EUXCEL Scrum in Poland

I’m on my way to the Scrum Session in Poland of the euxcel program. euxcel is an european wide program for young entrepreneurs of the hightech sector. It`s funded by the european union and will be executed by 6 hightech universities throughout europe. Their goal is to understand young entrepreneurs better and to help them with their needs and problems. We are around 300 participants and are the first flight of this program. The programm is divided in three sections: 1. One week Bootcamp/Scrum Session in one of 6 countries, 2. Four months of virtual collaboration based on their own platform and last but not least the final presentations in Ireland in November.

I’m very excited to become a part of euxcel. I’m looking forward to meet young, talented and different people from all over europe with a passion for technology. I hope to learn a lot about different cultures, work ehtics, ideas and ways to execute them. A beer once in a while wouldn’t be bad either. My biggest hope is, that they will be doing things a little bit different than the programs I already know and participated. But in order to things different, we also have to think different and work on unusual topics.

Like in many other programs, the week will start off with a one minute pitch from all participants to collect ideas to work on this week. Before we get to Poland, they send us a short summary where they stated the problem we should be working on. The problem is something like

“How can we help to get the economy to grow again in europe” and with a small addon:

“What can we do against the high unemployment rates, especially by young europeans.”

Then they gave us six focus areas we should be working, like healthcare.

When I read this problemstatement a couple weeks ago, my mind started to produce more questions rather than ideas. So I really got into the topic and started to think about what I should be pitching tomorrow.

Here are my results.

I started to focus on the first question. Since I’ve studied economics and really love to think about how big numbers and models work for our system and society, I had a big problem with this question. Because the question already concludes itself, that it is possible to get europe back on the growth track.

But I don’t see that this is possible in our current economic system.

For example, in order to have growth in the real economy in germany, germany would have to grow around 2–3% in 2015. This means, that Germany would have to grow around the size of the german economy in the 1970’s. Just look up how big the german economy already was in the 1970s and now we would have to grow around this size in ONE YEAR. This is insane and I have absolutely no idea how any country should be able to grow this fast this big.

Of course it could be possible if we would have endless resources, but since our whole world still relies on limited resources, we simply don’t have enough resources to grow 2–3%. Maybe in 50 years from now, when most of our resources are reusable, recycable or endless like sun, we can talk about such growth rates for high developed countries. But before that, it is not impossible.

There are countries like the U.S. who pretend to grow on this high rates even nowadays, but their growth is backed by printing huge loads of money, buying everything on debts, controlling the oil price and the currency in which oil is traded. But their growth isn’t sustainable, it is not even real growth.

This leads me to the secon part of the problem statement — how can we cut down the high unemployment rates.

Let’s assume that we get really really lucky and start 3 successful companies in the euxcel which are as big as facebook, spaceX and Tesla for example. I know this sounds crazy and I don’t believe at all that this will happen. But even if we could kick Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs butts, it still wouldn’t be enough. If we combine the employees of these three companies and can somehow afford to employ even more people than facebook, spaceX and Tesla do, this would create jobs for around 70.000 people in Europe.

But 70.000 new employees is nothing compared to the number of people being unemployed in europe right now. So the best possible outcome ever in terms of new companies wouldn’t change shit. We will not be able to solve the problems this way.

Why is that? How come, that even the best possible outcome wouldn’t help us to solve the problem.

One Problem is, that in our already highly developed world with endless resources, there is simply no possibility to create enough growth to get everybody working again. Our economic system isn’t capable of creating jobs besides economic growth.

Another problem is, that the digital tranformation and another technological revolution is taking part RIGHT NOW. This Revolution will likely hold it’s promises and will be the first one which really automates more jobs than it can create. This means, that everyday we create new technologies which helps us people so we don’t have to do hard work and painful jobs. But they are also destroying our jobs and won’t give enogh new ones back.

If you look at the german industries for example, then you will see that automotive is a huge sectore nowadays. But this will be changing radically withing the next ten to fifteen years. We will automate our fabrics, so robots will be producing our cars. We will also not need so many cars anymore. Because of technologies like car sharing, uber or autonomous driving vehicles, there is no need anymore for us to own a car by ourself. So this will reduce the market big times. So even in one of the biggest industries nowadays, we will be reducing their jobs dramatically.

In my opinion, it isn’t possible to create enough new jobs through technologies or anything else, to help to cut down the unemployment rates.

So are these questions not solvable? — not at all! we just have to focus on different aspects.

And this brings me to the idea I might pitch tomorrow.

We have enough jobs today, where people literally have to work till they burn out. They would love to work less to get their lifes back together. On the other hand we have so many people who would do anything to have a reason to get up in the morning.

I think the problem we are facing is the wrong allocation of our resources. This is also a big problem of our economy right now, where 1% of the richest people own more than 50% of everything.

If we would start to distribute our resources (jobs for example) in a fair way that everybody has something to do and nobody has to work till they die, than we could solve the problem.

So who is responsible for such a change of allocation? For me it’s the duty of our politics. But our politcs can’t do shit, because they are way too old and don’t use any technologies at all. I mean they are sitting in their parliaments for hours talking, without showing even One Powerpoint Slide. How is this possible??

But this is also our big chance, our politic is way to old and ready to get disrupted like crazy. I think we should focus on this topic and generate some cool ideas how we can get politicans to do what we want and to hold them responsible for their actions.

So this is my Idea, let’s see what happens tomorrow. I’m also excited to hear about the other Ideas and maybe we can gather enough people for some crazy ideas to work on in the next five months.