Impossible is my hashtag

Making the impossible a reality is what will still differentiate us from the best intelligent machines we will build in the future.

Entrepreneurship

Being an entrepreneur for almost all my business life and coming from an entrepreneur’s family, it was no big surprise that one day I will support other entrepreneurs to become successful as well. After my wife and I decided to no longer run businesses ourselves, we decided to help young entrepreneurs build their companies, like we have been helped by mentors and investors to build ours.

Living for the longest part of our business life in Silicon Valley, we started the Society3 Accelerator in San Francisco in 2014 and ran eight badges so far. Since the beginning, we have been blessed with a 50% success rate, measured by external follow on funding of our portfolio companies. We were excited to have found a way to cut the average failure rate of 90% almost in half. During these years we founded the World Innovations Forum and expanded our reach into Europe, mainly Switzerland and Germany, Asia, mainly Vietnam, Nepal, and South Korea, and also into Africa, mainly Rwanda, Ghana, and Kenya. The most asked question was “How could you come up with so many innovative business ideas and make them successful?”

After a quest to find out how ideas are actually created, I came across an eye-opening TED-Talk from David Eagleman a neuroscience Ph.d. from Stanford. It inspired me to learn any aspect of thought creation and learning and composed a model how disruptive ideas were created, taking my own thought processes into consideration and trying to find correlations. Long story short, we gave up our retirement and founded yet another company BlueCallom envisioning building solutions to help pretty much everybody who is interested to become innovative.

“Impossible is my hashtag”

Innovation

Innovation has captivated my interest since I was a boy. It never stopped driving me to innovate.

At age four, my father gave me a concertina. Being extremely curious, I cut it open to see what’s inside. It was disappointing to see nothing but an empty space. The only interesting thing was the metal pieces, but nothing that looked like creating music. When my mother found out she was about to be very angry, I was told later. But my father stopped her as he was very impressed with me trying to “sneak into this device to find out how it works. All that was left for me from this scene: It’s OK to be curious and trying to find out everything. Fast forward: My very first blog post was about innovation.

Innovation is the ART of technology. Creativity at its best – and when done right, innovation is useful for millions of people. Most importantly, it is the CORE ENGINE of any economy on this planet. 

Eventually, I decided to find out what innovation really is, how it is made, where it comes from, and when innovation s really innovation. My first book about innovation, “Innovations Paradigm,” was more or less a collection of all thoughts, findings, relations, experiences, and effects from innovation I could find. On one side, it touches briefly on the 12,000 years of innovation history, and on the other side takes the latest understanding from neuroscientists how ideas get formed and composed in our brain. It became the base material for my second book (in the making), “Your Innovative Mind”.

“Impossible is my hashtag”

Future

The future is the only timespan we can influence. And humans did so, for the past 12,000 years, once we understood to farm and harvest, built buildings, organized ourselves in larger groups, and later began with the industrial revolution. With an ever-deeper understanding of our mind, our neural network, our DNA, and more we are on the verge of an intellectual revolution.

When understanding our brain we understand the limits of our capacity. However since humans are designed to augment any of its limits through machines, we will also find ways to extend the limits of our intellectual capacity – without drilling holes into our respective sculls. That future is more intriguing than anything any human ever experienced. With the new intellectual revolution, we will be able to consciously think through challenges and opportunities that we cannot even comprehend today.

For instance, it is an undeniable fact that planet Earth will one day no longer be a good host for humanity. Yes, it may be far in the future, yet it may be closer than we are willing to accept. The natural denial process from most of us rejects them to even consider the situation.

Human evolution is nature’s best bet to let biological life survive beyond the lifespan of the planet it descends from. The research for alternative inhabitable planets has already begun. Earth is our nest – one day we will literally learn to fly and explore the universe for all reasons we already know today, limited space on earth, population growth, risks from asteroids, resource limitations such as water, fresh air, uranium, lithium, and so forth. Think big, think bold, and outside the nest (box). “Impossible is my hashtag”

Want to engage?

Send me a message or check out BlueCallom.

BlueCallom, AI-driven Neuro Innovation Management

We are rewriting the book of innovation. BlueCallom was founded to change the way we conduct innovation. Highly influenced by neuroscience, we initially developed methods to innovate. We are leveraging the newfound knowledge about how our brain composes and processes ideas, in particular radically innovative ideas. Exceptional results required us to find solutions that deal with an enormous valuable amount of data. Moreover, we needed to find ways that guide innovation teams through the maze of innovation possibilities. The early attempts to use Artificial Intelligence wasn’t very successful. But with the inception of GPT-3, then ChatGPT we found a breakthrough in enterprise innovation management. Today BlueCallom is an AI-Native software that manages a two to three year innovation process with hundreds of tasks and tens of thousands of data points, which would have been impossible without AI. With the help of our own Prompt Framing Technology we make AI enterprise ready for thousands of employees who do not know anything about prompt engineering or how AI really works.

“The Silicon Valley Podcast” by Shawn Flynn (Nov 2020)

“Makes you smart today” podcast by Douglas MacKevett (Aug 2019)

Impossible is my hashtag

What’s on top of my mind these days?

Impossible is my #hashtag

It’s not hanging out at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Maybe later at age 140 or so :)

  • For me personally, exploring the biggest challenges and making the impossible a reality is far more intriguing than anything else.
  • Empowering others to create their own future, a future of mobility, renewable energy a future of better food and healthier life, a future of better education, and more fun and peace is what keeps me up. Empowering teams to use their naturally given creativity that is mostly covered and suppressed in our societal structure, education, and organizational mechanics, is what I prefer over just laying on the beach.
  • Getting nations out of poverty is one of the big goals of the western world. While it is probably a well-meant and noble gesture, we can’t even organize our own society very well. How can we dare to influence other societies in how they should live? The best way of getting societies out of poverty is to let them evolve the way nature has it in mind. Harvesting their resources, taking their talents, dictating our ethics, and enforcing our ideologies is everything but well-meant.
  • The day all nations learn that they can only be on the top of their wealth and prosperity potential when all the other nations reached their own – we achieved the highest level of societal development. And that is not the end of development but the beginning of joint development at levels we can’t even imagine today.