Some of the many benefits of my job are meetings with entrepreneurs. Many of these individuals have gone through the University of Michigan and are living their dreams. Some of them lead companies, others buy and sell companies, and others invest in companies. Entrepreneurs are as different as can be. It would be hard to pick them out from a lineup.

But, there are two commonalities I see in them and that have now become two of the most important questions for me when students walk into my office.

Entrepreneurs, irrespective of age, are not defined by what they are, but rather by what they want to be. They cannot stop thinking of their companies, the way their inventions are going to change lives, and the tremendous opportunities that are in front of them.

This recognition has become the first question of a two-question entrepreneurship test that I use many times a day: what do you want to be? I couldn’t care less whether you are a freshman in Mechanical Engineering or a graduated MBA, a retired entrepreneur, or whether you are in a suit or in torn jeans: what do you want to be?  Do you want to change the world? Do you want to solve the big challenges of this century? Do you want to run your business?

And, there is a second question that distinguishes people dreaming about their future from others who are just having fantasies: what are you doing about it? That second question goes to the heart of the recognition that we control many aspects of our future. I always remember the joke of the man who prays each evening about becoming a Lotto millionaire. He prays for years and never wins anything. After ten years finally God speaks to him: “Help me out and buy a Lotto ticket”!!

Many would-like-to-be-entrepreneurs behave the same way. They have great dreams and aspirations, but they always move action to tomorrow. They even write proposals or talk about bringing in money, but they don’t fire on all cylinders. Sometimes, they come up with excuses that are perfectly reasonable– there are finals, there is lack of funding. But, entrepreneurs are not people that start tomorrow, they are people that get to it now.

So, you ask me, “Am I an entrepreneur?”

Well, what do you want to be, and what do you do about it?

During my first visit to the US from Switzerland in 1995 I lost my rental car key in the endless sand of the Californian coast. I was attending a conference with leaders of my field of research and had driven four of them to the beach in Dana Point to enjoy the evening before a big poster session. I still hear jokes about my mishap today, particularly from some of my senior colleagues who had to walk back for three miles to get back to the hotel.

But, there is one other thing I will never forget: This mistake cost me a small fortune as a PhD student. The most important reason for this was the cost of the locksmith. Despite looking up his number in the local yellow pages, the guy drove his car for close to an hour – and I paid all of it. Needless to say, I also paid a weekend surcharge, quickly learning that 24-hour service did not mean what I thought. But, the key problem was that I was looking for the locksmith without any understanding or consideration of where his business was located. All I did was look up “locksmith” in the Yellow Pages.

Fast-forward 15 years: I was recently in Baltimore and I needed a GPS device – I had a very important meeting and I was short on time. Using Google Maps running on my BlackBerry I identified all relevant business in the area. I  found some ratings of previous customers and I now only worried about one thing: where is the closest store?  I got the GPS, and arrived 10 minutes early.

This is due to a major set of advances by Google and some of its other competitors. They recognized, of course, that most relevant information should not be organized alphabetically, but should be organized by location and time. If I am hungry, I only care about places in my vicinity that are open now.

However, Google Earth and related products have a much broader impact if the data-sets make public gain in importance and visibility. This opening of data, enabled by a visual interface, can have tremendous consequences and will generate opportunities for the scientific community, the business community, and the individual user of the internet.

To stimulate some thinking, here are two products that are tremendously important or just plain cool. In fact, they are so interesting I would pay a subscription fee if they become available.

Pollution meter: As a father of a child with asthma, I worry about pollution because there are too many clear and established relations between asthma and pollution. Imagine having position-resolved pollution data summarized in a pollution meter which consists of 3-4 key quantities with direct and established health impacts. Each home, each part, each road would have a PM value. For example, a PM of 20/20/10 might be indicative of Big Sky, MT, and a PM=80/70/80 may be the pollution in Houston, TX. This pollution meter would finally make pollution real and actionable. I would look at the PM scale when I buy a house – it really matters whether you are up-wind or down-wind from the big smoke-stack! I would look at this when I choose a hotel or a vacation spot for my family. The PM scale would start affecting property values if enough people start using them and the pressure on polluters would mount. I would like to populate this data-set with measurements from space so I don’t have to trust polluters at a national level. The PM scale could change the world.

Water quality: One of the most important challenges to humanity, especially in developing regions, is the availability of healthy water. Imagine if we made such water quality data available for all major water bodies on Earth. We would be able to transmit that information to people and enable action, save lives. There are some fantastic algorithms out there that people have developed. Some algorithms are in fact able to detect certain pollutants from space. We estimate that only 5-10% of these NASA or NOAA collected data ever get analyzed and even a smaller fraction ever gets disseminated. It’s a shame – life-saving data are stored away until they are irrelevant. So, put the data out there- disseminate the code openly, and let others deal with the data that are more passionate than you are! A friend recently told me about a study documenting a very high degree of correlation of the occurrence of certain illnesses, or even overall life-expectancy, and the correspondence to certain water-shed regions. In other words: people die because they are drinking bad water. One valley over, people are ok, because they are lucky enough to have better water. So, where are these data-sets? Where is the coordinated follow-up? I am sure over half of this problem may be solved, but the solution is sitting on a dusty hard-disc in some data-center someplace. Who wants to talk about international leadership today? Leadership today is not measured in megatons of TNT, but in gigabytes of data put to use in the interest of humanity!

Explore the universe: There are many problems in cosmology and astrophysics that require extremely complicated tools, such as billion-dollar spacecraft. Today, I saw the first data of the Fermi telescope recently launched by NASA. It’s just amazing! But, there is another frontier of research: many interested people world-wide working on one and the same project. Imagine if we imaged the sky every hour – the entire sky – and put all data in a data-base for everybody to look at and analyze. I think we would find the most amazing breakthroughs using entirely different paradigms. We would be able to sum up these images and see deeper and deeper into the sky. With sufficient image stabilization and large enough telescopes, we could do much of what the Hubble telescope did, but from the ground. But, there is more. People around the world and computer programs would find supernovae – exploding stars. We would double the number of known and observed supernovae in less than one year by some estimates. This has enormous consequences for our knowledge of distances of stars and the distribution of matter. We would also have the best survey of asteroids. In addition, we would find obstructions of stellar light by dark Jupiter-sized objects. We don’t have many observations of such events. Great statistics of such observations would have huge impact in our understanding of the mass in the universe and thus address key cosmological problems. The University of Michigan can take a leadership role in this through their ROTSE array which has provided exciting results already. But, it takes the paradigm shift: let’s turn the data lose and get them uploaded so others can use them.

I would like to know how I can help people to make a dent into this and to enable solving these problems. Very often, we think of social change only in the context of living in Africa in a cottage teaching farming. That is a wonderful activity. But, how about solving problems from your computer by attacking them head-on? I used to take images in my winter coat nearly freezing to death. Now, we can do breakthrough astronomy with a computer. We have lots of cool data in many labs – let’s unleash them for the good of the entire world and to the benefit of our science.

We have a meeting on Scientific Applications with Google Earth on October 22/23 at the University of Michigan. The morning of October 22 is open to the public. If you are from Michigan, please attend – we have some amazing speakers. Or you can also sign up for the Google Earth workshop at http://googleearthconference.engin.umich.edu/ and attend tutorials and topical workshops in a wide range of areas.

Democracies enable individuals to make decisions for an entire country using a very simple process: you write down on a sheet – or punch into a machine – who you like and who you don’t like. No matter how much you know about a subject you say “yes” or “no” – and, all of us together will determine what happens. It’s amazingly simple, and unbelievably powerful! Would this be a good process to be creative? One might ask, just poll a bunch of people and let them decide.

I grew up in Switzerland, one of the oldest and most passionate democracies in the world. One Sunday morning each month, the entire village converges upon the school and answers questions that 100,000 or more Swiss cares about. It’s about everything: immigration, schools, protection of forests, and the health care system. Once I went to the voting booth in my officer’s uniform and voted against getting rid of the Swiss military. Thankfully, most Swiss agreed with me. I always wondered what I would have done on Monday if the result was different…

As imperfect and as ugly as the democratic process is – I love it. I am a very proud US citizen. I feel the most proud when I cast a vote – and I will do so in November.

There is, however, one aspect of democracies I have never liked – they are very, very slow and hate change. The more direct the democracy is the slower the change. I still feel shame to remember that in 1989, the last Swiss canton (or, state) was forced by the government to give its women voting rights. I am sad to say that I even remember the federal vote in Switzerland on women’s voting rights in 1971 – I was barely four. My entire family and most of my mountain village voted against it. I specifically remember asking my mother what her opinion was on the issue and how surprised I was when she told me that she is against it. I know exactly where I sat in the kitchen when she told me and that I did not understand why.

I don’t think that the Swiss are generally more disrespectful of women. I think the key lessons learned from the Swiss women’s voting rights embarrassment are that democracies, especially direct democracies, are slow, slow to change. It thus appears that change-agents or innovators are not democratic. I think that’s a very profound piece of knowledge.  

I have often done an experiment in my classroom that makes the key point of this post. I split the class up in teams of different size and I challenged the teams to solve a difficult and open-ended engineering problem. I then collected solutions and had the class decide two key characteristics of each solution: 1) its level of innovation, and 2) its level of technical accuracy. The result was basically the same every time I did this: small teams win the innovation category, and don’t score well on the technical category. However, big teams are very good on the technical metric but almost never score high on innovation. I have done this experiment on multiple occasions and I rarely see deviations from this general ordering.

I have therefore become increasingly convinced that the game of imagination and innovation are disciplines that are more like tennis and less like football. You may have one or two people on your side of the net, not a team of forty players. That does not mean that it’s impossible to generate great ideas with a group of forty – but it is a heck of a lot more difficult! In fact, there are many stories of successful entrepreneurs that were actively discouraged by many before their idea took off.

One of the most important challenges to creative minds or innovators is often the voice of many who don’t believe, especially in the early stages. Entrepreneurship takes leadership and tremendous resilience.  As important as it is to listen to customers and friends, don’t think of creativity or innovation as a beauty contest! This is not a problem where votes count. It’s all you and your idea, and where you are going to bring it. It takes a lot of personality to stand your ground in the face of adversity and challenges, especially for young people. But, it’s a wonderful feeling to prove naysayers wrong. Try it.

About my Friend Brian “Oscar” Grimm, 1974-2008

My friend, Brian “Oscar” Grimm passed away on my birthday, October 1^st. “Oscar”, as he liked to be called, was a graduate of the Michigan School of Art and Design. He started Cardinal Design, LLC, a small company focused on visualizing complicated things, such as science or engineering. With his partner, Tanja Andrews, he also co-founded Freshtopia.net, an award-winning website and video-blog dealing with food, sustainability and the environment.

With Oscar’s passing one of my great friends moved on from earth, and with that the earth just became a little bit less creative, a little bit less cool. In fact, Oscar was one of the most creative and intelligent people I have ever known.

I met him in 1998 as part of a design effort with Perry Samson and his start-up LivingText.com. I came in and started talking about this big international presentation I was going to give about solar physics and space weather. I wanted to do the presentation in visuals, not words, because it crossed disciplinary boundaries, and I had concluded that there was no hope for me to communicate my key message without using a common vocabulary: drawings, animations, and images. But, there were almost no three-dimensional models around and much of the content had to be created from scratch.

Most importantly, the biggest challenge I faced was to learn how to interact with artists – to find a vocabulary that was understandable to both of us. My formulas and special expressions did not work – it took me about five minutes to learn that. We spent hours drawing on boards and napkins. Very quickly I noticed that Oscar asked me to explain how things work, not just how they look. He would start his designs only once he knew how each piece worked, and how they interrelated. His designs were stunning: His animations were shown on TV, his images became title pages of magazines, and his movies stunned amateurs and professional alike. His online videos (also known as “Vodcasts”) earned him two Vloggies, the Oscar equivalent for this art-form.

For me, the biggest surprise was Oscar’s understanding of my research: After working with him for a few years, his grasp of solar physics was superior to the understanding of many professionals, including – to my surprise – many of my PhD students. Oscar would show up with questions that would stun me. His comments often focused on the center of today’s breakthrough research, and he knew instinctively what was important and what was peripheral to our understanding. It was absolutely natural to him, because he was a true artist.

Due to my European roots, I have a better education in art and art history than many of my colleagues I work with. I actually know the difference between Monet and Manet, I analyzed Picasso, it’s relation to Cezanne, and stood once for two hours in front of Paul Klee painting that I found absolutely dreadful. But, it is Oscar who taught me what art is really about, and it is he who has made me understand how important the arts are for our lives today.

Art is about creativity, it is all about finding a vocabulary to talk about the significance of the human experience. It took me a long time to learn that breakthrough engineering and great research are often about that very same thing. Creativity and art are at the heart of progress, and the human condition. Art is also strongly linked with engineering and entrepreneurship today: I am amazed by new forms of communication that are now enabling art today. We are only just starting to understand the connection between engineering, science and art in a world connected by the internet, with pictures taken on every phone, and with an outpouring of creativity that can be shared world-wide -immediately.

Oscar understood this and our countless hours of discussions have forever changed my understanding of the relation between engineering, science and the arts. In fact, he may have done too good of a job: I can no longer think or talk about a new idea, or formulate a plan, without a drawing on a white board, a notepad, or even a napkin. That’s the prime reason our entire wall in the Center for Entrepreneurship is a white board.

Due to the severity of his illness, some of Oscar’s spirit passed on before his body finally gave way. Here is what I wanted to tell him as a good bye: “I am very sad about your passing and have come to say good bye, Oscar. I will always miss you! You touched my life because you taught me new ways of understanding: I loved watching you take a pen and draw on a board – two lines on the board and I could “see it”. I loved your friendly laughter, your hug, your constructive feedback, the way you made me learn things, and I will never forget your enormous patience with me. Thank you! You introduced me to your friends. I now consider them my friends – it’s one of the biggest gifts you could have given me. You understand more about the world than most of us, and I am grateful for everything I managed to learn from you. Good bye, my friend. You will always be in my heart!“