Niederkrüchten, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
My experience throughout the university founding projects and managing our farm, led me to the conclusion that nothing is more valuable than a diverse range of perspectives, with differently shaped and trained minds to analyze problems and come up with exceptional solutions. I am most happy when I am working with a dynamic team, growing, creating and developing meaningful products. That is my personal goal and constitutes my motivation. I decided to concentrate my efforts in my master’s thesis on honing my engineering skills, particularly regarding computer aided design, manufacturing and applying a systematic product development process to a given product.
We grow organic vegetables like: Spinach, peas and cabbage for food processing (freezing etc.), fresh onions, carrots, pumpkins and potatoes for German supermarkets on 270 ha. We are part of the Bioland association for organic farming in Germany. Working in balance with nature, supporting biodiversity and protecting our environment and climate will secure our livelihoods and a diverse cultural landscape. Organic farming means taking responsibility for the future.
I took as pro-active a role as I could in the family business, without negatively impacting my academic education. A significant share of the specialized farm machinery used on our organic farm has been developed and built over the past thirty years within the family business, so from a very early age I was in a perfect position to learn hands-on about this subject. The most significant lessons I have derived from working on the family farm are an ability to improvise, to cope with stressful situations and a talent for entrepreneurial thinking. I have also been able to hone skills such as managing work routines, repairing and developing farm machinery, including hydraulics set up. Welding and constructional steelwork, handling and repairing big construction and farm machinery are also second-nature to someone brought up in this environment.
I initiated the development a high resolution automated steering system for the family organic farm. We combined existing dGPS systems (accuracy >2.5cm) and image processing systems (LASER triangulation) to develop a system that would increase the accuracy of farm machinery to <0.5cm, opening up countless opportunities for the development of radically new farm machinery applications e.g. robotics in farming. I motivated two friends (M.Sc. Mechatronics & Engineering) to develop, build and implement the system into existing farm machinery. During my Master’s Thesis with the title “Systematic Development of a Machine for Non-Chemical Weed Control”, I will work on the further development of a prototype at the Chair for Product Development at TUM. During the project, I gained hands on experience with prototyping complex hydraulic systems, machine automation, programming, systems dynamics and integrating sensor systems.
Having worked for Michael Strobel, Head of the Wind Turbine Assessment Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Technology as a student research assistant, he invited me to work for him as his assistant in his new capacity as the Head of Corporate Research (>400 employees R&D) at Enercon GmbH. Enercon is the leading German wind turbine manufacturer, technology pioneer and quality leader. I worked intensively with him to develop an innovation strategy and to integrate it into existing innovation processes. I devoted much of my time to the analysis and visualization of the complex decisions that needed to be made in several critical research areas of the company. This experience lead me to great insights on how to develop a strategy at different levels of a company and how to communicate such a strategy.
After completing my first scientific project study on the assessment of airborne wind turbines and having completed my introductory class on Technology and Innovation Management at the top of my class (grade 1.0) my interest in academia and research was sparked. Therefore, I applied for a student research assistant position at the Dr. Theo Schöller Chair of Technology and Innovation Management. I was delighted to be selected to be the sole student research assistant directly with and for Prof. J. Henkel. I worked mainly on reviewing scientific papers, and conducted complementary research around the topic of intellectual property. I learned how to target patents in international patent databases and find out about their legal status (e.g. owned by a non-practicing entity). In order to conduct further research about the development of patents in the emerging field of synthetic biology, I was able to develop a patent search algorithm for patents in the field of synthetic biology for which no IPC (international patent classification) exists.