General

For the visu­al­i­sa­tion of Traction‑X, a demon­stra­tor was devel­oped in a bach­e­lor the­sis.This was man­u­fac­tured with the help of addi­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing. To make the visu­al­i­sa­tion even more real­is­tic, the demon­stra­tor was dri­ven by a DC-motor and a step­per-motor. Many peo­ple are famil­iar with the state­ment: You can print any­thing! The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, this is true, but it is not prac­ti­cal and does not make sense. It is also impor­tant to com­bine the many dif­fer­ent process­es. Stan­dard alu­mini­um pro­files for the frame and plas­tic parts from three print­ing process­es were cho­sen as com­po­nents.Besides the FLM (Fused Lay­er Mod­el­ling) process, the SLS (selec­tive laser sin­ter­ing) and LS (laser sin­ter­ing) process­es were also used. When it comes to mate­ri­als, it is also impor­tant to see which mate­r­i­al makes the most sense. Com­po­nents with a sim­ple shape and low demands on strength and accu­ra­cy were print­ed from PETG (Poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late gly­col) fil­a­ment using the FLM process. These are the black com­po­nents on the demon­stra­tor. The rim parts were pro­duced from PA 12 (polyamide 12) by laser sin­ter­ing, then paint­ed in sil­ver. The plain bear­ing, the ring gear and the motor pin­ion were also pro­duced by laser sin­ter­ing. As high wear resis­tance and good slid­ing behav­iour are required, the mate­r­i­al Iglidur I3 from the com­pa­ny Igus (https://www.igus.de/product/719?artNr=I3-PL-10000) was used here. The dri­ve shaft is the sup­port­ing part of the demon­stra­tor. It con­nects the wheel to the frame. In order to avoid dam­age due to unex­pect­ed stress­es caused by trans­port or improp­er con­tact with the demon­stra­tor, for exam­ple, this was made of AlSi10Mg. A Rasp­ber­ry Pi is used to con­trol the two motors.The DC motor dri­ves the out­er rim, i.e. the tyre, via two gear stages.The spe­cial fea­ture here is that the gear stage locat­ed in the rim has dou­ble heli­cal gear­ing.Why this choice?A heli­cal gear has a smoother run­ning behav­iour and less noise com­pared to a degree gear, but axi­al forces are gen­er­at­ed.There­fore, either a heli­cal or axi­al ball bear­ing must be installed to coun­ter­act the axi­al forces or, alter­na­tive­ly, a dou­ble heli­cal gear­ing can be used, which does not gen­er­ate any axi­al forces. A step­per motor was used to sim­u­late com­pres­sion and rebound.The damper unit con­sists of two units.The upper damper unit con­sists of the upper damper con­nec­tion, the step­per motor and the trape­zoidal spin­dle. The low­er damper unit con­sists of the low­er damper con­nec­tion and the trape­zoidal nut. The trape­zoidal spin­dle and the trape­zoidal nut con­vert the rota­tion­al move­ment of the step­per motor into an axi­al movement.

For the new rear axle, as it is also suc­cinct­ly called at the uni­ver­si­ty, it was not nec­es­sary to “rein­vent the wheel”, but at least the hub­less dri­ve wheel with a huge wheel bear­ing is a design inno­va­tion. In which the dri­ve axle is shift­ed off-cen­tre and con­nect­ed to an out­er rim via a spur gear.  The nice thing about start­ing a com­plete­ly new design is that you have all the design free­dom at your dis­pos­al. How­ev­er, it is also a great chal­lenge, because it is both com­pli­cat­ed and time-con­­sum­ing to take into account all the require­ments and prop­er­ties of the Traction‑X rim to be designed. After all, man­u­fac­tur­ing, assem­bly and han­dling in the cus­tomer’s hands should be tak­en into account right from the start, as should the tech­ni­cal require­ments of the indi­vid­ual com­po­nents, such as the max­i­mum slid­ing speeds or the forces that can be endured. Not to men­tion the avail­abil­i­ty of afford­able com­po­nents that meet these require­ments with­out mak­ing the busi­ness case impos­si­ble, i.e. mak­ing the prod­uct unsellably expen­sive. It is all the more pleas­ant to be able to fall back on good pre­lim­i­nary work on the demon­stra­tor and patent draw­ings, despite all the con­struc­tive free­dom.  Thus, in the course of the last eight months and in the com­bi­na­tion of two indi­vid­ual project works and a bach­e­lor the­sis, a com­plete and func­tion­al CAD mod­el of patent vari­ant 1 (Dri­ve-Train Swing-Wheel) was cre­at­ed, which can be seen in Fig. 1. In addi­tion, sev­er­al finite ele­ment analy­ses deter­mined that the Traction‑X rim would with­stand the antic­i­pat­ed loads with a high degree of cer­tain­ty. At the begin­ning, it quick­ly became clear that the scope and com­plex­i­ty of the require­ments or tasks were too much for just one Bach­e­lor’s the­sis (mine) and one indi­vid­ual project the­sis (Jonas Bur­winkel). There­fore, we sep­a­rat­ed the areas of require­ments analy­sis and pre­lim­i­nary design into a sec­ond indi­vid­ual project work, which I car­ried out. At the same time, I was able to use the time to famil­iarise myself with the oper­a­tion of Fusion360. This was fol­lowed in my bach­e­lor the­sis by the detailed design of the entire rim with com­po­nents that are actu­al­ly avail­able on the mar­ket and the mesh­ing to the finite ele­ment mod­el, start­ing from the CAD mod­el of my Traction‑X design. In order to obtain real­is­tic results for the fol­low­ing cal­cu­la­tion of the sta­t­ic stress­es, the cal­cu­la­tion para­me­ters used had to be deter­mined in the best pos­si­ble way. Fig­ure 2 shows the graph­i­cal eval­u­a­tion of one of the cal­cu­lat­ed load cas­es. It can be seen that the stress­es in the cur­rent design are low (high safe­ty) and thus mate­r­i­al or weight of the rim can be reduced.  Par­al­lel to my work, my fel­low stu­dent at the TH Köln, Jonas Bur­winkel, took care of the design and cal­cu­la­tion of the gear shaft in his project work.  At the begin­ning of the project, it was impor­tant to under­stand the com­plex and not entire­ly triv­ial sta­t­ics of the rim in order to be able to cal­cu­late the loads of dri­ving on the indi­vid­ual com­po­nents. How­ev­er, since the dri­ving oper­a­tion of a scoot­er is any­thing but sta­t­ic, we came up with the fol­low­ing sub­sti­tute mod­el: for the high­est start­ing loads, we imag­ined an immi­nent traf­fic light start, a “cav­a­lier start” (a some­what dusty expres­sion). The dri­ver there­fore gives “full throt­tle” or com­mands the elec­tric motor to full start­ing torque by turn­ing the knob on the right, but remains on the front brake until the traf­fic light turns green. This load case was men­tal­ly super­im­posed with fur­ther dynam­ic increas­es due to dri­ving through pot­holes. Since our sys­tem behaves very well and lin­ear­ly, this is per­mis­si­ble. How­ev­er, the free-body dia­grams of the com­plex trans­mis­sion, which do not appear in this way or in a sim­i­lar way in any sta­t­ics text­book in the world, were a prob­lem. With the oper­at­ing loads and the require­ments for the ser­vice life of our Traction‑X dri­ve, it was then pos­si­ble, in con­sul­ta­tion with a well-known bear­ing man­u­fac­tur­er, to select suit­able bear­ings for the gear­box and to design the gear­ing and the dri­ve shaft. The large wheel bear­ing turned out to be much more com­plex. Know­ing that in the sec­ond patent vari­ant this would be replaced by a race on three rollers, the pre­lim­i­nary choice fell on a so-called thin-ring bear­ing. Although this ful­fils the tech­ni­cal require­ments, it would be far too expen­sive for use on Traction‑X. Here, the dif­fer­ence between a mass mar­ket for afford­able scoot­ers and the mar­ket for con­struc­tion machin­ery or mil­i­tary vehi­cles, where such bear­ings are also used but where costs play a minor role or no role at all, becomes clear. How­ev­er, this expen­sive bear­ing has already been replaced in the cur­rent design ver­sion by a so-called wire-race bear­ing, which is much cheap­er.  In order to be able to trans­mit high pow­er, the rim should be pro­vid­ed with oil bath lubri­ca­tion. This requires very large radi­al shaft seal­ing rings that seal the cir­cum­fer­en­tial rim bed against the stand­ing inner rims. These seal­ing rings are addi­tion­al­ly pro­tect­ed from the out­side with caps. Since we do not want to intro­duce hub caps for two-wheel­ers, of course, we have agreed on the term “wheel ring”. These clamp in the grooves that are also used to attach the glued bal­anc­ing adhe­sive weights. All in all, this idea met with a very pos­i­tive response, also because the good design­er should famil­iarise him­self with the habits of his cus­tomers, some of whom clean their vehi­cles with a high-pres­­sure clean­er out of con­ve­nience, but do not want to risk dam­ag­ing their rear wheel dri­ve.  To increase the clean­li­ness of the oil, met­al debris is col­lect­ed by a mag­net on the filler plug. To make the oil change par­tic­u­lar­ly user-friend­­ly, the oil drain plug is eas­i­ly acces­si­ble on the out­side of the rim bed. These design details were also met with praise, as they sim­pli­fy main­te­nance and increase ser­vice life.  Moti­vat­ed by the solu­tion of each chal­lenge and by the exchange with the team mem­bers dur­ing the bi-week­­ly meet­ings, it is

Pre­de­vel­op­ment Team­work The Coro­na year has cost many lives, caused upheavals and bank­rupt­cies in the econ­o­my, and has caused inde­scrib­able social suf­fer­ing and per­son­al empti­ness. How­ev­er, as the only pos­i­tive aspect, it has trained us to be mas­ters of remote con­tact via inter­net com­put­er vision. This will make many a busi­ness trip unnec­es­sary in the future. Mod­ern tele­com made pos­si­ble the enter­prise of Traction‑X @ TH Köln as a team project of stu­dents under my lead­er­ship. We are doing pre­lim­i­nary devel­op­ment, part­ly for a fic­ti­tious cus­tomer and a not yet con­sol­i­dat­ed spec­i­fi­ca­tion, part­ly for the Ital­ian Piag­gio mar­ket leader as poten­tial new cus­tomer. In bi-week­ly vir­tu­al meet­ings we dis­cuss orga­ni­za­tion­al and tech­ni­cal issues in an effi­cient and pleas­ant way, although we are most­ly far away from each oth­er in the north­west­ern parts of Ger­many. This has enabled us to build up a good, almost friend­ly sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal rela­tion­ship, which would have been impos­si­ble if face-to-face meet­ings had to be held on site in Cologne. The patron and men­tor of all this is Prof. Bet­zler, to whom I am very much indebt­ed for this, but with whom I am also con­nect­ed by a man­i­fold tech­ni­cal-sci­en­tif­ic agree­ment, an engi­neer­ing-sci­en­tif­ic-tech­ni­cal intu­ition, so to speak, which we share in a sim­i­lar way. Specif­i­cal­ly, a team of two stu­dents from the Far East worked on a project enti­tled “Bench­mark­ing Motor Scoot­ers” to inves­ti­gate the advan­tages of an elec­tric scoot­er equipped with Traction‑X in terms of accom­mo­da­tion space, vehi­cle geom­e­try, mass, cen­ter of grav­i­ty and result­ing dri­ving dynam­ics. For this pur­pose, a two-wheel­er from BMW was used as a ref­er­ence. Tam-An and Thanusaan were a good team and pro­vid­ed valu­able insight for the project. Thank you both. With a sim­i­lar task and in the con­text of his indi­vid­ual project work, anoth­er stu­dent looked at the use of Traction‑X for motor­cy­cles. He devel­oped a com­pre­hen­sive spread­sheet in which all com­po­nents of a motor­cy­cle are list­ed accord­ing to mass and par­tial cen­ter of grav­i­ty and in which the total cen­ter of grav­i­ty as well as the relat­ed mass moments of iner­tia of the vehi­cle are cal­cu­lat­ed. These char­ac­ter­is­tic val­ues were cal­cu­lat­ed for a com­plete­ly recon­fig­ured vehi­cle, which in par­tic­u­lar has the Traction‑X final dri­ve with inte­grat­ed wheel sus­pen­sion, and com­pared with the same para­me­ters of a con­ven­tion­al motor­cy­cle. This spread­sheet, cre­at­ed with a lot of ded­i­ca­tion, has already been reused and cit­ed by some of his fel­low stu­dents. Nis has done a good job, and I would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to thank him very much. One of the most impor­tant pieces of work is the devel­op­ment of a scaled mod­el or demon­stra­tor of Traction‑X. This par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing work was cho­sen by a stu­dent from Ems­land, Ger­many, who trained as an addi­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing expert in par­al­lel with his stud­ies. In gen­er­al any the­sis involv­ing the cre­ation of hard­ware is always fraught with mul­ti­ple prac­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties, and these are mag­ni­fied when kine­mat­ic ani­ma­tion, i.e. elec­tri­cal­ly pow­ered and elec­tron­i­cal­ly con­trolled mobil­i­ty, is added to the mix. This chal­lenge was addressed by com­bin­ing an indi­vid­ual project work with a bach­e­lor the­sis. Andre is also my team part­ner and val­ued co-founder of Traction‑X. Two stu­dents of a cur­rent team are work­ing in three cou­pled con­struc­tive papers on the design and finite ele­ment cal­cu­la­tion of Traction‑X for a potent elec­tric scoot­er. In the first indi­vid­ual project work, a require­ments analy­sis and the pre­lim­i­nary design of the Traction‑X rim have been worked on with great com­mit­ment, tech­ni­cal exper­tise and atten­tion to detail. The same com­mit­ment is now being applied to the sub­se­quent bach­e­lor’s the­sis. Mean­while, his col­league is work­ing on the design and cal­cu­la­tion of the asso­ci­at­ed com­bined dri­ve shaft and swing arm axle. Both are using the project-inter­nal devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment of Fusion 360 and Autodesk, respec­tive­ly, which has very con­vinc­ing pre- and post-proces­sors and a very fast FE solver. Yan­nik and Jonas work togeth­er in par­al­lel, but also like a well-rehearsed team

Net­work­ing Remote Rela­tion­ships Start­ing a busi­ness in the Coro­na year is brave, I was told. Dar­ing even, or sim­ply unwise, they said. Ret­ro­spec­tive­ly, I want to reflect on this and, in doing so, tell you about my start­up ven­ture, the foun­da­tion of which has not yet been ful­ly com­plet­ed, but the pre­req­ui­sites for which were cre­at­ed in 2020. At the end of 2019, I had con­tact­ed an inter­est­ed and sym­pa­thet­ic pro­fes­sor of auto­mo­tive engi­neer­ing at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Cologne. That was still before Coro­na, i.e. cor­re­spond­ing reports from a dis­tant Chi­nese province were not yet tak­en seri­ous­ly by politi­cians at that time. Basi­cal­ly, pro­fes­sors are busy and most in demand peo­ple, so I called myself lucky. In Feb­ru­ary, it was still pos­si­ble to meet in per­son in Cologne, to shake hands, to sit oppo­site each oth­er in an unbi­ased man­ner in a meet­ing room and to exam­ine, com­pre­hend and vis­it the exhibits, show­cas­es and the exper­i­men­tal field of the insti­tute. The joint appoint­ment dur­ing one of the first lec­tures of the semes­ter was first planned, then ques­tioned and final­ly can­celled. At that time, peo­ple were still think­ing of a rapid­ly pass­ing wave of infec­tion, as they were inex­pe­ri­enced with pan­demics. As a sub­sti­tute for a lec­ture pre­sen­ta­tion, I became famil­iar with the meth­ods of cre­at­ing an anno­ta­tion or sound­track of a pre­sen­ta­tion slide set, i.e. of mak­ing a kind of lec­ture movie. While famil­iar­iz­ing myself with the pre­sen­ta­tion pro­gram of the mar­ket leader, I learned that there are dif­fer­ent soft­ware licens­es and that the stan­dard ver­sion has a dif­fer­ent range of func­tion­al­i­ty than the pre­mi­um ver­sion, with­out this being appar­ent or doc­u­ment­ed any­where. Also the instal­la­tions are dif­fer­ent depend­ing on the oper­at­ing sys­tem, where­by con­fu­sion and arbi­trari­ness of the menus and sub­menus are sim­i­lar­ly annoy­ing in each case. Wel­come to the famous pro­ce­dure of “tri­al and error” — as if you wouldn’t know how to spend your time. In the first lec­ture, the pro­fes­sor relat­ed about our joint project to devel­op the motor scoot­er of the future and dis­trib­uted the address to the YouTube video. Some stu­dents were gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in my patent and had the time to look into it, which is not always pos­si­ble for every­one in work­ing life. Any­way, a group of stu­dents around Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bet­zler met or rather did not meet, but we arranged to have a video con­fer­ence. Video con­fer­ences are of course not new tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions. They had been around for years, were avail­able, but were used rather reluc­tant­ly. Too many tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties were asso­ci­at­ed with them. In the spring of 2020, they were with­out alter­na­tive, to use a com­mon expres­sion from pol­i­tics. Now they had to be embraced, as most work­ers, school­child­ren, stu­dents and oth­ers were uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly sent home and to work from domes­tic premis­es. Now the broad­band capa­bil­i­ties of the Inter­net provider and wire­less net­work had to be test­ed and ver­i­fied. A vari­ety of pro­grams for video con­fer­enc­ing, such as Skype, Webex, Zoom, GotoMeet­ing, Microsoft Teams and oth­ers, had to be installed and test­ed on var­i­ous occa­sions. Via video image we sud­den­ly and abrupt­ly get an inti­mate excerpt from the liv­ing world of the oth­er per­son. We see nar­row attic rooms with slop­ing ceil­ings and dorm­ers and sky­lights, dim­ly lit rooms with low ceil­ings in the base­ment and liv­ing room cup­boards from the era of pine fur­ni­ture, as well as yel­lowed oil paint­ings from the Wil­helmin­ian era. We also see amus­ing relics from the child­hood and youth of the now bare­ly matured stu­dents, for exam­ple the Lego ver­sion of the Mil­len­ni­um Fal­con of Han Solo, alias Har­ri­son Ford, or impos­ing license plates from Amer­i­ca’s “Gold­en State.” For my part, I had to get used to this sit­u­a­tion, not only because of the dis­tract­ing cir­cum­stances, but because it does­n’t con­form to the occa­sion of the inter­ac­tion, which is sup­posed to be of a busi­ness and sober nature after all. One feels a bit like a voyeur, regard­less of the fact that the video part­ner has a cer­tain amount of con­trol over what nar­row insight into his pri­vate life he is will­ing to give. Right from the start, Prof. Bet­zler took advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ty to fade in a rep­re­sen­ta­tive inte­ri­or shot with a kind of “blue screen” video in his back­ground. I would almost have believed that one of those leg­endary Ford GTs was actu­al­ly stand­ing on the test stand in the chas­sis tech­nol­o­gy lab­o­ra­to­ry of the Insti­tute of Auto­mo­tive Engi­neer­ing, which is looked at from his office, if occa­sion­al arti­facts such as float­ing head­phones had not revealed the dig­i­tal illusion.

I got it! Indeed! I don’t mean “heure­ka” or “Ευρηκα”, mean­ing „I did find the solu­tion“, because I already did that a few years ago. Now, in March 2020 final­ly, I got my patent grant­ed by the Ger­man Patent and Trade­mark Office, offi­cial­ly, so to speak. See the Reg­istry Infor­ma­tion of the DPMA. A patent in the field of vehi­cle tech­nol­o­gy, i.e. for a new type of sec­ondary dri­ve, com­bined with the wheel sus­pen­sion and the dri­ve wheel itself. Traction‑X con­tra­dicts the pop­u­lar belief that at the begin­ning of the 21st cen­tu­ry every­thing in the field of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing has already been invent­ed. Traction‑X is mechan­ics that can inspire, con­sist­ing of ground shafts for case-hard­ened run­ning sur­faces, pol­ished bear­ing-balls, pre­cise fits and exact cast­ings. Here, too, dig­i­ti­za­tion has long since found its way, because every wheel of a mod­ern vehi­cle is equipped with an elec­tron­i­cal­ly con­trolled brak­ing sys­tem that pre­vents the wheel from lock­ing dur­ing decel­er­a­tion. There would hard­ly be enough space here for a com­plete descrip­tion of the change­able saga, which is relat­ed to this inven­tion of dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy. The trig­ger­ing moment of the tech­ni­cal idea was a vaca­tion trip, in which I could com­pare the dri­ving char­ac­ter­is­tics of a small enduro motor­cy­cle with those of a small scoot­er in a direct rela­tion. On the one hand there were large wheels with good rolling con­ve­nience, excel­lent sus­pen­sion com­fort and sta­ble road hold­ing in com­bi­na­tion with a tedious six-speed gear­box and a nar­row seat. That was the motor­cy­cle. On the oth­er hand, there was an extreme­ly com­fort­able sit­ting posi­tion with the con­ve­nience of a cen­trifu­gal clutch and auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sion in con­nec­tion with bone-hard sus­pen­sion on small wheels that lit­er­al­ly plunged into every pot­hole, and wob­bly dri­ving behav­iour that required per­ma­nent cor­rec­tions. That was the scoot­er. How, I asked myself imme­di­ate­ly after return­ing the lat­ter of the two vehi­cles to two-wheel­er rental, could you com­bine the pos­i­tive prop­er­ties of one two-wheel­er with the good prop­er­ties of the sec­ond two-wheel­er? Tak­ing “the best of two worlds” and cre­at­ing some­thing new is the chal­lenge, you could say, also because the com­mu­ni­ty of motor­cy­clists is quite dif­fer­ent from the com­mu­ni­ty of friends of scoot­ers. Motor­bike and scoot­er are two dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of one theme. These tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, which pre­oc­cu­pied my engineer’s mind for a while, soon result­ed in a few pen­cil sketch­es, fol­lowed by a 2D CAD tech­ni­cal draw­ing. This was fol­lowed by a sur­vey of exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy con­cepts and a search for exist­ing sim­i­lar patent appli­ca­tions or grant­ed patents. When I actu­al­ly did­n’t find what I was look­ing for, I reg­is­tered the inven­tion with the Ger­man Patent and Trade­mark Office. The expe­ri­ence with a pre­vi­ous appli­ca­tion, which I had writ­ten with the help of a patent attor­ney, helped me a lot. This time I was the sole author of the patent appli­ca­tion and since I for­mal­ly met all require­ments, the appli­ca­tion was pub­lished. Ini­tial­ly, a research request was ordered with the DPMA, which result­ed in a non-bind­ing exam­i­na­tion result in advance of any offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion of theirs. After I had called for advice from a patent law attor­ney, I could tech­ni­cal­ly assess the appli­ca­tions held against by the patent office. We were able to high­light the essen­tial inven­tive points of my appli­ca­tion. I kept my claim and sub­mit­ted a exam­i­na­tion request. After a few for­mal improve­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly an expan­sion of the state of the tech­nol­o­gy art, the patent was final­ly grant­ed about three years after the request. That was last month.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR? Which char­ac­ter­is­tics makes an entre­pre­neur, I am ask­ing, and what qual­i­ties does it take to be a suc­cess­ful com­pa­ny founder? Is it a lack of abil­i­ty to sub­or­di­nate one’s per­son­al­i­ty to with­in the nar­row cocoon of depen­dent employ­ment? Alter­na­tive­ly, you might find sim­i­lar­ly capa­ble, cre­ative and clever minds and leave the com­pla­cent com­pa­ny. Maybe even before try­ing to per­suade deci­­sion-mak­ers to do some­thing new and inno­v­a­tive, to leave their com­fort zone and to com­mit to an idea that they could­n’t have had in their dreams. A cor­po­ra­tion offers a lot of posi­tions that promise reg­u­lar work­ing hours and a guar­an­teed salary pay­ment at the end of the month, while requir­ing only mod­er­ate com­mit­ment. How­ev­er, it also fea­tures many obstruc­tions and pit­falls, bureau­cra­cy and a lot of per­se­ver­ance. It is the cre­ative spir­it and the absolute desire to rethink inno­va­tion, to change the world, to accom­plish, to gain recog­ni­tion, respect, appre­ci­a­tion and con­fir­ma­tion for one­self? Thus, it is also achieved for oth­ers, and it is all about pow­er and mon­ey and even­tu­al­ly and ulti­mate­ly it is about part­ner­ship and love. At least Ernest Hem­ing­way would have agreed to this fun­da­men­tal assess­ment of the mean­ing of all striv­ing, to what life is all about. Being a start-up founder or a small busi­ness own­er, is that it? Nobody wants to remain “small”, how­ev­er, the think­ing is big, lim­it­less oppor­tu­ni­ties, new hori­zons are at the focus, the view­point is direct­ed to infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties. Is this notion viable every­where? Not all loca­tions are said to yield unlim­it­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties, and the degree of igno­rance and nar­row-mind­ed­­ness varies sig­nif­i­cant­ly, wher­ev­er you are. Intel­lec­tu­als solve prob­lems and issues that they are set to work on. Genius­es solve prob­lems, the exis­tence of which has nev­er even dawned on any­body, and they invent new prod­ucts or rein­vent prod­ucts anew, i.e. a new added val­ue, a clever ser­vice or an unex­pect­ed ben­e­fit that, from then on, no one wants to do with­out. Once you have suc­cess­ful­ly gath­ered your team­mates behind you, since a good and moti­vat­ed team is essen­tial, the next step is to over­come the fear­ful­ness of the financiers. Empa­thy, com­mit­ment and per­sua­sive­ness are also qual­i­ties that a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur must pos­sess. The real entre­pre­neur needs to be a work­horse, haunt­ed and ambi­tious, at least part­ly. At the same time, he needs to bring suf­fi­cient self-con­­fi­­dence and self-respect to not per­ma­nent­ly exceed his sus­tain­able work­load. He needs to care for his health and to engage in ade­quate relax­ation and men­tal stim­u­la­tion. “Beware of the bar­ren­ness of a busy life!” was thus the ear­ly warn­ing of the ancient philoso­pher, Socrates.