Business Courses and Me

I have never ever ever thought that business courses were worth paying attention to. It just doesn't seem important to get lectured on how to make decisions, presentations and especially not by a motivational speaker shouting and jumping up and down the room telling us to stand up, shout and jump around with him because that somehow gets you inspired and helps you present an exemplary pitch. Well, I say that's complete horse-shit! I am an engineer and I honestly can't be made to sit for a whole hour or two unless you teach me something technical. For your information, all this is going on in a summer school on Smart Spaces, I have to compulsorily attend in Helsinki and sit for 8 hours everyday listening to all sorts of topics very unrelated to Smart Spaces. Where I thought this was going to be related to IoT and how you could integrate sensors with spaces to achieve a more intuitive shopping/exploring/dwelling experience, this is more about making money and all the shortcomings associated with an idea before you even have to chance to let it flourish in your head. Nonetheless, I continue to daydream and sleep with my eyes open in the class. I have gotten surprisingly very good at it.
It's not like I don't want my innovation out there. I want to be an entrepreneur someday, to be responsible for a huge change in the world and what not. But I want to do it without the fear of it being a failure and constantly worrying about the possibility that I may not make any money out of it. If I ponder over these aspects even before my idea is born, I am afraid all I am doing is suffocating and killing it before it sees the morning light. In this summer school however, I am somehow thankful that I got a better project than other groups as we are more about innovating a new product to promote smart spaces than marketing the existing product through ads and promotions which is what other groups are doing. At his point I would like to introduce Nimble Devices  who we are working with to implement Indoor Positioning System (IPS) inside one of the biggest department store in Europe, Stockmann's Herkku. This is aimed to help customers navigate through the myriad of items at the store to easily find what they are looking for. We are also trying to provide added functionalities in this service like making your own grocery lists, getting notified about your turn in the queue so that you can roam around and shop instead of waiting in in-store queues and instant payment using your online account. Well, I hope this turns out to be a reality as then I would have contributed or spent some part of my summer school doing something remotely technical even though I wished for more.
In spite of all this, at least I got to explore a new country and met a lot of really polite Finnish people who speak English (Yes, that's a huge factor!). But I will write about Finland in detail in the next post anyway. And at the end, I still think rocket science is much more interesting and easier to wrap my head around than business.