Learning na naman :)

        

    It is Tuesday again, June 24, 2014. I need to goto school early because I do not want to be late again for the third time. Therefore, I went to school as early as I could to be there at exactly or before 8 am. Going to school early is quite hard for me because of the heavy traffic on my route to school, so if wanted to be on time early in the morning, I have to wake up earlier than the usual. Luckily, I was not late on that day but many of my classmates are already in the classroom even though it was still 15 minutes before eight. I knew that the most of them are already here at 7 am but they were the ones who was never late before. Those are dedicated students hehe. I went to my favorite seat, which is at the back. I like it there because I could close my eyes for few minutes when I feel sleepy without being noticed. Hey, I would like to clear it; it is not my intention to sleep in there.

After few minutes, our facilitator went inside of our classroom and started our class with a prayer as usual. When the prayer ends, the exciting part comes; the entrance of the late comers. I guessed it right; there still late comers up to that day, more than five at least. This somehow energizes my morning because it is fun to watch my classmates perform in front of us. After all the performances of the late comers, I facilitator said something. He said that his policy was being abused because almost same people are getting late on the class. I have even thought of it before. I have planned to be late just for a couple of minutes because I have a hard time waking up in the morning. The punishment was just to sing or dance in front of the class and it is not a big deal for me. I am confident enough to do that. However, when our facilitator noticed that I was late twice, he warned me so I tried my best to be on time. So let us get back to the story. Our facilitator said that his students before also abused the punishment so he came up of a new policy. The new rule for the late comers is this; they have to feed the stomach of his or her classmates when he or she comes late. I do not know if my facilitator was serious of what he said. When you think of it, there are most likely 40 plus students in the techno class, each one of us make cost at least 5 pesos to be fed. In other words, a late comer will spend at least 100 pesos when he or she comes late. Though we are still not sure that our facilitator was not joking at that time, I know that the point of our facilitator is just simple, do not come to his class late. However, free food is still a good idea to me hehe.

            After the “talent portion” and our facilitator’s announcement of the new policy, we officially started the Technopreneurship 1 class. First, our facilitator had a little review on our topic last meeting, he also talked about the importance of a technopreneur and what is the progress of our nation on promoting technopreneurship. He also talked about the incubation hubs built in our city. To be honest, I do not have an idea what is an incubation hub is all about so I tried to research it in the internet. Business Incubator has been a major driver in the economic development of several countries such as in the United States of America. Majority of the most successful companies in the world such as Apple, Intel, and Google came from a business incubation facility. These companies have started from a simple university project where it was grown into a billion-dollar company employing thousands of workers all over the globe. The objective of a business incubation facility is to provide a low-cost / low-risk venue for start-up companies as they try to develop their businesses to full-grown and financially independent entities. It provides its locators the required business infrastructure to appropriately allocate their limited funds to more crucial requirements of developing their products or services. The incubation process generally assist start-up companies in administrative functions such finance, marketing, and operations such that they could focus their attention to research and development. It also provides orientation on legal matters such as intellectual property rights and legal contracts. The process also helps the companies in developing its supply chain network to exhaust possible linkages with other businesses. These business networks can contribute to the growth of start-up businesses through partnerships and collaborations. In the Philippines, business incubation is considered by the government as a means to address poverty and prevent brain drain amongst high-valued professionals such local scientists, engineers, and technology developers. Business incubation promotes the initiative of the government to encourage entrepreneurship amongst young Filipinos to help create high-valued jobs and to raise the standard of living in the country. In the past, establishing business incubation facilities had been a joint-initiative of the government, academe, and private business entities to nurture innovative ideas into commercially viable products or services, which could enhance the lives of Filipinos. However, these initiatives have not been successfully implemented within the country. Business incubators typically act as mentors or consultants who advise and guide incubatees in growing their businesses. Despite this, the fall out rate of incubatees has been a major challenge in these initiatives blaming on financial support and attribute factors of the product or services offered. Business incubation in the Philippines has focused on the growth of start-up businesses as individual entities. These normally involve household businesses, which have not established their business models. In previous attempts of the government to collaborate with academe in putting up an incubation facility, start-ups were housed in a government-owned facility to nurture their businesses. They were given assistance in terms of providing the location for their offices as well as for research and development. However, oftentimes, incubatees drop-out of the incubation process or they fail to continue and support their initial success as soon as they have graduated from incubation. Business incubation administrators attribute these failures to the lack of development in terms of the start-up’s business model. This normally results to failure prior to graduation from the incubation process. Incubatees realize that the business model does not work and that customers do not welcome their innovative products or services. Business incubation also fails because of the type of support given by incubators to their incubatees. Incubatees tend to be dependent to incubators throughout growing their businesses. Incubators shelter their incubatees in terms of their immediate needs. Thus, incubatees fail to sustain their businesses as soon as they join other bigger companies in a different location. On the other hand, maintaining the business incubation facility has also been a challenge because it does not generate sufficient income to support its operations.

Source: http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/research%5Ccenters%5Caki%5C_pdf%5C_publications%5CHui_Fernandez_Sio.pdf

After knowing this, I am suddenly interested on what it is like to be in an incubation hub. I hope that someday if given a chance, I would like to enter in an incubation hub.

            After that, our facilitator asked if we have watched the movies 3 Idiots and Pirates of Silicon Valley. Actually, I have the copy of those two movies but I still have not watched it because I was busy on other stuff for school. Maybe I will watch those movies this weekend because I do not have something to work on that day.

            Few moments later, our facilitator told us to get a whole sheet of bond paper. “Here we go again,” I said to myself because I have remembered the thing happened last meeting. We need to have a whole sheet of bond paper without sharing or borrowing from our classmates. As a student that only had a pen and a lunchbox inside a backpack, I need to sneak or find a way to get that paper. First, I asked my seatmates if they had any extra paper but I think only three students out of the entire class has brought bond papers. Well this is expected because bond papers are rarely used in classes. Majority of my classmates including me o not know what to do. Some of them are going outside to buy bond paper I think. I have also planned to go outside but suddenly one of my classmates said that they have a stock of bond papers. They asked if they could get it from where they kept it so that they could sell those papers to us. Our facilitator agreed so we waited for few moments for them to get back. I have thought that our facilitator

will harshly increase the prize. Because of that, I prepared one hundred pesos if ever my assumption was true. I worried a little because the one who was selling the bond paper is not my close friend, I might have a hard time on getting my money back unlike before. Our classmate came back with a thick rim of bond paper. Unlike what I have thought, a sheet of bond paper only costs one peso. After I have bought the bond paper, I came back to my seat and waited for our facilitator to give some instructions. Our facilitator divided us into three groups and then he showed us three pictures, one is an image of a man holding is son. The picture is unclear to me but I think that man is a beggar. The second picture is an image of two ugly girls. In addition, the third image is a group of people rallying. I belong on the first group just so you know.

            What are we going to do is the first group will write something about the first picture and discuss about it. The first picture was a father that does not have a job. We have to write the things that we are going to do if ever we were the father. The second group will discuss about the second picture. It is about the people that do not have a job because they do not have a pleasing personality. Lastly, the third group will be writing something about people that are not satisfied with their salary. All of our explanations must be in a perspective of a technopreneur.

            I was interested on this activity because those situations are common problems here in the Philippines. Now, I would like to share my insights about that situation and say something about those situations as a technopreneur. I would like to start on the first situation. If I am a father and I do not have a job, it will be depressing for me since fathers are expected to be the breadwinner of the family. Not having a job is the single biggest predictor of depression in fathers. Other factors found to contribute to depression in fathers include poverty, paternal physical health problems, having a child with special health care needs and maternal depressive problems. Depression in fathers can cause a variety of mental and behavioral issues in children. A challenge in treating depression is often trying to find the source of that hopelessness. In men, the idea of not being able to support their families financially can be a huge source of this feeling. It is not only depressing but it could also affect our children. Unemployment, family breakdown, low educational achievement and low income are all linked to one another, and they are all important factors in poverty and social mobility. Higher unemployment might mean more family breakdown. Better education might mean lower unemployment when children grow up, and so on. All bad things tend to go together. They all link generations too. Unemployment, low education and family breakdown all transfer from one generation to the next. Obviously, these are all important problems. However, where is the best place to start picking away at this horrible knot of issues? How big a dent might different sorts of policies make in this problems? Unfortunately, evidence on how problems in one generation lead to problems in another is a bit sketchy. Therefore, it is difficult for politicians to know what to do and so they often have to make decisions based on their hunches instead. Before I state my opinion on how to solve this problem, I would like to talk about my insights about the second image. Our facilitator said that it is about the people who do not have jobs because they do not have a pleasing personality. Even though there are now a policy that companies should not make that as a requirement, most of the companies still prefer the people who have pleasing personality. For me I understand why they prefer people with pleasing personality because they look presentable especially on the jobs that need to face the clients. However, it is still disturbing that some people do not get jobs even they have skills because they are not beautiful or handsome enough. Our facilitator even joked about it saying that most of our graduates are freelancers because most of them are ugly hehe. But for me, a pleasing personality is achieved by cultivating desirable qualities while avoiding unbecoming habits. A positive attitude, flexibility in dealing with different people or situations and sincerity in relationships will endear others to you. A pleasing personality can be of great benefit in one's personal life and career and can be achieved by anyone as long as they have the willpower. These cases are good example of unemployment here in the Philippines. I have stated the effects of unemployment on one of my few reflection paper works. I have stated that some of us may have not known this but unemployment is not the effect of economic crisis, but one of the main reasons of it. Actually, this problem will continue to create bigger problems, just like disease that keeps on spreading and slowly destroys our system and if not cured at an early stage it may cause too much greater problems. Unemployment makes the government suffer. In many countries just like hear in the Philippines have to pay for the benefits of the unemployed. The greater the unemployed or the longer they are without work the more the government has to spend money. Therefore, the nation has only not to deal with the loss of income and decreased production but also with additional cost. If a person is unemployed, he or she of course has a very low income, this simply means that that person will not spend money but instead he or she will save it, which has a highly negative effect in the economy because the cycle of money is slow. Unemployment will not only affect those who have no jobs but also those who have. Unemployment also brings up discontent and frustration amongst the tax paying citizens. In order to meet the demands of the unemployment fund the government many a times may have to increase the taxes thus giving way to restlessness amongst the tax paying citizens. The increase of tax will then result to decrease the spending of those who are employed. Yes just like the unemployed, they would save their money and another problem has now occurred. Many of us Filipinos ignore simple sickness and will only go to a doctor if the illness is severe. This is because of we are thinking of the expense rather than our health. I think it will not be a problem if all of us are capable of spending money for treatments, but we can’t because we have to save money. This is another effect of unemployment. Another effect of this problem is when the economy is down, we have the one to blame, the government. We blame the government in fact it is the one who is getting pressured when the economy is down even though sometimes they are the great contributor of economic problems. But let us disregard that; let us just imagine that the government is not corrupt (LOL). When the people are blaming the government, there will be a lot of protest especially here in democratic countries. This will cause political instability. And without a stable government, it will be harder for us to regain the stability of the economy. This will most probably occur recession. We have also to consider the increase of crime rate. People with no jobs will be desperate and commit crimes to be able to survive in this concrete jungle. When the crime rate is high, it will be more prioritized by the government. This problem will solve them first because it will drastically increase the problems. Another problem of high unemployment is the employment gap. To further complicate the situation the longer the individual is out of job the more difficult it becomes to find one. Employers find employment gasps as a negative aspect. No one wants to hire a person who has been out of work for some time even when there is no fault of the individual per say. When many of us do not have very low income, the standard of living of the people is also low. This simply means that when the people in a certain place have a low standard of living, the usage of high technology in everyday life is very insignificant. Thus, our dream of living with a technological environment like Singapore and Japan will be almost impossible. In addition, the most common effect of unemployment is the loss of brains and work force of a certain nation. We are actually experiencing it as of now even though the unemployment rate here in Davao city is not quite high. When most of people want to go out of the country because of bigger income then it will be hard for us to attain a high economic rate. Just like I said before, some of foreign companies absorb the good performing students here in our city and make them work in their country. If the other countries are keeping on absorbing our best graduates, we do not have brilliant minds that will help to propel our economy. Those brilliant minds will be recognized all around the world but they do not work for their country, they just work for themselves. All I think that I can do to solve this problem is to have a business; this is also applied on the rallyists that are not satisfied with their salary.

            Our facilitator also discussed about the SEED model. What is it? This course model is very important to us especially those people who taking technopreneurship subject. Based on the discussion, S stands for self mastery, E stands for Environment Mastery, E stands for Enterprise Mastery and lastly D stands for development of business plan. I learned from our discussion that the technopreneurship subject has come up with this model. So in order to understand this course model, our facilitator elaborates to us of what is SEED curriculum. According to the DCCCII SEED Technopreneurship Course Roadmap, The KRA (Key Result Area) Objectives of self mastery are orientation and direction setting, leveled off expectations, learned the basics of technopreneurship, unleashed passion, self knowledge and lastly, the inner entrepreneur unleashed. the core concept of self mastery is to have an alignment and passion in the field of technopreneurship. The modules of self mastery are introduction or rationale, basics of technopreneurship, technopreneurship ecosystem, self-assessment and personal vision, internal analysis, and lastly, team dynamics. Now let us go to the second one, the environment mastery. Its key result area objective is to generate at least five techno business opportunities with market potential and its module is market and opportunity spotting. In addition, the modules of environment mastery are external analysis, business idea generation, high impact presentations, business idea evaluation, elevator pitch presentation, business concept and business plan overview, and lastly, business plan pitch presentation. On the enterprise mastery, its key result area objective is to have knowledge on building the components of the enterprises and learn the marketing, operation, hr, and financial activities required in building the business plan. The core concept for this one is one is the ownership of the business. Its modules are creating the business, marketing management, operations management, financial management, risk management, and business concept presentation. The final one is the development of the business plan. Its key result area objective is simple, to have a business plan that meets the standards. Since it talks about running the business, its core concept is delivery and accountability. Its module is about writing up presentation and defense and refinement. Based on the discussion, self mastery passion comes from knowing yourself. It brings passion, when you know yourself, you know what you want and do not want. I learned from this that in order to become a successful technopreneur in the future, you should have a mastery of you are or you should know yourself in and out so that you will know your passion and you know what you want or do not want. According also to the discussion of this, it does not require a high Intellectual Quotient but if you have a very high IQ, well it is good and it is beneficial to you. However, it requires or there is a need of high emotional quotient and adversity quotient. Emotional quotient is the ability of an entrepreneur to connect to other people and be able to feel other emotionally and adversity quotient  is the ability to rise up after the failure that has been encountered. It is also explained in our discussion that being a self-mastered person should be performer, epicure, and boss, has a whole-brained, has a personal vision, and knows strengths and weaknesses. The second is E or Environment Mastery in SEED says that it is all about generating business ideas and seeking opportunities out from his or her environment through serendipity walks, crises, trends and etc. I have learned from this that the possibilities of generating ideas are most likely to be found through the following. First is the serendipity walks, this an ordinary walk like walking on the field in our university and suddenly you stumbled down and come up and generate with an idea. The second one is crisis as if you encountered crisis or failures; this may lead to an opportunity. The third is trends opportunities and innovative ideas that could be found in current trends and fashion. Lastly are your hobbies or interests, personal skills and experiences. All of these are the factors and possibilities of generating business ideas and seeking for opportunities. I learned also that being an environment-mastered person should understand his/her industry where he/she belong and many more. The third is E also which stands for Enterprise Mastery and from this, I knew that enterprise mastery should have an idea on how to run a business such as marketing, operations and so on. In addition, being an enterprise-mastered person should understand and integrates the functions of management, human resource, operations, and etc. The last is D stands for development of business plan that covers writing, presenting, defending, and adding refinements to the presented business plan. I learned also the four types of entrepreneurship, which are incremental, imitative, rent seeking and innovative. As well as the characteristics of an entrepreneur such as hardworking, self-confident, builds for the future and a lot more.

            You are maybe wondering if I did not specified what I liked least and like most in the sharing since it is the objective of this reflection. It simply means that I liked our discussion in technopreneurship. It is because learning this kind of things are eye opening and makes me think about my future as an IT student. Because of this subject, I some changed my perspective in my future and I have learned not only to be a technopreneur but also the probable solutions of some problems here in our country. At first I would like to just an ordinary employee. I do not even have an idea of what my future job is. As I stated before, I regret on taking this course. . I entered this course not because I love computer games, or I am interested in programming or what ever a reason that a common IT student says. I entered information technology for the thought of I will be surely employed when I graduate because computers will be not obsolete. I enrolled in this course without knowing what information technology is all about; what the subjects are we going to take or what kind of environment that there is. I did not even know that information technology requires a lot of math. I hated math since high school so I was like hitting my head with a stone. However, the worst part is not being aware of one of the main subjects of this course: Programming. The first day that I encountered that word, I asked my classmates what it is all about, they said that it is inputting codes, and logics and other overwhelming stuff. Oh man, I entered a war without knowing what kind of enemies we are going to encounter. No wonder while I was still a first year, I failed two subjects, which is particularly Programming and Algebra. After that incident, I have thought of changing my course. “Information Technology is not for me”, I keep that telling to myself. However, my mom did not wanted me to shift course not because she believes that I can do it but because of practical reasons. Oh man, I am stuck with this course. I could not do anything but to follow because she is the one who is spending for my college. Therefore, I continued the saga. As time goes by, I started to like this course especially when I enrolled the subject Multimedia. I really loved that subject and it is too sad that unlike other colleges, our university does not have a major for multimedia so if I am going to be a graphic designer I have to work on my own. In graphic designing, I saw my potential future job. I love illustrating photos and editing pictures. It is fun and makes me feel comfortable while doing it. In fact, I accept photo editing and other graphical works without payment. I like it because I could enhance my skills and on the other hand, helping other people save money. Now my friends approach me if they wanted me to design or edit pictures for them, designing tarpaulins for graduation and debuts, souvenirs on any occasions, designing t-shirts and even editing videos. I love what I am doing even though I am not paid, other people appreciating my work is enough for me. My friend also liked what I am doing so he thought of an idea to make talent earn money. He had thought of a business. My friend was a computer technology student so we could create a business that fixes computers and graphical designing. I just ignored his offer because as an information technology student in the University of Southeastern Philippines, I have no such free time for a business. We do not have a capital for that business to so it is really hard for us. Then the subject Technopreneurship came. It made me thought of my friends offer and made me realize that instead of finding a job as a graphical designer, why not create a business of my own. Our facilitator inspired us about having an alternative mindset. I have entered the course IT because of a sure future job and this is because the people now are learning to get a job and forgetting on creating business. It is so ironic that the reason why I took this course made me know that I am wrong and now I am using my learning in this course to alter the common mindset.

            In technopreneurship, I had also thought of helping my community and even the whole country. One of the goals of technopreneurship is making you an employer. That has made me thought of ideas that will not only help the user of my product but also the entire community. I have said in one of my works that one thing to help the community or the economy is to create jobs. I have said, “As a technopreneur, I could greatly help to propel the economy of Davao city because Technopreneurship means business, and business is one of the powerhouses for a great economy. When you have a business, you have to hire workers, so you are not just helping the economy but also you will help the unemployed. One of the things that I have thought to propel the economy of Davao city is to decrease or possibly eradicate the unemployment by having a business. Some of us may have not known this but unemployment is not the effect of economic crisis, but one of the main reasons of it. Actually, this problem will continue to create bigger problems, just like disease that keeps on spreading and slowly destroys our system and if not cured at an early stage it may cause too much greater problems.” In other words, the aim of technopreneurship is not only making you rich but also helping other people.

            I know that there is a big chance that I will not be a technopreneur. However, I still work hard on this subject not because I just wanted to graduate but I am interested to learn. There are things that teach you unconsciously. The lesson that I will get from this subject may not be implemented on its actual goal but I could use the things that I have learned in real life.