce by inherently sniping how much energy were harvested by the plant (rate of photosynthesis).
As we know, plant undergo photosynthesis to expand energy and one of the important part of it was to capture sunlight, they absorb and bounce certain amount and certain frequencies of light and this can be quantitatively measured. One of the ways is to shoot them with a near infrared light.
This is BARELY new technology, my part is to bring the technology to those who need it. As farmer has hundreds and even thousand of hectares of land, the quest to monitor plant health and by knowing an focus to do 'more distributed' fertilizer and water to them, become much more important, and even more crucial, to prevent a pathogenic outbreak from infesting their whole crop as it has happened in the past.
I propose a way for farmers to efficiently monitor their plants rate of photosynthesis and thus can improve their economy and it will last a ripple effect to those district that are reliant to their produce.
Unfortunately, this type of innovation requires multiple cylical season of harvest to actually measure its effectiveness, but the problem is literally fucking there. I know many countries that have adapted to this solution and this must work as well, but my project didn't get funded by the government and I never get to hear why.
I applied the same proposal to a competition and it won the best product award though. It's such a shame that the whole COVID fiasco came in 2021 and I didn't get to continue the whole project as even my encounter to the farmers were strictly prohibited due to the rising case of COVID.
The main lesson why I wanted to write this article was to tell a story, why incentive-induced motivation for innovation is crucial.
The modern world is undeniably busy and people can barely have enough time to even just excel to their studies. I was just an outlier that didn't care enough for my studies and I wanted to pursue something more real and practical, I undeniably would say, to see the look of their face when I presented the technology that I was hoping to build were quite shockingly motivating for me and it creates a positive feedback loop to my project. But be fucking real, it requires money, time, and dedication, where do you think I can get the near infrared light to shine through the whole fucking farm, or even the lithium batteries to power the drone, or even the quadcopter frame and propellers, those materials require money, and people can easily shrug the 'fiery flames of eyes towards innovation' as something 'futile' and 'what a waste of time and money'.
As I watch yesterdays presidential election debate and how much they say or they want to look like they care about their people, be fucking real, believe in the people who are capable of innovation and don't just rely innovators will just continuously innovate things because they want to, it requires time, money, and effort. Government grants are great, let's keep them going, I really encourage for those who are in charge of power with the people's tax to pour more incentived-induced projects so brave people can show forth and step up to realize that they can play a role in the modern and economically-driven world that are pushed by supply and demands that they too can play a part and escalate the country's economic fiasco.
We are humans, we pride ourselves around cognition, we should not just expect money to be handed to us, rather recognize our playing field that somehow, incentivized cognition in order for the creation of better welfare not only for them as the creator but lasting a ripple effect of value towards those who are helped by their innovation.
I believe that there's no 'special recipe' for creativity towards innovation, but rather it's a complex problem as complex as the human mind. By looking inside ourselves and understanding what makes us ourselves, we can define and hijack our drive towards motivation and be fucking real in the world we live in, if it requires money so be fucking it, no lithium batteries will fall for the sky, as no rice will not fall from the fucking sky as well.
We have walked far from the hunter gatherer society when you may have rice just from a walkable distance and meat maybe once every hunting days, but through industrialization and globalization and the enablement of the money-sustained society, and even how money is what keeps people afloat, incentive-induced innovation is no joke.
People don't just do good because it's good, it's because it's a complex process of doing it out of its own self interest that happens to align with the populace sense of value. Then, it has become 'shared value' work.