In search of the sciences of future making: Delta sciences?!

Abstract

This article reports on a two-decade Deweyan Inquiry into suitable scientific elements to enrich existing engineering education with theory about innovation and entrepreneurship. Setting up a university-wide educational program to train the engineer of the future: educating the entrepreneurial engineer, is a specific part of this. Current social challenges require future-proof and integrated solutions and not just new technical solutions. The future engineer must therefore, in addition to his obvious technical competence, also be competent in the socio-interactive and organizational dimensions of technological innovation.
The overcrowded curricula forced us to see to what extent we could transfer parts of innovation and entrepreneurship theory within existing education and through their teachers. Great idea, but what should we tell them? Only learning some knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation was considered too simplistic. Transferring anything about stage gates, lean startups or business models makes little sense because much of this relatively superficial knowledge can also be found on the internet.
From a scientific-philosophical perspective, we realized that technological innovation and entrepreneurship are not actually integrated theoretical concepts. In other words, the conclusion is that no integrated theoretical perspective is available for our program of the entrepreneurial engineer. Actually, very surprising, because we have been doing this since the beginning of humanity.
Our answer is therefore a proposal for a new transdisciplinary scientific field that focuses on the inherent human activity of future making, here tentatively called the Delta Sciences. What we see as the integration of the division of scientific areas used in the Netherlands into Alpha (humanities), Beta (Natural) and Gamma (Social) sciences. We see pragmatism supplemented with theoretical frameworks from the intersubjective domain as well as the domain of logic as important elements for the basis of the Delta Sciences. A scientific field that is about how we as people build our own future together, hence future making.