 Hello everyone and good morning, good afternoon or good evening depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for Short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2014 webinar series. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Anand Narayan, who is the head of CELCO Labs at the CELCO Foundation in India. My name is Yana Randa and I'll be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers where I am a senior program manager in the Engineering for Global Development Department. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar. Prottyping is a necessary but often difficult hurdle in product development. This is especially pronounced in the agricultural sector for organizations designing and delivering low-cost agriculture devices to underserved communities. In the case of South and India, farmers don't often have the time, patience or desire to test out prototypes of tools that could eventually increase their livelihood. So how can a design team make forward progress? To answer some of these questions, we've invited today's presenter, Anand Narayan, to share his insights. And we thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series. In addition to myself, we have Mike Mater of ASME, Holly Schneider-Brown, and Steve Welch of IEEE. We work together on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series, or would like to make a recommendation for future topics or speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on this slide. Webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenter, we would like to take a minute to remind you about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of over 20,000 technically-minded members and more than 140,000 social media followers, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges, whether in water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, or other areas faced by underserved communities worldwide. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies such as ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, just to name a few, as well as academic supporters such as MIT's D-Lab, international development agencies such as USCID, EWB, USA, and practical actions, and access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Visit our website, engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. The three publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices in thinking of leaders in the field who bring innovative technology and solutions to bear on global humanitarian and development challenges. 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During the webinar, please use the Q&A window to type in your questions for the presenter. If you encounter any troubles, viewing or hearing the webinar, you may also want to try opening up the webcast delete in a different browser. Also, feel free to access the Help widget for technical help. At the bottom of the screen, I will remind you that you have the survey widget. It is a red icon with a checklist. Please make sure to take a moment before the end of the webinar to fill out our survey. Your opinions are invaluable to the webinar series. Without your comments and suggestions, this series won't be what it is today. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one Professional Development Hour, or PDH, for this session, please follow the instructions at the top of our webpage on engineeringforchange-webinars.org. So, I'd like to introduce to you today's presenter. Ann Larayan is the head of FALCO Labs at the FALCO Foundation. FALCO Labs is an initiative founded in 2009 to plug the last mile gaps in innovation for the social sector, working particularly in areas of clean energy access, livelihood technologies, water, in addition to experiential learning for students. Ann has substantial experience in working with decentralized renewable energies and appropriate technologies, both within academia and in industry. Ann completed his Bachelor of Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and obtained a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. So, without further ado, I will push it over to Annan. Thank you for the introduction, Yana. And hello, everybody. I'm going to start by just going over the rough agenda for today's webinar, and then I'll get straight into it. I'll start by talking about the organization, CELCO, and what we are trying to do, followed by a brief introduction to the problem, the goals of what we are trying to achieve in this project, the challenges that we encountered as we started working on our agricultural machines, and the rough methodology that we evolved to overcome those challenges. A few other considerations that would be good to have in mind what success might look like, and then we can go for questions. Starting with CELCO. So CELCO is structured as a non-profit organization. We are a spun-off from a very successful social enterprise, CELCO Solar, that does decentralized solar lighting that's touched about a million people in the southern state of Karnataka. CELCO Foundation, which conducted this work, is registered as a public charitable trust. We envision a socially sustainable society. We want market-based solutions which are financially sustainable, which are culturally and socially acceptable, as well as environmentally sustainable. Broadly, our mission and the work we do involves the needs identification of underserved communities in the areas of decentralized energy and appropriate technology. We work on creating innovative and sustainable solutions, and we want to foster ecosystem development in the social sector. Coming to the introduction of this specific problem itself about small-scale agricultural machinery for small-holder farms. When we started this work, we found that while there was a bewildering variety of mobile phones and other technologies, somehow the choice in small-scale agri-machines was just not there. As we started looking into the problem, we realized that extension work is fundamentally very difficult. So we have a large agricultural research sector in India that has worked largely on new farm practices, new crop varieties, but somehow there has been little research on agricultural machines per se, and what little work there has been has not yielded useful solutions that have come to market. We realized that very early on. We did go around talking to a lot of the players in the sector. And so in our own small way, we work largely in a paddy area with a lot of small-holder farms. So we said, let's work on a suite of machines that can reduce labor requirements, increase profitability for farmers, and increasing the speed and the ease of performing the task of currently carried out agricultural tasks. These are the goals that we started out with. Why is agricultural machines needed in the first place? One thing is various changes even in India and in rural India means that in many parts of the country there is an acute labor shortage, which is a reality different from, say, 20 or 30 years ago where at least there was a perception there's an excess of labor. But right now, especially for crops like paddy, which are very labor-intensive, one of the most common complaints is that you don't get the hands that you need for the time-critical tasks that are required. In conjunction with that, there's an unavailability of smart mechanized solutions. And as you dig deeper, you find that most of the agricultural research lacks far more participation in either the identification of the precise need, the testing of the solution to determine its appropriateness. And what's probably natural or to be expected is that large commercial entities which work in this sector prefer to concentrate on large-scale farmers and their needs because it's much easier to do things in scale and it's easier to build a viable business model. So we started about three years ago on a suite of machines. The specific machines we're talking about, some of which you'll see in pictures or in videos, is a paddy transplanter, a two-row paddy transplanter, a thresher for separating the straw from the grain, a dehusker, a light trap for insect protection, and a harvester for reaping the crop. So when we started off, and I think one thing to keep in mind, and this may be true for many of you others who are designing, is the perception that the machine needs to be ultra-low-cost, affordable, and I've encountered or many efforts or many organizations that have done this and we were no different. So when we started, the goal was to make a prototype as quickly as possible, get it out into the market and see. And one thing that's changed, though, is that lots of rural people, including in India, are used to high-quality finished products. So our early approaches, we would hastily put together by a barrel in the market, find something recyclable, which while it's all very romantic, one thing we found is as soon as we started bringing it to the machines, the enthusiasm for the farmer in testing the machine itself dropped. And when this happened once or twice, we realized that this is a pattern and that we would have to fix it. So they were put off by the rough and unfinished look of the machines. I mean, they were not really used to the idea of a prototype. So when we call them and tell them we're coming in for a test, the expectation is of a finished product. And once you've lost that initial interest at, you know, it was very hard to continue to get them to engage in the test. The other thing we discovered, so, you know, many machines like that you and I also use have multiple functions. So in order to get something out through the door and test quickly, you would have some, you know, maybe the most important part of the machine's functionality working and you take it for a test. Like for example, in the thresher. So a typical thresher would also require a winnowing in order to separate the dust now. So again, the farmer's expectations is of multifunctionality. So even if you have an intent to put in winnowing later, sometimes the fact that you don't have it on during your first test can hurt. The other thing is depending on the type of machine, there is a reluctance to try the machine on their own crop, which is understandable because, you know, in the case of paddy, this is the rice that they're going to eat for six months. So often, you know, you come in, you know, here's a set of people that are, you know, coming with something that, you know, looks new and different and they're saying they're going to work on your fields. So in the case of a transplant, for example, there is a fear that, you know, are we going to damage the seedlings so much that we are not going to have a yield or a much reduced yield. So there was definitely this reluctance to try the machines and that's because there's a risk involved to the farmers. And like I said, you know, definitely the concept of prototype testing is a bit alien. So the rough and unfinished look was a barrier. The part about them jumping to conclusions about the usefulness of the final product was a barrier. The other thing, so very soon, you know, you take the machine, you demonstrate it and then your next step is to give them, give it to them and try for them to use it. We realize soon that it's the equivalent of, you know, an average driver trying out a formula one car in order to test its limits. So often the farmers are not used to a machine like this and some of these machines, it takes a while to learn how to use the machine whereas the expectation both on your side as a tester and the farmer's side is that it's going to work right away. So you have that learning curve that somehow you need to overcome. So over time what we actually decided to, we didn't do this in the beginning, over time what we evolved to is we would actually spend the money and, you know, have a retainer farmer on our payroll who just got better and better with the machine. So later when you would go do the tests, you would have somebody experienced operating the machine which would give much more confidence. The other barrier, for example, we face in the transplanter is that for the transplanter to work, the seedlings had to be a certain size for it to optimally work and for the paddy seedling to get transplanted. And that was all, you know, despite lots of communication with the farmer, you know, you would land up for a test one day and find that the seedling is too long or too small. If it's too long, you know, the machine will not be able to pick it up if it's too small, either too many seedlings get picked up or you have seedling damage, both of which are not good for your test. So based on a lot of these lessons that we learned, and I think I should also point out that many of these lessons were learned over multiple seasons. I mean, one of the other barriers with testing agricultural machines is you have narrow windows. So for example, if it's transplanting in the areas that we test, you have two windows of, you know, two months each that you can test. So, you know, and so often if either your prototype is not ready in time, you've missed the season. So it took us about two or three years to actually, you know, figure out that these were all very systemic challenges we were encountering and that we would have to overcome. So as we started, you know, down the road, we started learning from these tests to, and then we started tailoring our tests and demonstrations a little better. So we realized, like, that it was important to determine exactly what we wanted to achieve from a test and that we had to plan. So the first and most important criteria which, you know, you might hear in different, you know, whether it's human-centered design or user-centric design or, you know, whatever your paradigm of choice is, is understanding the precise need and popularity of a new product that you want to introduce. You know, now we use a combination of surveys, but we realize that often just user surveys in the abstract often have not worked in these type of communities because people don't want to give you feedback in the abstract. I mean, if you say, if I made a machine like this that would do this, would it be of use to you? Often we see a lot of blank stairs. So we do see the need for a quick and tangible prototype that people will react to. And if you want to gather feedback about a machine that you've not yet built, it might make sense to actually do a design or a model. And then you will find that people will react once you describe the functionality and how something looks. Yes, so the other thing that we do is we try not to take prematurely designed products for testing. And this is because you have a limited number of early movers or channels that you can test with. So these may be organizations who have opened up their groups of farmers to you for testing or they may be your own personal links or whatever prospective customers. If you're in this for the long term, there's probably a chance that you will have to go to these people again and again. So you want to retain them for future tests. So very clearly now we try to understand what the features that farmers would see as essential, we try to build it in because there's a lot of potential embarrassment if your prototype does not work as the designer had expected. So not only do you need to build all the functionality in, but you need to be able to test it internally in a controlled setting. And this you can do through different ways. If you have access to your own fields, like in our case, we have employees who have farms and it may be worth your while to actually just lease out and pay somebody for the use of the crop because what you don't want to have happen, which has happened to us is you go with a machine that you think is going to work and it's the first time you're trying it out. It's somebody you don't know very well. It's a lot of egg on your face for it, you know, if it's functioning at one-tenth that of the performance that, you know, they're doing it by hand. So definitely try to understand the desirable features, build those in tested and controlled settings and there's always going to be agricultural universities or field extension farms or NGOs that can get you the space. The next is getting feedback from the farmers on the features. Farmers will always, of course, be eager to have a go with the machine before they know how to, you know, use it properly. I think it's important. I think I alluded earlier to having your own, you know, staff retainer kind of farmers who have used it. It's good if they actually do a demonstration and then train them so that when the farmer is using it, there's a confidence in them being able to use it and use it properly. The other thing we found is that the cycles for the testing may not just be one season. And, you know, and this has to do with basically either the fact that people are sometimes risk-averse or that, you know, that it takes a while to get. So sometimes we have found that it sometimes takes your third or fourth season of a farmer using it for them to build the confidence. So I think it's important not to get this heart in too early. So, you know, figure out which of your prospective testers are in it for the long run and take it back to them season after season because sometimes they're ready to work with you and get the conditions right. For example, if the seedlings were not right, you know, try to go back and do it again. And over time, you know, they will start being able to use the machine unsupervised. The other thing we have found useful is to work with other agencies that the farmers trust. So in our case, we have a very large NGO which works with, you know, million or so farmers in Karnataka called SKDRDP. We go, you know, if they're already organizing an event where their farmers are convening, we try to do demos there in order to bring awareness to them. We also use their channels for testing. That also sort of implicitly builds the trust in your product and in you, but like I pointed out earlier, it's important not to misuse the trust. So I'm going to now go and play a slide for you, a video that is going to show you one of the ways in which one of the tests that we did. Again, I think it's important both as, you know, engineers trying to do a good job or, you know, or as companies trying to make sure you've built a product to the user requirement is that what you're building is actually a superior product. There is no substitute for quantifying performance. So what you're going to see in this video is the traditional method of rise threshing with one of the most successful thresholds that now seems to be gaining acceptance. So in the foreground, you're going to see the farmer who's very much a localite trying out the machine with Paddy. In the background, you're going to see the four women using the traditional technique. What we went through is rigorously actually computed down to the gram in order to demonstrate to ourselves and for future exactly how much faster the machine is over the hand method. Other considerations that we have learned along the way is that you have to have staff. You can't give the machine away to somebody and tell them, you know, give me feedback. It doesn't work that way. It's important to have your own staff. We have actually found that it's often useful to have the original designer of the machine present for the early test so that because obviously that person has a lot of insight into the machine can ask more probing questions of the farmer to better understand what changes or improvements may help and also answer questions for farmers feedback. It's also very often you know your next rep. I mean, you know, the commonly used phrase of failing early and failing often, you know, definitely it helps to have the designer because, you know, at the end of that phase itself, you might be able to go back to the drawing board for your next revision. Those of you working with, you know, communities like this will probably understand the importance of communication. So time and again, we thought we had communicated what we wanted from the farmer about the length of the seedlings that were required or the soil conditions to find that sometimes, you know, when you go there finally for the test, having spent the money to go there, the conditions were not right. Now we've just decided just to be, you know, better prepared and we actually send somebody to verify. So we don't just take somebody's word for it. If the seedlings need to be 18 centimeters, we send somebody four days ahead to make sure that it's within that limit on the day we test. And this can be frustrating because there are times we've had and this is true for I think maybe cultures where either, you know, they're not, you know, their timing depends on various factors. Sometimes you've scheduled a test and you realize they've gone away for some local village festival. So I think the importance of state on top of it. One thing we have found is to not multitask too much and have dedicated staff that is helping organize these seeds. That helps these things go more on schedule. So communicate, communicate, communicate. Timing, please let the farmers know how long they're testing. I mean, you know, pay attention to their resources and their schedule. You know, even though it's in your interest to get this tested, you will need to understand what are their constraints and often they will be constraints because, you know, if it's raining, they may not want to do threshing because, you know, the paddy is wet. So you just definitely understand the problem and communicate about when it can be scheduled. We never about payment for testing. So we actually consciously decided not to pay farmers because we wanted the fact that they had some skin in the game because too often the development sector, people are too polite. If you paid them for the test, they're not going to say that this machine sucks. So it is important that I think you not pay too much, but definitely we do offer to reimburse for any losses because to be fair to them, you know, it's not fair for them to take a risk on some machine that, you know, you've designed. So we always say that, you know, if there's a loss, we will make sure we make you whole. And this has helped. I mean, you know, not paying obviously reduces the number of farmers who are willing to test, but we have found that those farmers who are interested enough will come forward and it makes for a much better test. Soon you will find out that, you know, once there's an acceptable machine, there will be others who are ready to rent it and that will give you insight into whether this machine is actually meeting customer demand. Aesthetics of the machine, like I think I mentioned earlier, is very important because you know, because there is an expectation of what a machine looks like and I think it is well worth our while to make sure the prototypes look attractive and properly finished and I guarantee you that you will have a much better response from the farmers. You may have to use different channels. A lot of our time we spend at farmers, mailers, where groups of farmers are anyway coming, they are used to these channels as a way of getting to know machines. A lot of sales may not happen, but I think it's a way of branding your machine and making sure that you're getting the word out that your machine exists and that familiarity with the machine will make them more keen to test your machine or other machines that you might make down the road. So these are some of the guidelines and I have to say that in our own efforts in this, finally I can say that the rays of light are just sort of breaking through the horizon. We are seeing signs of early success and a lot of this path of three years has mostly been very uphill, encountering these challenges that I wish somebody had told us all this when we started. So hopefully we're saving some time of some of you who are trying to do this. When you evolve to the right solution, the customer pull is usually very evident. You will easily see at that point that you're meeting and solving some customer pain. Unfortunately, this can take two or three years because it may be four or five growing cycles before you get there. It could also be that we were not addressing the problem in enough scale. Like any other problem, it's important to use the appropriate resources and the appropriate scale to solve the problem. In many cases, I think we had underestimated the amount of work that would be required and that made things go a little longer than it needed to have. Eventually, and now we are actually finding the pressure is now in high demand. We have people calling us saying, we want to buy more of these and so we're able to see what success looks like. We're now spending the time to actually set up different structures because a lot of what I've gone into is kind of an R&D effort, soft-funded R&D effort because nobody who's trying to make a short-term profit is going to invest this kind of time for these kind of machines which often may not have the kind of margins required to build a very high profit business. But then sales and rentals and reaching the market may not be best done through a non-profit. So even a non-profit like us is looking at what kind of partnerships with distributors and other sales channels do we need to explore in order to take these machines further. And I hope many of you also see this kind of success and in our case, we're seeing these machines not only being sold, we're seeing other farmers come to the machines, come to the farmers who have bought our machines and are renting it from them for paying a fee and the transport cost. At that point, you definitely know that something is working. I'm going to play you another... So where we are now, we're now trying to do the marketing and create the appropriate marketing material to spread the word. I'm going to play a video for you that will show you both the Thresher and the Transplanter and how we are reaching the farmer. Since it's in Canada, I'm going to translate for you. It just says Selco Foundation, Rural Lab. Here we're talking about... We have a picture of local farmers using the machine and telling them the rate. In the video snap, you have the side-by-side comparisons of the traditional method and the machine so that builds the credibility that we know what the traditional method is and what we're benchmarking against. We are talking about the benefits saying it's simple and easy to use and easy to carry and we have a shot of two farmers carrying the machine. We are quantifying the fact that you can double the productivity and now we come to the transplanting machine where we talk about the benefits of the transplanting machine. There's a short video of a farmer using our machine in a typical paddy field and this is one of those farmers that we had trained and kept as a retainer so that when you're demonstrating it's a fluid motion, we talk about the productivity increases that are possible, the fact that it's very portable and can reach small farms easily and the fact that it has been tested under local conditions and in the case of the transplanter we are actually showing the before and after saying that despite transplanting with the machine nine weeks later, the seedlings look healthy and then there is the information about how to contact us. A couple of references and if you have any questions you can always reach me by email at anandthatselcofoundation.org I look forward to any questions that you may have by email. So at this point I'd like to thank Anand and also let everybody know that he is available to answer questions as of now. If you have a detailed question I'd like to also send him. His contact information is noted on the slide. So I'm going to go over to our Q&A window. I've seen a number of questions come in already so I'm going to go ahead and get started with them and Anand will tackle them one by one as we finish a little bit earlier than expected so we have a little bit more time to chat with you all. So question number one comes here. Does non-urbanization and rapid industrialization mean a diminishing market for such devices? Anand, would you let us know please? Yes, thanks Anand. Good question actually. It's actually interesting. The organization is actually leading to a very large shortage of labor in many areas in India. If you go back to the philosophy of Gambian philosophy 20-30 years ago I think automation was considered bad of any kind including small to maximize labor availability but now at least for badly intensive crops like badly intensive crops like badly because of organization and migration you don't have enough of a labor force to support. So you're actually targeting people many of whom are either growing for emotional reasons that they've been small farmers they've been growing their own rice for generations, they want to continue or you might say idealists it's a very small segment. For example, in our district where we're testing induction kind of paddy production is probably down 70-80% from say 20-30 years ago. So that's the answer the organization has led to it's not a very large market I think one thing that we learned early on depending on which sector you're working in agriculture machines probably not the single version of the device is probably not going to be as universally accepted as say a cell phone. But the short answer is yes it does mean a diminishing market but it's also created a market for this device in between the years ago. Fantastic, thank you. So another question that came in was regarding need finding and we're talking about here the design process. Was the need finding exercise done systematically before you set out to develop the product and were the farmers able to articulate their needs? Okay, so in the early days I think need finding was not as systematic as we do it now we just went with our gut feeling of what might gain acceptance much like a field job would try to do but later we found that that was obviously a dangerous part because you're not a small farmer yourself and there is a need for systematic need assessment. Having said that we actually did a little bit of a chicken and egg because I think if you go to the abstract and ask a farmer what machine would you buy or what do you feel a gap they would not be very ready with some kind of a description. So we had to either ideate suppose functionality sometimes your pictures and then arrive at what would be needed. So we evolved to a part so we allow a lot more systematic and we repeat this exercise we participate in farmer maillards where you have anything between 20 or 100,000 farmers walking through your stall and at that time we keep testing and sometimes you also find that the demand also changes it's kind of a moving problem but yet to the question there is definitely a need for need-finding and confirmations and validation of profit values and things like that. We have a number of questions that come in so it was very exciting. Thank you guys. One question here is and I think our video would have showed some of this but we'll let Anna speak to it specifically how do you get farmers to uptake the machine when they may not see the profit from it until more than one growing season? Can you repeat that unless I can read it No, no worries. I can I can repeat it. How do you get farmers to uptake? Right. So I think it depends on the machine again so the pressure is interesting and I think we found that maybe the reason the pressure got acceptance faster is on a single day they see the result of the test. They can see what is the productivity of the hand the traditional method of productivity using the machine. So on day one they see that they have half their cost and that's the profit essentially because the starting point is the same and you've ended up with the same mode of value. Can you get a little trick here for something like the transplant because you're very transplanting and your yield is going to be four months later and there are so many parameters that influence yield so it's very hard to trace it down to a single parameter. There was significant cost saving by the use of the machine. However, we had to run the test for two growing seasons to convince ourselves and the others that there's no loss of yield because if you drop the cost but instead you've reduced the yield a lot more you might actually end up causing a loss and in our experience that has been a barrier to that machine being adopted at the same rate even if the cost savings is comparable. Got it. All right. Another question that came in in your experience have you noticed any resistance to a technology introduced by Westerners into rural India as opposed to say a domestic technology? Not really. I think I wouldn't be able to answer that question completely because we've had a lot of Westerners in our test and we have volunteers from various universities around the world, engineers without borders and who all contributed significantly to the testing and the design. I have not seen any resistance but then we would also bear with them and we even have locals on the team so I can't compete. I cannot answer the question of what if you parachuted some Westerners into a place and they were trying to do this, what the experience would be I wouldn't be able to tell but I think it's going to be pretty tough. You're going to need some local channels to enter anywhere, typically. So in a kind of different vein entirely looking at a completely I guess diametrically opposite approach one of our listeners is wondering if non-mechanical solutions are being or were considered as an example he shares the fact that there's a small farm that's born now which is about nine acres has year on production permanent full-time employees no tilling beyond organic and 140 crops are grown so did self-goal labs consider non-mechanical solutions? Okay, so yes you know we we're not considered, I mean I think there's a small team but I think the approach is interesting and there are some comparable notably for Padi called SRI method which is a system for rice intensification which is it's a different way of growing Padi but primarily non-mechanical intervention but the answer is we did not try any non-mechanical solutions or no till method in our work. And a question from the operations and maintenance side, how do you plan to service these machines? The question is specifically around human resources and who are the human resources will be to service these machines? Okay, so I think I must have mentioned earlier in the presentation that you know CELCO the foundation is a spin-off from a social enterprise that has solar lighting and one of the teams who the success in that market was the ability to service and maintenance of solar systems that we provided to the customers. Definitely service will be part of it and having said that we still have gone through the early market penetration stage so service would be a good problem to have but we would try to use existing capacities of whoever does repair of mechanical devices today train them and build out that service mechanism but definitely servicing is a very important part of providing these machines. Couldn't agree with you more so one of the main trade-offs of course when you create prototypes and when you have to go through a number of iterations with hardware is the cost associated with it but also you know you have to consider how to make these machines aesthetically pleasing so one of our listeners would like to know what some of the methods you incorporated in making a prototype aesthetically pleasing without adding significant cost. Well so you know I don't think we've paid heavy attention to aesthetics but I think our learning that I alluded to was that you know you can't have something looking very immature so typically if it's a powder coated finish or something you know I don't think the expectation is of a really shiny gadget but having said that because they used to finish products like that this is up the bar compared to what you would do so none of our machines have paid a lot of attention to aesthetics beyond say a clean and professionally looking finish so that again would be a next stage once you identify that the market is large and you're going to go for production and scale. So we have a question regarding funding so does India support the funding of the machine design and prototyping process or where else do you access prototype development funding I'm sure we could talk about funding for a while. In theory yes India does have funding and the university system has been funded I think India has a Center for Agricultural Machine Research in India again in India the last country the agricultural machine testing center is in the middle of the country and even to order a machine no local farmer would even know the language probably of Hindi to get that machine. There's a lot of last mile barriers accessing many of these innovations our work was actually not funded by within India most of our funding for this work has come from the Lemelson Foundation in Oregon and though we have tried to get additional funding from other sources like agricultural machines. Another question is regarding introduction of the technology have you successfully introduced processing technology in the context of labor surplus. Well I don't know if we would in none of our areas I think we tried to understand what the customer pain would be and so our work with introducing small scale machinery has been in areas where there are labor shortage. Now we have done some other work looking at food processing and food processing the biggest barrier I think we face there in that work it's very different from anything I talked about today it's on the market linkage side to produce a group of people working at the ground level to be able to get and break open the market for a newly and innovative product has not been easy but we continue to make this effort. So we have an interesting question here regarding fuel are your machines or cell phone machines I know that most of them are fossil fuel based but the question is regarding your future directions I suppose or current direction is cell phone making an effort to develop an emission somehow and to perhaps move away from fossil fuel So cell phone broadly and the burden of cell phone still is the solar lighting where there is some amount of carbon emission offset in our work we have not focused on that and I think I see another question around when we introduce these machines I would joke about it at many meetings we started introducing most of these machines as the pedal as the main operations that very early carbon neutral to the old operation and the first feedback you would get from most farmers is can you please put some motor and I think when I put myself in there they are already working hard through the day unlike most of us so I think they are also on the same path of being able to reduce manual work if they can So we have not linked this work to explicitly to any carbon emission but we are very conscious in one of our research areas that we would like to go through is how can we design these machines with the least amount of power possible so that you can have a cyber food agricultural processing center with the solar power because what we would hate is for the acceptance of this machine to also involve diesel or any other fossil fuel to go along So we are sensitive to that question but I think if you try to solve too many problems you know, none of them Certainly, that makes good sense One of the things that is kind of a good insight is the question regarding safety so we know that modern equipment has many safety requirements How is the potential liability from accidents mitigated if items like safety shields Oh, excuse me I apologize if items like safety shields are not included in prototypes Good question and something we have encountered I think one of our earlier versions of the pressure when we built it out and we were getting it out the first thing was I was a little scared because this thing was working around at a high speed and you know, I was a little worried that along with the straw your hands would get tucked into the into the spinning wheel and you hurt yourself but I mean, thank you that didn't happen we did say that for the next read we would have to take care of safety safety issues I'm thinking of something of shield Unfortunately, there isn't a standard for many of these machines but I think it behooves anybody designing these machines to pay attention to safety issues and just make sure that children don't accidentally hurt themselves or even the adults and I'm saying this really conscious the fact that I do realize that one of the most dangerous professions even I think in the US was agriculture in terms of the number of accidents in the job and that's from farmers giving us a lot of heavy machinery and not necessarily trained in the same manner that factory workers would be Last part of the question is about liability you know, liability I mean, we are aware of it but I think the issue liability is not sadly or happily depending on what camp you are on not a very big issue in India in these devices. Having said that I think we do pay attention to it but the potential liability has not been on top as much as the broad issue of safety One interesting question is swing over to the business side of deploying agricultural devices there is a question regarding IP or intellectual property how safe is IP in India if it has been applied through PCT patent application in India and I think patented in other countries I'm not familiar with PCT applications, maybe that's the patented cooperation Good question I think it was damaged from a few years ago there was this local workshop designing a machine for making jackfruit chips and I would see this machine in his workshop every time we went for our other prototypes maybe over a year and he said why is it taking so long this work is very hard to figure out how it works and once it successfully works someone is going to copy it anyway so in general IP is not necessarily safe and I should also point out for this market even your detection of infringement is going to be so difficult I normally would advise people I think we should go and file a patent for the sake of getting that ownership and attaching your name to it but as a value proposition and I should also add I do have a background as a patented agent but I would not put my money in patenting a small scale application just detecting infringement and by the time it goes to the core system it's not located in India it's going to be very long having said that India is part of the PCT you will get a patent if it meets the criteria for patentability and if maybe you can speak a little bit around the business model expanding further overall business model for developing and marketing your machines I know we had a video to show an example of that but maybe you can speak to that good question to which we don't have a complete answer so when we started our work about 3 years ago we realized the model thinking at that time was and one of the reasons that this kind of work needs to be publicly funded in whatever manner is that the path to actually getting the market is very long the profits are not very high which means the mainstream market forces typically would not invest their capital in the development of the machine I would say that a non-profit foundation is probably the wrong exit mechanism so we either talk about identifying a series debating between distributed manufacturers who return for the IT support and quality support who then service the local areas they work in or they're easily open to a centralized model of manufacture that then goes through traditional agricultural machine distribution channels I don't think we see ourselves as the foundation being the marketing entity eventually this year we're experimenting actually where we found one or two fairly good players who are into agricultural machines and we're trying to enter into a number of understandings where we transfer the design to them and they do the marketing and there's no money exchange between either entity we're going to take the question into a little bit of a different direction going away from the business model one of our listeners would like to know if you see any applications of electrical and computer engineering in developing nations specifically or maybe you can speak to what you've seen in India electrical and computers I think it's a bit of I think it's probably all there are methods I don't think we're working on them but people like ITC the use of information to bridge markets with producers I think there's enough good ideas that are out there that people are doing electrical engineering actually one of the gaps we do find is good DC machines so on the electrical motor side is a fair bit of work one thing we at Telco point out there's most machines that have been designed with the grid in mind which makes renewable energy very difficult to attach to many of these machines because they've all been designed as this powered in matter this is a much tougher problem than even what we are trying to solve but it is worthwhile to look at somebody can do the work by hand you should be able to do that work with 150 watts of power and that's a very affordable solar panel to many many communities that's where I would say the entry point is because it would be probably in the lines of machines for processing and efficient machines and I think that's the best answer to have now of course one of our listeners is also interested in how some of these processes relate to introducing innovation that applies to existing machinery that is at a larger scale so he notes that you seem to be referring to innovations that address small scales or niche applications to replace primitive processes are there different approaches for introducing innovation that applies to existing machinery that would be tested in the manufacturer's lab in the existing machinery now so I'm trying to get my wrap around the question yes we are looking at I won't say necessarily I used the word but it still could be tens of thousands of farmers in one state in a country having said that the approach for testing is different I mean I'm sure that the approaches for the way the innovation develops would be different and maybe one on getting the question differently or at least the test with the farmer I think would not be too different and would not depend on where the machine came from or what size application it is it's a tough question I think to kind of conceptualize and perhaps for those of you who haven't seen your question answered and there were a lot of questions we had almost 30 questions that came in so I apologize that we can't get to them all today however please feel free to reach out directly or to webinars at engineeringforchange.org and we will make sure to share the questions with him and post answers all of you should be seeing now the thank you slide we like to thank all of you for attending and remind you to share your feedback with us regarding this webinar by using the survey widget at the bottom right hand of your screen this was our first time trying out this new platform so we apologize for any stumbles along the way we hope to get better and smoother with our platform for those of you who are just getting your PDHs the code is listed on the screen please follow the instructions on our webinar page on how to get your PDHs and don't forget to become an E4C member to get information on our upcoming webinars we look forward to seeing all of you on our next webinar on June 24th on 3D printing I wish you all a good day or good evening wherever you may be take care now, thank you