Profile: Norbert Szyperski ’62, Germany
April 2005
That today every mayor in Germany can spell the word ’incubator’ is thanks in large part to the stubborn determination of Norbert Szyperski, the 1962 Eisenhower Fellow from that country. In the Germany of forty years ago entrepreneurship was not highly regarded. Nobody saw a need for programs to help new enterprises because market mechanisms were supposed to sort it all out. Almost no one wanted to listen to the ideas of a young professor of management who believed in actively promoting and supporting new business ventures. But Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Norbert Szyperski persevered. For more than 30 years he and his colleagues at the University of Cologne conducted research and developed programs, advised and networked, and ultimately proved that fostering entrepreneurship pays off. Indeed, Szyperski, his information sciences colleague, Professor Paul Schmitz, and their group were responsible for launching 65 enterprises, including Germany’s first venture capital undertaking on the U.S. model. He became an acknowledged expert on entrepreneurship and its contribution to regional development. Szyperski is modest about these accomplishments, and was quoted in the McKinsey Company’s magazine McK Wissen, as saying “I simply get the right people together with the right ideas….The rest then happens by itself. You’ll see.”
Although by training and profession an academic micro-economist, Szyperski was never a stranger to the business world. During his university years he supported himself by working as an agent for a Berlin office machines firm, riding to his appointments on a Lambretta. Later he was personally involved in a number of those start-ups midwived in the university environment, and he still sits on the board of four others. In the 1980s he was for four years chairman and CEO of Mannesmann Kienzle, for whose manufacturing division he spent eighteen months of “calm but unrelenting” lobbying for a government license to to operate a private mobile telephone Network (D2).
Szyperski is equally well-known as an expert on information technology, especially its role in business development. Information science was, indeed, the focus of his Eisenhower Fellowship in 1962. The 30-year-old Berliner, then Assistant Professor of Business Management at the Free University of Berlin’s Institute of Industrial Research, had stated as his Fellowship purpose a study of the social and economic aspects of automation. Insights gained early in his seven-month program prompted him to focus his inquiries on the use of computers as a tool for decision-making and especially for research in economics and business administration. These subjects became a second major focus of his career. He wrote or co-wrote a stream of books and articles based on the research he and his colleagues conducted at the Economic Research Group on Innovative Technologies at University of Cologne. The emphases in his work varied from the sociological – how to escape the negative effects of an information society – to the commercial – the market prospects of IT products - but mostly concerned IT applications to business management practices and strategy. As part of his efforts to promote IT on the national level, he served as chairman of the Executive Board of the Society of Mathematics and Data Processing and later as chairman and chief executive officer of the German National Research Center for Computer Science. In a fruitful marriage of his interests in IT and entrepreneurship, a number of the start-up firms originating from his university group were technology based companies. Regarding the prospects of this field that has changed so dramatically during his lifetime, Szyperski says,” To defend the freedom of knowledge is probably the most important task facing us in the future.”
Any portrait of Norbert Szyperski must highlight his faithful commitment to internationalism. His final Fellowship report shows an early appreciation of a global outlook, when he writes about his conversations with other Fellows, “It was this international frame of opinions and considerations which helped me to find my own provisional picture of this country.” And he has said that the international perspective he experienced on his EF program strongly influenced him in 1988 when, with IBM executive Ronald Kay and others, he co-founded the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. ICSI is an independent, non-profit basic research institute focused on computer science and engineering. One of its objectives is to promote international understanding through visitor programs and collaboration among leading researchers from different countries. In recognition of his seminal efforts on behalf of the institute and its goals, in October 2004 ICSI gave Szyperski and Kay its first Distinguished Service Awards.
Szyperski has maintained other strong ties with the United States. In 1962 he and his wife Ilya remained in the US for several months after their Fellowship while he was a visiting professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville and she gave birth to the first of their five children. They often visit this son, Clemens, who lives with his family in Redmond, Washington where he is a software architect for Microsoft. Also, Szyperski has served as president of an association for advancing German-American cooperation in IT. Another bond with US has been his continuing support of Eisenhower Fellowships, first as a member or chairman of German nominating committees and, in 1995, as the founding president of a special sponsoring organization of German Fellows to support EF activities in that country. This group has assisted in the development of Fellowship programs for four American Fellows and organized the highly successful Global World Conference of Eisenhower Fellows in Berlin in 2002.
In 1990, feeling understandably overwhelmed by the responsibilities of running both a holding company and a research institute as well as supervising doctoral students, Szyperski decided it was time to limit his institutional commitments to his research group at the University of Cologne and to a new venture, InterScience, a group of older experts he assembled to form a small consulting firm specializing in strategic management. Not surprisingly, however, he soon added other responsibilities. Today, in addition to working with InterScience, he is a partner in a German company that cooperates with firms in the Ukraine, an advisor to an Indian software company, an expert counsel at the BMBF Program Exist, and the member of numerous boards relating to entrepreneurship and regional development. He and Ilya live mostly in their hotel on the island of Sylt, where he runs a business unit of InterScience.
It is typical of Szyperski’s multi-faceted life that another commitment prevented him from traveling to Berkeley last October to collect his award from ICSI. Instead he had to be in Berlin to accept another honor. There, at a special ceremony, the president of Germany personally awarded him the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, a fitting recognition of a distinguished and inspiring career.
Parts of this profile were adapted from an article in the McKinsey Company magazine, McK Wissen 01, in its first issue in 2002, published by brandeins Verlag, Hamburg.