Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: EMERGING ISSUES AND CHALLENGESpossibilities, and as well as positive visions there are warningsabout dangers and barriers to the realization of opportunities.A third set of factors concern innovation. Innovation has cometo be recognized as a key element in competitiveness, nationalperformance and achieving socio-economic objectives. Moreprecisely, many countries have come to feel that there areweaknesses in their innovation systems – the institutions, andrelationships between institutions, that generate and applyknowledge (in science and technology laboratories, appliedengineering, design, higher and vocational public services,commercial enterprises, policymaking, finance and so on).Foresight was seen to provide tools that could help connectand integrate components of innovation systems, and indeedsome exercises (e.g. France’s FUTURIS) 3 have been explicitlyaimed at informing decisions about restructuring nationallaboratories and the innovation system more generally.Many countries have embarked on large-scale foresight exercises,and in several cases we are now into the third or evenlater round of such exercises. In some cases, it remains a specializedactivity impelled by one part of government; in othersforesight approaches have been embedded much morewidely. Expertise has been developed in using techniques suchas road-mapping, scenario analysis, Delphi surveys and trendanalysis, and there are interesting developments in the applicationof information technology to support these approachesand provide new means of decision support.One lesson learned early on during these exercises was that itis important to bring together expertise in social affairs, businessmanagement, financial issues and policy, together withexpertise possessed by scientists and engineers. 4 Exercises thatneglected this found themselves hastily having to plug theseknowledge gaps. Foresight activities – in the most successfulexercises – proved a valuable setting to enable experts of manykinds to share and fuse their knowledge, to break away fromtheir standard presentations and immediate preoccupations,to articulate their understandings about longer-term developmentsand to explore how these did or did not align withthose of experts in adjacent and related areas.What has proved to be at a premium is the capability to possess(and share) highly specialized knowledge, but also to be able torelate this understanding to the issues raised in a wide range ofother fields; people with ‘T-shaped skill profiles’ (people with in-3 See R. Barré Foresight in France, Chp. 5 in L. Georghiou et al. (eds, 2008) The Handbookof Technology Foresight, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: EdwardElgar (This Handbook provides much more depth on many of the issues discussed inthe present text). A good account is also available at: http://forlearn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/guide/7_cases/futuris_operation.htm (Accessed: 5 May 2010).4 See the study of ‘industrially-oriented foresight, J. Molas-Gallart et al. (2001). A TransnationalAnalysis of the Result and Implications of Industrially-oriented Technology ForesightStudies, ESTO Report, EUR No: EUR 20138 EN available at: http://www.p2pays.org/ref/05/04160.pdf (Accessed: 5 May 2010).depth knowledge of their own domain as well as competence ina much broader spectrum of managerial, interpersonal and otherskills). Additionally, foresight required open-minded people; theexperts have to be able to participate on the basis of the knowledgethey possess, not simply to argue positions that reflectcorporate or sectional interests. Thus a combination of cognitive,social, professional and ethical capabilities are required. Thissort of profile is liable to be in demand in any engineering workwhere relations with customers and users, and perspectives thatgo beyond immediate project management, are required.Foresight exercises have addressed a multitude of topics 5 butan inescapable feature is that, across the board, we are continuingto move toward a world in which more and more ofour social and economic activities are instrumented: 6 wherewe use new technologies to transform the material world anddesign and simulate these transformations; where technologiesmediate our interactions and help us codify and collateour knowledge; where we have increasingly powerful tools tointervene in both tangible and intangible elements of complexsystems, and to help us understand such systems. New formsof engineering are emerging (service engineering and bioengineeringbeing two examples), as are new approaches to educationand lifelong learning. There is probably no single future forengineering; new specialisms will emerge, new skill profiles andhybrid combinations will be required and new professions willdevelop that have a greater or lesser engineering component.Personal foresight will be an asset that should enable individualsto make informed choices in these shifting landscapes.Meanwhile, foresight programmes underline the central roleplayed by engineers and engineering in creating the future.Hopefully, such activities will continue to be diffused and institutionalizedso that the essential links between engineeringand social and environmental concerns can be deepened andmade more effective. 7 In this way, debate and action aroundlong-term opportunities and threats will be informed byknowledge of the strengths and limitations of engineering capabilitiesand of the structure and urgency of social concerns.5 See the EFMN database. Even one country’s activities can span a vast range, for examplerecent projects in UK Foresight have concerned themes as various as Flooding,Obesity, Drugs and Brain Science, Exploiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum, Detectionand Identification of Infectious Diseases, and Intelligent Infrastructures. Go to http://www. foresight.gov.uk for details of these and many more projects.6 This term is borrowed from IBM’s Samuel J. Palmisano in his paper A Smarter Planet: TheNext Leadership Agenda available at http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/smartplanet/20081106/sjp_speech.shtml(Accessed: 5 May 2010). Much of this is also describedin terms of being ‘informated’ or ‘infomated’, but other technologies are being employedalongside information technology, for example, genomics and nanotechnologies.7 An interesting step here is the introduction of ‘Engineering Foresight’ modules intoengineering courses, for example a course for third year mechanical engineeringstudents at Manchester University intended to equip them for the sort of projectsthey may be working on in the future. The course, with a horizon of several decades,particularly explores “step change, disruptive technology and scientific breakthroughrather than incremental product and process development”, and locates mechanicalengineering in relation to future markets, societies and technologies by training instudents in various forecasting techniques. Go to: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/© UNESCO The Vizcaya Bridge innorthern Spain – designedby de Palacio in 1887 andUNESCO World Heritage site.55