Planetary engineering: entrepreneurship at the interface of cultures

Abstract

This contribution answers the question: what capacities are required for engineers to participate in entrepreneurship for development, specifically in developing countries? Related to this main question is a number of sub-questions: (a) What extra demands does a different cultural and institutional environment pose on entrepreneurship? (b) How does the management style of the enterprises involved find proper and effective solutions at the interface of different and often opposing (traditional and new) value sets and institutional arrangements? (c) How are these different value sets and institutional arrangements imbricated in each other and in (the use of) the technology—and technology in them? (d) How does this affect the education and curriculum building of engineering students? The author will move to and fro between experiences from practice and insights from theory so that theory and practice inform and explain each other. The author will finally propose one superior value or capacity in order to deal with the cultural and institutional differences indicated: the capacity for planetary movement, i.e. the capacity to alternate (consciously and deliberately) between different value sets and to compose a management style that combines different elements, timely and temporarily.