How a Comment can Make a Difference

When in 2015 I was asked by the MIT Technology Review team (after I had commented on an article about the life-long work of Jay W. Forrester) to share in more detail my personal encounter with Jay W. Forrester during a workshop in 2007 I was more than happy to share this, and how he influenced my vision that has stayed to the present day.

The article appeared around this time in the summer of 2015 and can be read online here.

Fischertechnik and more

Back in the day, in the 70's when not too many cars were around in our street I used to put Fischertechnik "sailing boat" models into action, "flowing across" the empty street. Besides that the various course magazines from Christiani that my father, an electrical engineer working at the ZDF camera department for many years, had gotten his engineering education from, infused some more insights into engineering.

However, somehow engineering never really pulled my inner passion. Looking back it's even more astonishing that now, about forty years later, my passion has transcended into exponential technologies and their implications leading towards another blog called BlueFuture2012.

A Brown Field ...

... where everything started.

In 1969 our family moved from Nackenheim, a small village on the Rhine famous for Carl Zuckmayer and its vineyards, to Mainz-Lerchenberg. This suburb just recently had been constructed on the brown field about 10 km out of Mainz next to the headquarters of German Television ZDF.

http://www.mainz-lerchenberg.de/

Not only had we lots of free and semi-finished space outside our home, a couple of hundreds of meters to the open fields and orchards that still span out to the horizon. Rather in our home, my father an electrical engineer with lots of interest fields (from model plane flying, interconnecting the house to what you would call the "Intelligent Wired House" nowadays, and building sheds in the garden) set up the socalled "Play Cellar". There piles of wood, tools and other material was at hand to be used by us, my sister and myself, as well as friends to build stuff out of nothing.

Why do I still remember so clearly these days?

How everything began ..

... this will tell the story from the idea to set up an Entrepreneurial Think Tank has come from. Deep in the hidden (mostly to that day) history of my past life there lie the real reasons for starting the project.

I will post rather short episodes that are relevant for the current time.