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BLOG #3. Lecture Series.

To help the students in understanding entrepreneurship more, the Department of Business Administration of the College of Business and Management (CBM) organized the two-day lecture series and invited three guest speakers.

 Every student undertaking the GEE 16 course, The Entrepreneurial Mind, is obligated to attend and learn from the three inspiring guest lecturers, Dr. Arnel Arreglado, Engr. Bruce Mabulay. To assist students in bringing their ideas to life, talks on the Startup Ecosystem, how to build one, and the various opportunities and programs offered by entrepreneurship are presented. The lecture series also showed us how crucial having a positive outlook is when starting a business because being an entrepreneur is not simple.

The first speaker, Engr. Bruce Mabulay, went into greater detail on creating startups, the startup ecosystem, and the various agencies and groups that are eager to provide funding for startups.

Mr. Arnel Arreglado, CEO of Pindot, delivered an energizing speech for aspiring businesspeople at the second lecture of the series. He discussed his personal experiences and offered advice based on what he had to go through to succeed in his career. The two speakers answered questions from the students during the final segment of the program. The speakers' insightful suggestions helped the students understand what to do with their products/services.

The last lecture in the series featured an hour-long discussion on intellectual property rights before the final pitching. Unfortunately, I was unable to take a photo because we were so busy polishing our pitch outside the University Convention Center (UCC). However, as I listened outside I can say it was beneficial for us to learn more about entrepreneurship-related regulations, such as those pertaining to patent rights, so that we may take them into account as we prepare for our company.

Overall, this successful event was a great move to help the students understand and appreciate entrepreneurship. The series undoubtedly increased both my caution and confidence as I planned to open a business in the future. I discovered that becoming an entrepreneur is more complicated than I had previously thought. I also came to the conclusion that I shouldn't be frightened to fail because I will learn a lot from it.

We are currently working on our pre-recorded pitch for our product, a solar-powered fan. I can't believe we've come this far considering the difficult trip our group had to take. We questioned our ability as a result of the feedback we got on our product. However, we are now prepared to introduce our solar-powered fans to potential investors and invite them to do so.

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As a result of our interview with the students from Central Mindanao University, the problem we want to provide a solution to is the lack of fans inside the school premises. This concern was pointed out by some students and through observation, we also saw that many students use anything like papers, notebooks, and laminated materials as their fans. Thus, we decided to provide a solution with this matter by providing a mini solar powered fan. 

After the venture proposal, we were told to know more about the patent rights as our product seemed to be an existing product. However, as we searched for patent rights at IPOPHL Patent Search (WIPO Publish) there is no registered patent right for solar powered fans. Thus, if we continue to innovate this product we will not be able to face infringement to patent law.

The next consideration we looked at was our costing. One of my group members asked his father about the materials we needed. According to him, we need a solar set-up component, shield lead acid battery (12 V) (6 A), solar power Inverter (DC: 12-220 V), and fan. Unfortunately, we are not able to check for the prices of these materials since none of us was available for canvassing. However, we plan to check next week. 

I learned a lot of things from the different activities that we did these past few weeks. One of it was to really identify and know if my target market would really buy our innovation through our empathy map. If our product would be pricey, I doubt many students would buy it. Thus, we will try to look for different ways in which we can lessen the costing of our product to produce a useful and student-friendly product. 

Through the discussion, we realized that our product can actually attract more customers other than just CMU students. Thus, added selling platforms like online selling and having distributors. With this type of selling, we can connect to other potential customers even from far places. This is also a strength to us since many people are now into online shopping.

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Solar-powered fans.

Last August 24, our group decided to interview random students within Central Mindanao University (CMU). We asked them what are the usual problems that they experience as they study here on the campus. 

The first respondent stated that her biggest concern is the lack of vending machines on campus as she wanted to conveniently buy beverages and snacks. Since some of us are still taking online classes, many are also bothered by the poor signal within the school premises. One commenter said that she is more worried about the garbage disposal since some students lack the discipline to put their trash in the garbage bins. Another student mentioned that she is having financial difficulties while she is at school since there are so many expenses that she must pay. Others claim that it greatly bothers them that there aren't enough fans in the classrooms, especially given how hot it is right now.

Among the problems that these students shared, the very first problem that we want to give a solution to was about having poor signal, by innovating data booster since poor signal really is bothersome to most of us. However, we decided not to focus on that matter because we think that we are not capable enough to innovate such things. Thus, we decided to take consideration on other problems, and we realized that it is also very important for the students to freshen by having mini fans. We wanted it to be solar powered so that the students would not worry whether or not their fans will run out of electricity. One of our groupmates, Hanah, also stressed that we could ask for help from his father with any idea of how we can come up with our fans. We also decided that our fans will be out of recycled materials, we will just beautify it using the idea of Sephie. We are still thinking of an attractive name for our product so we just call it 'solar-powered fan' for now.

Our team learned that it is very important to consider not just our personal opinions but the opinions of our target market. We want to help them with the problems that they encounter, thus we need to make sure that it would really be useful for them and not to bother them more.