Six Reasons why TU Munich keeps winning the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition and what this taught me about Innovation [Part 2]
This is the second part of my reflection on why TUM Hyperloop from Munich, Germany continually keeps winning Elon Musk’s SpaceX Hyperloop competition. In the first part, which can be found here, I considered Resilience, People, and Time as factors for successful innovation projects. In this second and final part I will dive into money matters, academic rankings, as well as making your own luck.
#4 — Sponsors
This aspect seems rather obvious, but needs to be considered in two different ways:
With 72 sponsoring partners, the Munich’ Team is certainly one of the best-funded Hyperloop teams, as only Delft Hyperloop (finishing 2nd place in the last competition) acquired more sponsors. Such partners are crucial in two different ways: money (or contributions in kind, like manufacturing parts or tools) and consultative support.
Building a Hyperloop is extremely expensive — not only building the actual pod, but also shipping it to the competition site, flights and hospitality for the team, hosting events and so on. Thanks to generous financial support TUM Hyperloop is basically unconstrained in their design decisions and can afford the best available materials and components.
Just as important as money is the consultative support coming from the sponsors. All team members are still students and developing components for a vehicle running nearly 500 km/h is definitely a first-time experience for everyone.
The impact that this kind of sponsorship can have is best illustrated by this “nerdy” engineering example: When we built the first Hyperloop Pod in 2016 we decided to build a dual braking system composed of eddy current brakes as well as friction brakes to safely decelerate our 600 kg pod from expected 340 km/h to a full stop. However, none of us had ever worked with eddy current brakes before, so thankfully a manufacturer of railway brakes gave us advice in making the right decision to design and develop these brakes.
What did this teach me?
There are two fundamental lessons for innovation projects I drew from this experience. First, innovation projects need reasonable funding to be successful. This doesn’t mean, that infinite amounts of money need to be poured on innovation, but engineers and developers need the freedom to experiment without constantly-lingering budget constraints over their heads in order to design a state-of-the-art concept.
The second lesson is, that no matter how many young bright minds you have directly around you, you simply cannot be an expert at everything. Skilled partners, especially from diverse and sometimes even unusual backgrounds, with the necessary experience are another crucial factor for innovation.
#5 — Education
Whilst everyone loves the classic story of a few college drop-outs working away in a shed outside their parent’s house and coming up with the next big thing in technology, one should acknowledge the incredible rarity of this actually happening. Much rather it is environments with a high density of skilled and intelligent people that foster innovation and advances in technology. Consequently, the quality of education seems to be another major success factor in the Hyperloop Pod Competition.
A look at the latest QS World University Ranking for “Engineering and Technology” will display five Universities among the best 25, whose teams have made it into the competitions final runs. This means that basically all finalist teams (except Paradigm, which is a merger of three universities) originate from universities ranked top of the world in engineering.
Furthermore, most of TUM Hyperloop team members are already pursuing their Master’s degree, therefore being fully qualified engineers with decent focus and specialization in a particular area. In contrast to the United States, most of the University graduates in Germany — and especially at TU Munich — continue their studies in a consecutive Master’s degree. As we explored in the first part of this article the absence of tuition fees at German universities are just as much of a factor for this as the different timely structure of the education system — 3 years for a Bachelor’s degree and 2 years for the Master’s in Germany.
Summing it up, members of TUM Hyperloop enjoy one of the best educations in engineering worldwide and have further progressed in their studies than many other students in the competition thereby creating a coherent team that can sometimes draw on returning team members for several years.
What did this teach me?
The biggest part of innovation is combining things you already know in a new way to solve a problem. Logically, the more you know the more you can combine to a new solution. Effective education that leads to increased knowledge can be key by providing the environment and guidance for professional development that leads to innovative thinking.
#6 — Luck & Ingenuity
Without a little bit of luck, winning a competition is just impossible. Thinking back to lesson #1, if the team had not found the right motor configuration in the last hours before the competition then victory would have been far from guaranteed.
EPFLoop on the other hand got unlucky. Whilst preparing their pod for the final run this year the team had to change their propulsion wheel, switching to a different rubber mixture than in their last test run. In EPFLoop’s final run the contact pressure between wheel and tube rail was not high enough, causing excessive slippage of the wheel on the rail and therefore highly inefficient acceleration.
I also remember my team burning through the motor controllers of the Low Speed Maneuvering System (which is used to drive the pod to the end of the tube) in the 2017 competition. Since SpaceX had this as a mandatory requirement it needed to be fixed before the competition, but devastatingly having purchased these specific parts in Europe, we could not find the right spare controllers in the United States. The only components accessible were not powerful enough to drive the propulsion wheel. Eventually the team came up with an audacious, but also ingenious solution as we decided to try combining two controllers in an improvised approach to hopefully achieve the same outcome as with the European original. One could say we thereby made our own luck, but even though our spontaneous fix delivered the wished for results, there was always an element of uncertainty through which we purely relied on getting lucky.
What did this teach me?
The ingenuity of coming up with genius fixes combined with a good portion of luck is the final factor that makes innovation successful. Whilst luck is always an unalterable factor it can sometimes be pointed in the right direction. If you think outside of the box and are prepared to explore a variety of innovative approaches to a problem, you might just eventually make luck become inevitable.
Ad Astra!
Whether it is Resilience, People, Time, Money, Education or Luck & Ingenuity — a single factor alone is never the reason for successful innovation projects. However, the combination of all these elements is in my opinion the ultimate reason why TUM Hyperloop has continuously won the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition. Rest assured that I will continue to follow the future developments in this space and see, whether my assumptions hold true — if so, then the future winner might just happen to be a slightly special team from Munich again.
I hope some of these lessons can provide you added value for your own innovation projects. The reflection on my time with hyperloop has most certainly benefitted me and the rest of the Unetiq team in advancing our highly innovative projects. Feel free to check us out and get in touch, if you’re looking for partners with your work.
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