Amy and I had a great few days in Munich earlier this week. The highlight was teaching Joachim Henkel’s class at Technische Universitat Munchen on the topic of “Why Innovations Often Come From Startup Companies.” I met Joachim through Eric von Hippel – they’ve worked together on some Open Source research that’s part of Eric’s Democratizing Innovation theme.
The class was very engaged and humored me by speaking excellent English. Rather than stick to a tight topic, I did a lot of story telling and Q&A, which I always expect is a nice change of pace for a class like this from the more standard academic lecture (at least they seemed to have fun.)
Joachim and his delightful wife Kathrin were excellent hosts. We had an extraordinary meal at Schuhbeck and stayed at the beautiful Bayerischer Hof hotel. In addition to some sightseeing, I managed to squeeze in a meeting with the founders of eCircle – an impressive email marketing company in Munich that is a potential partner for several of my portfolio companies.