The researcher at the University has duties but, to some extent, he as well has the freedom to choose the area and the kind of his research. This freedom is precious (and rare in most other professions), so he will take care not to waste it. The freedom includes the duty to do something “important” as Einstein said: the most noble duty of a scientist is, to formulate an important problem. The talk will address how to find “important” problems, as well how to do efficient research.

Apparently, finding really important problems is difficult. Fortunately, there are roads where important problems are ubiquitous and easy to find. The first road is to ask about the limits in our area of research, that is optics. We demonstrate that limits commonly show up as uncertainty products, which gives us the option to bargain with nature. The second road is the cooperation with customers of science and technology. We will illustrate these options by examples of successful new optical methods developed in our group and in our spin-off company. We conclude with questions such as: Can we teach inventing? Is education expensive? Which is the major quality of a successful and happy scientist?

VIII Iberoamerican Optics Meeting & XI Latinamerican Meeting on Optics, Lasers and Applications, Porto, Portugal, July 22 to 26, 2013