The overlooked ecosystem problem for technology innovation in agriculture

Posted on by Bart Doorneweert

Agriculture is lifting off in the world of start-ups. Google’s Eric Schmidt recently announced an accelerator dedicated to backing startups in the domain. This is an encouraging development that could bring agriculture to the forefront of the digital tech ecosystem, and might even give it a top position in the field of tech innovation.

But despite the opportunity of commercial venture capital directing itself to agriculture, there is a major overlooked problem that tech development in ag faces, and that is the condition of its ecosystem around entrepreneurship and startups.

The agricultural sector suffers from a backlog in terms of informed entrepreneurship skills. Generally speaking, agricultural engineers, who either design solutions for farmers, or are farmers themselves, know very little about entrepreneurship. They build things animals and plants like, but not necessarily their human users. Agriculture knows tons about engineering, but little about the innovation that is required to successfully support new technology adoption in the farmers’ market.

Leadership is the second ecosystem problem in agriculture. In a dynamic landscape, like that of agriculture at the moment, it’s important that there are leaders out there that can define an end to which the game will likely play out. From defining such an end, you can then work backwards, and make the hard decision about what activities and initiatives you should be undertaking now, to move in a trajectory towards that end, even if this goes against the grain of conventional wisdom. (I strongly encourage you to read John Hagel’s recent two posts on the future shape of strategy)

However, many of agriculture’s leaders don’t give much for landscape thinking and futurism. They prefer to work with linear progression, departing from the handful of business models that have ruled agriculture for the past 50 years, for their predictions of the future. This is not such a fruitful perspective for a market environment in which technology tends to blur, rather than affirm classic industry boundaries.

The ecosystem challenges are not only of the broad landscape definition kind. They also lie in the specificities of tech design for farmers. Particularly the basic technology user experience for farmers has not been understood thus far. For instance, a startup called Farmobile is betting on its own hardware module to function as a data bridge between reading out data from tractor and machine sensors, and mass storage on the cloud. Farmobile explicitly states that they don’t work with mobile phones and tablets, because they break, get lost, have batteries that drain too quickly, and are cumbersome to use in pairing for farmers and their farms hands.

Convention would dictate that the mobile platform be used. Such a choice for explicit distantiation as Farmobile has taken from mobile would generally be considered as Silicon sacrilege. But I am convinced Farmobile knows their users better than convention dictates, and is making the right bet on UX. A bold decision which nobody, or no precursor could support them to make as of yet.

The bottom line is that there is no ecosystem yet of founding teams with experience and mentors and investors alike, who understand what lies ahead for agriculture and the practical challenges to overcome. That ecosystem is yet to be built. I predict, nay warn, that if “ecosystem” remains optimistically overlooked in the new investment strategies that are popping up for agriculture, that the lack of entrepreneurship, leadership, and design is going to be one of the big, hard walls that tech development in agriculture will hit.

The uncertainty depositaries

Posted on by Bart Doorneweert

Most people would consider uncertainty a bad thing. You don’t know what will happen, you can’t control for the outcomes you would prefer. I’m not talking risk here, which can technically be insured against. I’m talking uncertainty, where there is no objective way to determine what the future state of things will be; no means to end framework by which to go.

However, not all people experience uncertainty in the same way. There is a great theory developed by the economist Frank H. Knight about uncertainty and entrepreneurship. Knight claims entrepreneurs have lower thresholds to apply their subjective decision making under highly uncertain circumstances. Whether positive outcomes are ascribable to competent judgment or sheer luck, is not really discernable, but at least it’s important to know that there are people who aren’t afraid to apply their own judgment to make decisions under deeply uncertain circumstances (with all the consequences of being wrong, and pretty much alone in your beliefs at many points).

Now consider two practical examples of this. First one is about someone whom we all know, Steve Jobs. Now at the time of developing the first iMac and the iPod, Jobs made a judgment call on the future state of the internet, where he envisioned that the ordinary consumer would have wide spread access, and could ship and receive much larger bundles of data. This was in a time that competitors will still banking on diskette drives… Job’s judgment resulted in the built-in modem and LAN port on the iMac, as well as the online distribution model for the  iTunes store that fed your iPod. The difference it made for Apple is nicely explained in this quote from this Forbes article:

The iPod took off after earlier MP3 players hadn’t not only because of its simplicity and ease of use but also because Jobs waited until broadband technologies were ready to support the music data transfers it would rely on.  

Another such example of uncertainty can be found in the informal economy, which is by definition a very uncertain operating environment. This one was discovered by Niti Bhan during field work in Kenya. She found somebody that had wired their house completely, without having access, nor guarantee of access to the grid: “it would come” was the home owner’s prediction.

Wired house before the grid came

Wired house before the grid was even available in the area (Photo credit: Niti Bhan)

This very much triggers my thoughts. Both examples are from widely different environments, but show the same type of judgment call about a very uncertain outcome. Could we be looking at the same thing here? Would that mean that we could thus better understand entrepreneurship and people who live in the operating environment of the informal economy, by relating the effect of uncertainty to decision making?

The only article which comes remotely close to this question, is a psychology experiment set up by Chip Heath, and Amos Tversky. A gem of an article, but very little used since publication, so I’ve learned by Chip himself. The article indicates that competence and aspiration seem to lower people’s thresholds to actively engage and invest, under conditions of uncertainty.

Would it be worthwhile to define personas on such basis? To inform accelerator programs on the people they’re funding? To engage with specific farmers in development programs in the informal economies in developing countries? To find the early adopters of the internet in emerging markets? I’d love to hear your thoughts!