The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future

Dr David E. Goldberg

05 October 2007 (Friday)
4.00pm – 5.00pm
Engineering Auditorium, NUS Faculty of Engineering

Abstract

The world (1) is apparently flat, (2) is being given over to a rising creative class, and (3) requires a whole new mind, but a common conclusion drawn from authors such as Friedman, Florida, and Pink is that technology professionals in advanced economies must excel at creating new categories of product and service, as returns to routine engineering/technology labor are declining because of the ease with which these tasks may be outsourced. This talk starts by examining the setting after World War 2 that has largely shaped engineering and technology education of the recent era. It continues by discussing the techno-economic forces that have affected the intervening time, and it considers recent work by Price in others to understand the essential characteristics and habits of tech visionaries (TVs) who currently help major companies create value through the effective bootstrapping of entirely new product lines. A key thesis of the talk is that the tech professional of the future must be more like the tech visionary of today. The ramifications of TV research for educational reform are examined, and the talk concludes with some specific examples drawn from a new course, Creative Modeling for Tech Vision, that helps technology students and professionals build key creative modeling skills necessary for the effective bootstrapping of new products and services

The Speaker

David E. Goldberg, a leader in the field of genetic algorithms, is the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Distinguished Professor in Entrepreneurial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also co-founder and chief scientist of Nextumi, Inc., a web2.0 startup company. Trained as a civil engineer at the University of Michigan, where he earned his B.S.E. and took his Ph.D. in 1983, Dr. Goldberg, who had previously worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and in private industry, joined the Michigan faculty as a lecturer on receiving his doctorate. He moved on to the University of Alabama as an assistant professor of engineering mechanics in 1984 and was promoted to associate professor three years later. In 1990, he joined the Illinois faculty and was named a professor of general engineering in 1993. He was appointed to his current chair four years ago. Dr. Goldberg has been a Prater Exchange Professor at National Taiwan University, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a visiting scholar and Gambrinus Fellow at the University of Dortmund in Germany, and a visiting professor at Tsukuba University in Japan. The founding chair of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, he is a former chair of the International Society for Genetic Algorithms. He is currently co-chair of the inaugural Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering, and he co-founded the recently established initiative on Engineering and Technology Studies at Illinois. Among many honors, he is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Wickenden Award presented by the American Society for Engineering Education, and an Outstanding Instructor Award presented by the National Technological University. In addition to articles in professional journals, he is the author of two books on genetic algorithms, the widely-cited Genetic Algorithms in Search, Organization, and Machine Learning (1989) and The Design of Innovation (2002), and, most recently, The Entrepreneurial Engineer, which was published in 2006 by Wiley.