Michael Schmidt, Founder of Innovation Company Hyve

If you analyze the world right now, what is the dominant “operating system” or mental model through which you filter your observations? Why do you think this perspective is especially important at the moment?

Secular humanism or Universalism and decentralization of three key resources: food, energy and knowledge.

Equal rights will allow cooperation beyond limits. This will help humanity to solve near to all challenges we as a species are and will be facing. Any exclusivity of technology or resources will lead to inequality and conflict. Decentralization of food and energy production provides freedom and security for all. Shared knowledge is key as well. The internet is a powerful tool to share our knowledge on a global scale. 

What weak signals or emerging dynamics are currently sparking your curiosity. Which of them do you think are still being viewed too narrowly?

Computational engineering (Leap71) in combination with additive manufacturing, computational protein design or AI driven engineering (David Baker) and quantum computing. In combination these technologies will lead to:

• • • • • extremes powerful and well-connected electronic products that have a use-based life cycle
        • new health treatments
        • replacement of petrochemistry-based materials
        • clean and decentralized energy production
        • clean energy storage
        • crop engineering to support plants to adapt to changing environments

Which thinker or practitioner has left the most lasting mark on how you perceive the world? What is the one idea you don´t want to give up?

Buckminster Fuller and his book from 1969 ”Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.

Möbius (Jean Giraud) and Alexander Jodorowski and their comic ”the Inkal”.

When you encounter a complex problem, how do you begin to break it down and work through it?

Depends on the problem space. Mainly researching until I feel fully loaded, then breaking down the challenges into main challenges and side challenges. I look for principles outside the topics of the main challenges where these seem to work and are solved already. Nature, science, art…and then I start to combine fields and areas that don´t seem connected and use them as solution space for my challenges.

Innovation processes are often full of turning points. What has been the “butterfly effect” moment in your career — seemingly small decision or coincidence that ultimately changed the direction of a project or company?

March 2000 – I was sitting in my small design office and read an article in a news magazine about the internet. I started dreaming of how to use the internet to connect us better for improved innovation. I was talking to my friend about it and he was in. Since then the company Hyve existed.

If you could remove, with a single wave of a magic wand, one structural or conceptual barrier to global innovation, what would it be — and what would it enable us to do?

Borders of nations. We are all one and we have to unite to all share equal standards of living.