Thursday, January 19, 2012

Bridging the Gulf - Creatives with Policy Makers

Nigel Cameron, whom I had the pleasure to meet at AMPlifyfestival 2011 last June in Sydney, with great folks on his panel.

General question that comes up: in which way can the "super-fast" innovators, VCs get along with the policy makers?

Whom do you know in #SiliconSaxony's policy arena who is innovative, open-minded, and in an appropriate position to discuss some future concrete concepts on the educational, and high-tech future of Saxony?

Sunday, January 1, 2012

2012 - Innovation and Entrepreneurship

With the first day of the year 2012 coming slowly to an end here in Dresden (another five hours to go ;-)), my thoughts race back to late 2008 when I decided not to work for a consulting firm, rather venture out on my own. Coming from an engineering family (with roots in tailoring, and shoemaking), my mind seems to find new opportunities to create new business ideas, and ease the constraints in given business processes (almost unstoppable, as former bosses had to find out).

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So after a visit to a really strange business school with no teachers, only a head coach, and a couple of coaches, up in Finland it became clear to me that I am by far not the only "crazy one", and that it needs the appropriate environment to let geniuses shine their hidden capabilities.

Since those days, I read and write, reflect, and act more than in the decades before when I often was forced to be a "cog in the system" yet nothing could really stop my desire to make the world (around me) a better place, step by step (preferably small (!) ones, yet continuously).

"Innovation and entrepreneurship are thus needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as in businesses. It is precisely because innovation and entrepreneurship are not "root and branch" but "one step at a time," a product here, a policy there, a public service yonder; because the are not planned but focused on this opportunity and that need; because they are tentative and will disappear if they do not produce the expected and needed results; because, in other words, they are pragmatic rather than dramatic and modest rather than grandiose - that they promise to keep any society, economy, industry, public service, or business flexible and self-renewing. They achieve what Jefferson hoped to achieve through revolution in every generation, and they do so without bloodshed, civil war, or concentration camps, without economic catastrophe, but with purpose, with direction, and under control."

Quoted from Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1986, p. 254