st<\/sup> century, can only begin to imagine. And this competition is just one of many examples of the strong and encouraging entrepreneurial spirit of the youth in the Rhein-Main area.<\/p>\nThese promising young entrepreneurs are students who have gone above and beyond academic requirements to pursue their passion and talent. But, as students, they have spent most of their lives listening to old people \u2013 geezers.
\nThis is problematic. While I don\u2019t mean to tell students to disregard teachers and children to disregard parents, we can\u2019t foresee what tomorrow\u2019s entrepreneurs will need to know even 10-20 years from now. For young entrepreneurs, that\u2019s the good news: don\u2019t spend all your time listening to geezers. As the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow competition shows, young people can produce outstanding work with their own ingenuity.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s bad news as well. Tomorrow\u2019s entrepreneurs don\u2019t know what they will need to know 10-20 years from now, either. For example, the iPad was first marketed only five years ago, and some questioned its usefulness. Now many people, including myself, can\u2019t imagine life without one!
\nTo quote former a US Secretary of Defense, there are \u201cknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.\u201d And unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) for the young entrepreneurs of today, almost everything we need to know in 2045 falls in the last category of unknown unknowns.
\nThankfully, we can prepare for these daunting unknown unknowns: we can learn how to quickly adapt to, and see the opportunities in, changes and new developments nobody can predict. Learning to be an entrepreneur is basically that skill \u2013 learning to discover new products and services for people in a world in which technologies, markets, trends, and tastes change at an ever faster pace.<\/p>\n
As Steve Jobs said: \u201cThis is what customers pay us for \u2013 to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Learning the unknown is certainly not easy. But the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow competition demonstrates the potential of the young entrepreneurs in the Rhein-Main area to develop innovative and promising business ideas and to cultivate Germany\u2019s entrepreneurial spirit. I look forward to seeing what today\u2019s young entrepreneurs accomplish in tomorrow\u2019s world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What will people need in the future, and how can I create a business plan and market a product that addresses this need? On Saturday, May 30th, 46 young entrepreneurs presented their business plans at the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow awards ceremony, showing amazing innovation in answering this question. The event was the fifth or sixth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":326,"featured_media":14276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[297,104,125],"class_list":["post-2481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fslife","tag-competition","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-frankfurt-am-main"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22985,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions\/22985"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.frankfurt-school.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}