Regaining your virginity

Since then, the Virgin franchise has grown into a 400+-company behemoth of a conglomerate, with businesses in everything from cosmetics to space travel, yet still employs the key principles that helped the company succeed some 40 years ago, principles that it shares with most young companies. Virgin invests a great deal of effort in staying virgin.

Young scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers have a universal advantage in common: they don’t know they’re able to fail, and so they’re willing to try out nearly everything. This fresh outlook on life allows them to create things that were never thought possible before. It’s no coincidence that the majority of the great, history-altering breakthroughs were made by people in their 20s. That doesn’t mean that once we pass the 30-year-old mark, we stop getting good ideas. It means that past a certain level of experience, we tend to start shaping our ideas in their infancy, so that when they’re fully-formed, they resemble projects from our past. In engineering, just like in art, each individual has a certain style. Just like an art lover can tell a Monet from a Van Gogh, an airplane enthusiast can easily distinguish one of Burt Rutan’s creations from a Fokker, for example, even if she had never seen that particular model before. A signature engineering style is built up over years of experience, and it helps us progress and improve our designs as we learn from previous successes and failures. However, it also can leave us prisoners of the dreaded ‘box’ that project managers are so enthusiastic about avoiding.

So how do you start thinking outside the box when you’ve spent years reinforcing its walls? Virgin does it so: instead of building up any one company to gargantuan proportions, it usually breaks up the larger ventures into smaller ones, thus helping maintain a fresh start-up business atmosphere. Furthermore, the people at Virgin like to venture into areas where they have absolutely no experience. These businesses tend to turn the industry upside-down, coming up with solutions no one in the industry had previously thought of. This is because technology often comes out ahead of its time, and is often written off in favor of proven technology.

Maintaining an open mind with science and engineering is as difficult as it is crucial for producing great discoveries, but not everyone can afford to keep venturing into new fields to stay fresh. One way of regaining your entrepreneurial virginity is to work with new people from very different fields and backgrounds; their creative energy will influence your own creativity. Another way is to humble yourself, forget that you’re an experienced and respected engineer and pretend that you’re a child looking for a solution without fear of embarrassment or failure. Ask younger, inexperienced engineers for their opinion and really listen to what they have to say. Get ideas from books, articles, movies, artwork completely unrelated to your field of expertise. You’ll only be able to think outside the box once you’ve stepped outside of it and looked around.

Olga Motsyk is an MSc aerospace engineering student from Kiev, Ukraine. She can be reached at olgamotsyk@gmail.comm

Lintjesregen
Maar liefst drie TU-hoogleraren kregen op 29 april een koninklijke onderscheiding opgespeld. Prof.dr.ir. Mark van Loosdrecht (TNW) kreeg een ridderorde voor zijn rol in wetenschappelijke doorbraken in de rioolwaterzuivering die tot forse energiebesparingen leiden. Prof.dr.ir. Han Vrijling (CiTG) werd benoemd tot officier in de orde van Oranje-Nassau. De hoogleraar probabilistisch ontwerpen in de waterbouwkunde staat er om bekend dat hij aandacht vraagt voor de veiligheid van lage gebieden in Nederland, en voor dijkringen waarvan de veiligheid onvoldoende is. Ook emeritus hoogleraar prof.dr. Salomon Kroonenberg werd tot officier benoemd. Hij heeft er als wetenschapper, schrijver expert en adviseur voor gezorgd ‘dat mensen dieper wilden graven op het gebied van de geologie’, meldt de gemeente gevat. MRVDV-oprichter en hoogleraar architectuur prof.ir. Winy Maas tot slot kreeg op 9 mei een Franse ridderorde. Hij verdiende zijn benoeming tot Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur met zijn renovatie van Les Halles in Parijs en zijn bijdrage aan het project Grand Paris.

OpenCourseWare
Directeur onderwijs en studentenzaken Anka Mulder is verkozen tot president van het OpenCourseWare consortium, dat bestaat uit meer dan 250 onderwijsinstellingen van over de hele wereld. Met OpenCourseWare willen zij hun onderwijsmateriaal gratis online beschikbaar maken. De TU doet dat sinds 2007. Inmiddels staan er vijftig TU-cursussen online. Daarmee wil de universiteit haar internationale reputatie versterken. Mulder: “Deze benoeming zie ik als erkenning van ons werk.”