Real-Life Decision Making
You graduated with a master's degree in computer science, specializing
in artificial intelligence. As you are working in the real world, you realize
that even with your master's degree, earning a living at what you do
is not as easy as you first thought. Competition for sponsors and scarce research
funding is tough.
Hassan Ait-Kaci is a professor of computing science. He says that in order
to thrive in this extremely competitive industry, you will have to "develop
a product in the next six months to a year, because with the speed of technology,
if you do not get your idea out to the public, you will not be taken seriously.
"Even if you know of a technology that works, what costs a lot for the
industry is how many people are working at it and for how long. If you're
an owner, you want to minimize development time and any idea that is going
to curtail this to a minimum period is going to be a hot sell."
You have an idea to create an application that will assist programmers
in shortening development time. You want to create a program that will write
programs for you in programming language. You want this program to take over
the menial tasks to assist programmers in developing and creating their products
more quickly and efficiently. To be successful, you will have to rush your
product to the market.
"First one to the market usually gets the lion's share," says Ait-Kaci.
"It does not matter if your product is the best quality, so your development
time is precious."
To get your project and dreams off the ground, you will have to attract
grants and sponsors quickly. To attract the investors needed for you to develop
your idea, you will have to convince them that your idea is valid and well
worth their investment. You know that there is a lot of demand in the industry
for new products.
This demand has propelled some of your colleagues to exaggerate their claims
in order to attract investors. "False claims will get the market share," Ait-Kaci
says. "This is what will make people invest money."
This is a hard position for you. You feel that if you want to get where
the money is, you will have to exaggerate in order to attract investors. If
you do this, it could jeopardize your reputation as well as your professional
integrity. So before you step into meetings with potential investors, you
must decide what stand you are going to take.
What do you do?