Team:NCTU Formosa/Entrepreneurship

Overview

Entrepreneurship has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup company, offering a product, process or service for sale or hire.[1]

Today, our project, PANTIDE, has a complete idea and experience to prove its effect. First, we will introduce our business model, which includes three kinds of items, the problem, solution, and schedule, to explain why we want to choose this problem, how we solve them, and when we will launch our product. Second, we analysis the marketing and future to discuss about three items, insecticide using, organic agriculture, and technology agriculture. Next, we grasp the regulation about the manufacture and using in real world to get a certificate from government. The last but not least, we introduce the sponsors who help us in our difficult time and launch our product for others companies.

Business model

Tagline

Commingling of the technology and plants to lead the new agricultural revolution.

Problem

As we mention in our wiki, more and more people pay attention to the chemical pesticide influence our daily life. The trends of eating organic food is gradually increasing. However, the management cost and low yield are two major problems that cause the organic food expensive. There are two goals that we want to achieve:

  • To be precise agriculture
    The high management cost including human resource, time, and precise field monitor.
  • To reduce the using of chemical pesticide
    Chemical pesticide cause lots of problems:
    • Environment pollution
      According to studies, there are over four million tons of chemical pesticide being sprayed in the world. It’s not only pollute 40% river which is serious effects the water, but cause soil contamination such as pesticide residue and salinization of soil. The pollution destroys the original environment.
    • Health
      The chemical pesticide using in abundance is harm to our bodies such as lung failure, abnormal breathing, quiver, cardiopalmus, and poor appetite.
    • Loss of market
      According to Ministry of Economic Affairs, R.O.C., food safety problem has caused the loss of 17 billion new Taiwan currency.

Solution

This year, we want to combine the synthetic biology with the state-of-the-art technology. We hope drawing people’s attention to the precision agriculture which backing up the development of modern agriculture.

  • Biopesticide---PANTIDE
    • Database
      • Nowadays, many kinds of protein have been discovered about their sequence, structure, and function.
      • To integrate the reference of PANTIDE such as structure property or spice specific killing.
      • To compare with the different toxic active site in the protein sequence and be classified with its structure.
    • Synthetic biology
      • Through the synthetic biology, we transform the PANTIDE sequence, which is choose from our database, into E. coli to highly produce the toxin protein.
    • Pesticide killing
      • Using the PNATIDE, it can cause the death of specific pests with different kinds of dead function but ecofriendly and non-toxin to other animals.
    • Environmental Sustainability and health
      • To River and soil, PANTIDE comes from the mother nature and is biodegradable. Therefore, there is no pesticide residue problems.
      • To other animal, PANTIDE is spices specific which means it is non-toxic to benefit insects and don’t hurt the human body.
    • Market costs and social costs
      • PNATIDE can protect corps, biodegradable, and non-toxic to human body. We believe that this new pesticide will reduce the problem of food safety to cut the market costs and social costs.
  • Smart detector>

Figure 1. Visiting expert. group photo with the professor Huang and his postgraduate student in Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute Council of Agriculture. Dr. Huang is the fourth person on the third hand in the back row, and the senior brother is the third person on the left hand in the back row.

  • Smart detector

Figure 2. Discussion with Dr. Huang and his postgraduate student in Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute Council of Agriculture.

Figure 3. Group photo with Prof. Shaw-Yhi Hwang and the research assistant. They stand on the right side in the picture.

User Study—Visit the farmers

Business Study—Visit the proprietor