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Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum (2011)

Chapter: 1 Perspectives on Global Technology

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Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
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1

Perspectives on Global Technology

In the first half of the forum, each panelist explored a specific dimension of the global spread of technology. The topics varied widely—from reducing poverty to the impact of young people on technology to the need for systems thinking in engineering. But all seven presenters foresaw a world in which engineering will be fundamentally different from what it has been.

ENGINEERING FOR THE OTHER 90 PERCENT

Many people on Earth are living longer and better lives than ever before because of engineering. Life expectancy in the United States a century ago was 47 years. Now it is about 77 years, largely because of improvements in sanitation, food and water quality, health care, and other technological systems designed at least in part by engineers.

But the engineering profession has focused largely on the needs of a relatively small percentage of people, said Bernard Amadei, professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado and founder of Engineers Without Borders. Life expectancy in Zambia is only about 32.5 years. Eighteen countries in the world still have a life expectancy of less than 50 years, and 79 have a life expectancy of less than 70 years. On an average day, 5,000 people die from indoor air pollution; 5,000 to 10,000 die from inadequate sanitation; 5,000 die from malaria; and comparable numbers die from tuberculosis and HIV infection. Altogether, Amadei said, 25,000 to 75,000 people die every day from causes that are clearly preventable, or as many as 200,000 people per week. That number is comparable to the death toll from the Haiti earthquake—week after week, month after month, year after year.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
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Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers Without Borders and professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Amadei founded Engineers Without Borders to address the needs of people who work simply to stay alive by the end of the day. The organization now has some 12,000 U.S. members, about half of whom are working in 48 different countries. There are 400 chapters in the United States alone, some consisting largely of students, others of professionals.

Amadei cited three particular challenges for engineering. The first is engineering in an emergency. What does engineering look like two hours after an earthquake, a week after an earthquake, eight months after an earthquake? How do engineers make the transition from rapid response to recovery to development to sustainable development? Engineers tend not to be in the field after emergencies, despite the contributions they can make to recovery, sanitation, education, and policy. “I was in Haiti in March. Not a pretty picture. There were 1.6 million people in the streets of Haiti in March. They are still in the streets of Haiti.”

A second challenge is engineering in native cultures. Engineering does not necessarily look the same in developing parts of the world as it does in the developed world. Amadei described an example of what he called frugal engineering—an engineer in India who devised a

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

solar-powered electrocardiographic device that costs $800 and can generate an electrocardiogram for about a dollar. “Eight hundred dollars is pretty much what I would pay if I would go to Kaiser Permanente for one EKG in the United States. Here is an example of frugal engineering. Your market is 5 billion people.”

Engineering in emergencies, engineering in native cultures, and engineering in extreme or very difficult conditions—have in many ways not yet been invented. “There is a huge environment for innovation, but we need to change our mindset.”

Bernard Amadei

Finally, Amadei described the challenge of engineering in difficult conditions. Recently he was working in Peru at an elevation of 14,000 to 15,000 feet. “Try to find water at 14,000 feet. Try to find energy at 14,000 feet. And yet people live in these very difficult conditions.”

These three areas of engineering—engineering in emergencies, engineering in native cultures, and engineering in difficult conditions—have in many ways not yet been invented. But tremendous progress could be made in each, especially if the efforts of engineers were complemented by those of doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, and other professionals. “There is a huge environment for innovation,” he said, “but we need to change our mindset.”

GLOBAL EXPANSION OF THE RESEARCH WORKFORCE

In recent years, there has been a major global increase in the number of people engaged in scientific and technological research. According to the 2010 Science and Technology Indicators, the research workforce in the United States and Europe grew by about 35 percent. In China and several other countries, the research workforce doubled.1

Three factors have contributed to the rapid expansion of the scientific and technological workforce, said Ruth David, president and chief executive officer of Analytic Services Inc. First, greater access to information through digital technologies has enabled people all over the world to build more rapidly on the collective knowledge of the science and engineering communities. Second, greater access to people has made it possible to forge networks and collaborations without regard to

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1 National Science Board. 2010. Science and Technology Indicators 2010. Arlington, Va.: National Science Foundation.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

geographic boundaries. Third, greater access to computing has put the power of supercomputers on a desktop, and the advent of cloud computing promises even greater capabilities.

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Ruth A. David, president and CEO, Analytic Services Inc.

The United States still has the lead in several indicators of research productivity, but the trend lines are raising concerns, said David. In 2008, for the first time, more than half of the patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office were awarded to companies outside the United States. Surveys conducted routinely by the National Venture Capital Association indicate that venture capitalists intend to increase investment IN Asia and other areas and perhaps reduce venture capital investments in the United States. “You can argue that the baseline still isn’t bad. We have a robust VC investment community. But again, I think it is important to look at the trends.”

In 2008, for the first time, more than half of new U.S. patents were awarded to companies outside the United States.

Ruth David

A recent National Research Council survey of six nations—Brazil, China, India, Japan, Russia, and Singapore—found that these nations are generally pursuing a two-pronged strategy in science and technology.2 One part of their strategy is to focus on areas where science and technology can address particular needs in their respective countries. The other part is to build their economies in the global marketplace, thereby capturing a greater share of the benefits of scientific and technological advances. Most sobering, according to David, is a 50-year road map for science and technology published by the Chinese

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2 National Research Council. 2010. S&T Strategies of Six Countries: Implications for the United States. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

Academy of Sciences. “Having been captive inside the Beltway for a few too many years, it is hard to plan 50 days ahead, let alone 50 years.”

Wisdom, expertise, and talent are everywhere and cannot be confined by national borders. The transnational nature of science and technology creates a delicate balance of challenges and opportunities for the United States. For example, businesses increasingly view cross-border exchanges as collaborative opportunities, not just as competitive threats. Although U.S. universities in the past have relied on foreign students coming to the United States to study, today they have international collaborations, international campuses, or both. Similarly, U.S. industries today have both manufacturing plants and research facilities abroad. The world may not yet be flat, said David, but it is certainly flattening.

THE GLOBAL YOUTH MOVEMENT IN TECHNOLOGY

In past generations, people tended to create their identities from what they wore, what they owned, or what they controlled, said John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar and advisor to the provost at the University of Southern California. Today’s young people increasingly forge their identities from what they create and what they share. “This is a very positive fact,” said Brown. It helps to explain the do-it-yourself (DIY) and do-it-together (DIT) movements that are sweeping across the world. It also influences how people think about and use technology, no matter what their age.

Brown described four aspects of the global youth movement in technology. The first is the open-source movement, which extols the virtue of producing software and other goods and making them freely available. More than half the web sites in the world are running the open-source programs Linux and Apache, said Brown. One day shortly before the forum he logged onto an open-source site and saw that in a single day the site had provided 2.8 million downloads of computer code, had uploaded 4,200 contributions of code, had posted 1,200 forum entries, and had tracked 576 programming bugs. “This is a worldwide movement,” he said.

Brown said that when he was an undergraduate he became well known for writing code that more or less worked, but no one could figure out how it worked. “That doesn’t cut it today,” he said. “It’s the other way around.” Young people write code today so that it can be read and improved by others. In doing so, they build social capital and personal reputations. In this way, the open-source movement has become

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

a new mechanism for creating and expanding technology.

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John Seely Brown, visiting scholar and advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California and the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

The second phenomenon Brown discussed is the union of amateurs and professionals. The world amateur comes from the Latin amare, meaning to love, and amateurs are applying their love of particular topics in professional settings. For example, a simple $3,000 Dobsonian telescope, when combined with a charge-coupled device sensor, has power equivalent to the 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California when it began operating in 1949. Furthermore, small telescopes around the world are now networked, and amateurs are watching the sky 24 hours a day and making new discoveries. As an example, Brown cited the 2-meter Faulkes telescope on Maui that can be accessed through the Internet by schoolchildren, museums, and amateurs. He also mentioned the rediscovery by two schoolchildren of an asteroid that had been previously tracked and lost. “Those two kids are scientists for life,” he said. “The joy of finding something like that and getting national, if not international, recognition for it was really tremendous.”

The third trend Brown cited is a return to making things. Events such as Maker Faires (http://makerfaire.com/) and facilities such as Fab Labs (http://fab.cba.mit.edu/) are engaging students in the design and construction of technologies. “You learn by being tinkerers,” said Brown. “Most of us in this room probably grew up that way.”

Finally, Brown discussed engagement in imaginative worlds made possible by technologies. Children who have become fans of the Harry Potter books do not just read them. They contribute to fan sites, construct mythical worlds, and fill in the back stories of characters. On one site, 386,000 stories have been archived. Global discussion groups

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

have children reading and writing outside of school in ways that were not possible before. Similarly, massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft bring together millions of participants to create new and imaginary worlds. When Brown recently logged onto a World of Warcraft site, 15,000 new ideas had been posted in a single day. “These kids are producing knowledge amazingly fast,” he said. “You might think [this is] for fun or for wasting time. But these kids are creating ideas and learning from each other at blinding speed that is very much mimicking the speed at which knowledge is being created in the scientific community. They are used to constantly absorbing and adding back to that knowledge on a day-by-day basis.”

“…kids are creating ideas and learning from each other at blinding speed that is very much mimicking the speed at which knowledge is being created in the scientific community.”

John Seely Brown

THE ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD REVOLUTION

Of the approximately 1.2 billion children in the world, half live in poverty, and 100 million do not go to school at all. “I don’t mean they drop out of school at some point,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop per Child Association Inc. and founder and chairman emeritus of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “A hundred million don’t go to first grade.” Adding underserved children who are not counted in this statistic could double that number.

One way to counter the tremendous education gap in the world is to build schools and train teachers, and this clearly needs to be done. The One Laptop per Child project takes a complementary approach. It has designed a very low-cost, low-power, interconnected laptop and has distributed these laptops in large numbers to children. This approach is based on five principles:

  1. The laptops are designed to be owned and used by children.
  2. Laptops are geared for children aged 6 to 12, although they can also be used by younger or older children.
  3. Every child and teacher in a given region should have a laptop.
  4. Laptops are designed to provide an engaging wireless network.
  5. Laptops should be able to use free and open-source software tools.
Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×
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Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child nonprofit organization.

Uruguay is the first country to have achieved digital saturation. Every child in the country aged 5 to 15 has a laptop with an e-mail address, and WiFi connectivity is widespread. “The transformation is extraordinary,” said Negroponte. “The children are teaching their parents how to read and write. Older kids are teaching their younger siblings. There is anecdote after anecdote.”

Providing a laptop for every child changes the nature of teaching. In places like the city of Gaza, where the foundation has also been working, teaching had been very rigid, with children lined up in perfect lines and afraid to ask questions in case they might be wrong. With laptops, the children can exert responsibility over their own learning. Truancy rates that were 20 to 30 percent have dropped effectively to zero.

The idea of one laptop per child is not new, said Negroponte. When he was working in Cambodia in the early 1980s, the laptops children took home at night were often the brightest light source in the village. Some of the earliest laptops designed for wide distribution in the developing world were built with a crank on the side to provide power. Although the crank proved to be impractical, “a lot of people remember it, and I still today meet people who say, ‘Where’s the crank?’ because everybody remembers the pencil-yellow crank.”

“The children [with laptops] are teaching their parents how to read and write. Older kids are teaching their younger siblings. There is anecdote after anecdote.”

Nicholas Negroponte

These laptops connected remote villages to the world. If each of 100 interconnected laptops contained

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

100 different books, a village could have immediate access to 10,000 books, more books than most elementary school libraries have. Furthermore, the laptops can be connected outside the village to millions of books.

Private enterprise can provide some of these resources, but not all. “When I wake up in the morning, I ask myself one question,” said Negroponte. “Will normal market forces do [what I’m doing today]? If the answer is yes, then stop. So everything we have done and everything we plan to do is what normal market forces will not do.”

THE COMING ERA OF SYSTEMS THINKING

The U.S. semiconductor industry has captured more than half of the $250 billion worldwide market and exports more than 80 percent of what it produces, making it the number one exporting industry in America over the past five years. Moreover, the semiconductor industry enables a $1.5 trillion electronics industry that has been transforming daily life. “The success of the semiconductor industry has been a remarkable achievement by many different measures,” said Ray Stata, cofounder and chairman of the board of Analog Devices Inc.

One of the most important factors behind the success of the semiconductor industry has been the preeminence of U.S. research universities. These universities nurture not just technical discoveries that drive innovation and growth but also the technical workforce that has made the semiconductor industry a success.

Even though for many decades the United States has not generated enough American-born engineers to meet the requirements of the U.S. engineering workforce, research universities have attracted the best and brightest students from around the world to study in the United States, especially at the graduate level. Moreover, many of these engineering students remain in the United States to work and make essential contributions to U.S. companies. Although existing statistics are uncertain, at least 70 percent of foreign students, and possibly as many as 90 percent, are still in the United States five years after graduation. “There is no way that we would have been able to achieve the things that we have in our company and in our industry without the contributions of these foreign- born engineers,” said Stata.

Of course, the success of the semiconductor industry is due to other factors as well. In particular, large and small companies play an essential role in the continuing development of the technical workforce and in commercializing new technologies created in universities and industry.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

At least in the semiconductor industry, said Stata, “entrepreneurs in America know how to create and commercialize technology better than in any other place in the world.”

However, the semiconductor industry and universities both face momentous changes in the years ahead. Stata cited the late Wharton School professor Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking, who said the performance of a system depends much more on how well the parts of the system work together than on how well they work separately. Yet the parts of universities still work largely in isolation rather than together. Universities historically have focused on excellence and innovation in individual academic disciplines, but the complex problems societies face today require the integration of disciplines. Universities must move beyond rewarding innovation and excellence within disciplines to optimizing innovation and excellence across disciplines.

The same observation can be made of industry. In the past, customers of the semiconductor industry typically bought components they could combine and integrate into their own systems. But customers today generally do not buy components and design their own systems. They want a supplier to take responsibility for integrating the parts and

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Raymond S. Stata, chairman of the board and cofounder of Analog Devices Inc.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

delivering them in the form of a complete systems solution. To accommodate this shift in demand, companies must recognize and reward the role of systems engineers.

This is not an either-or game, Stata observed. Innovation at the component level remains essential. But there are even greater opportunities for innovation in putting components together in unique and productive ways. “As we look to the future, that will become more important and will provide the opportunity for American industry and universities to stay ahead in the technology race.”

“Our role should be to move the goalposts, to continue to make American universities and industry more productive and the destination for the best and the brightest technical people from around the world.”

Ray Stata

Companies and universities in other countries are struggling to achieve parity with the United States in disciplinary excellence, and they are making tremendous progress. This is something “we should all celebrate and for which they should take great pride.” Yet these institutions are far behind U.S. institutions in achieving excellence in interdisciplinary research and education. “It will take literally decades for them to build the depth and breadth of resources and experiences that it will take to compete broadly at the state of the art.”

But the United States cannot stand still and wait for other countries to catch up, Stata insisted. “Our role should be to move the goalposts, to continue to make American universities and industry more productive and the destination for the best and the brightest technical people from around the world.” Achieving this goal will require much greater attention to optimizing the performance of the whole as opposed to optimizing the performance of the parts.

This is a significant challenge to institutions that already consider themselves successful at what they do. But this transition is inevitable. U.S. companies and universities have an opportunity to lead this transformation. In doing so, they will help not only themselves but also institutions in other countries by demonstrating how systems thinking can improve the human condition.

Finally, said Stata, his experience indicates that a very small fraction of the engineering workforce produces the large majority of the breakthrough innovations in the world—the innovations that have the greatest influence on the progress of mankind. We need to find ways to identify

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

and support this small fraction t to advance the frontiers of knowledge and capability.

The United States has a unique responsibility and opportunity to lead the way in thinking about how universities and companies will be different in the future. Systems-level thinking should be the guiding principle in moving forward.

ERASING THE BOUNDARIES OF SPACE AND TIME

In his former position as associate director for science and technology in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Eric Haseltine was responsible for coordinating the science and technology strategies of the national security agencies. Part of that job required tracking the development of science and technology in other countries. “It was a jaw-dropping, surprising experience,” he said

One lesson he took away from that experience is that geography is dead. Technology development that used to happen exclusively in the United States and Europe can now happen anywhere in the world. “We no longer have the right of primacy in new technology.”

“…we can regain…leadership by looking at this wave of change that’s coming at us not as something that will drown us but as something we can surf to even more greatness.”

Eric Haseltine

Furthermore, the continuing acceleration of technology development has created new relationships between science, technology, and time. New phones or cameras used to be released every two years. Now they come out every six months. Google can issue a new software release every week. Open-source projects can receive thousands of software contributions every day. This acceleration is not simply a continuation of past trends, said Haseltine. At some point a quantitative change becomes qualitative, and “you’re in a completely different universe without realizing it.”

As an example, Haseltine described a recent request he received to develop a particular technology. He responded, not entirely truthfully, that the technology had already been developed. He then had one week to build and demonstrate a prototype. He quickly acquired components from Russia, East Germany, and China, downloaded open-source software from France to do image processing, and hired programmers in India. The final device had probably 200 million lines of code, Haseltine

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

said, but it was ready and working in a week.

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Eric C. Haseltine, consultant, former associate director for science and technology in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and former head of research and development at Disney Imagineering.

“The interesting thing is that once it was all done and I took a step back and looked at it, I said, ‘Whoa, this thing is way different than I thought it was going to be.’” Combining the components in a particular way had produced capabilities much different from those of the individual components.

Haseltine dubbed this phenomena “the sex of ideas,” a phrase coined by writer Matt Ridley. In a recent book, Ridley analyzed the sudden flowering of human culture 45,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans began to move out of Africa into the rest of the world.3 Some scientists have posited that a genetic mutation flipped a switch in the human brain, leading to more sophisticated language and higher levels of human creativity. But a more plausible explanation is that changes in population density and social structure led to a sudden increase in the cross-pollination of ideas. “That is really what innovation is about today,” said Haseltine. “That is what happened to me in this demo—I had created sex on my tabletop of ideas.”

The greatest opportunity presented by globalization is another sudden increase in the cross-pollination of ideas. The result will be a tsunami of change as time and space are mashed together. “We can whine…about the fact that America is losing its leadership in engineering, or we can regain that leadership by looking at this wave of change that’s coming at us not as something that will drown us but as something we can surf to even more greatness.”

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3 Matt Ridley. 2010. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: HarperCollins.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

BECOMING A GLOBAL LEADER

When Esko Aho was born in 1954, Finland was a small, poor, politically and economically isolated, largely agrarian country. A half-century later, Finland is one of the most globally connected economies and societies in the world and has a leadership position in mobile technologies, forestry, sectors of the metal industry, and other businesses.

How did that happen, asked Aho, who was prime minister of Finland from 1991 to 1995 and is currently executive vice president of corporate relations and responsibility at Nokia. What were the ingredients necessary to make that transformation in just 50 years?

The first necessary ingredient, he said, is education for all. In Finland, the impetus for this came not just from government. In the 1950s and 1960s, the people of Finland, both rich and poor, embraced the idea that investing in education would be good for the country as well as for individuals. This conviction in turn placed great emphasis on the importance of good teachers. Today in Finland the nation’s most talented and accomplished young people still want to become teachers.

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Esko Aho, executive vice president, Corporate Relations and Responsibility, Nokia, and former prime minister of Finland.

The second necessary ingredient is substantial investment in research and development. In the late 1970s, when Finland was investing only about 1 percent of its gross domestic product in R&D—which was less than the average for the Organisation for Economoic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries at that time—it decided to increase its R&D investments to 2 percent of GDP by 1990. It succeeded. And even during a severe financial crisis in the early 1990s when Aho was prime minister, R&D funding was increased by 80 percent.

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
×

The third necessary ingredient is an industrial ecosystem conducive to innovation. According to Aho, Finland has continually and substantially improved its innovative capacity since it began industrializing in the 1940s.

“A new generation of talented youngsters all over the world wants to see that we are able to do something good, and we have to be able to show that.”

Esko Aho

The last necessary ingredient is the ability to take advantage of crises. Finland has had a number of internal and external crises in recent decades, which it has used in the way the United States used the Sputnik crisis to foment change.

Despite Finland’s great success over the past 50 years, Aho is worried about the country’s future. “We are too satisfied with our achievements and our capacity to make maximum use of our high-technology skills and talents,” he said. More broadly, the European countries and the United States still have a huge technological capacity at their disposal, but other ingredients for success are not there. As an example, Aho cited the lack of incentives for developing uses for mobile technologies other than entertainment. “Why do we not use mobile technologies for education or for health care?”

The countries that will succeed in the future are those with the capacity to combine different types of talents to achieve global competitiveness, he said. Traditional approaches to R&D and education are no longer sufficient. Multidisciplinary training and teams will be essential.

Finally, Aho asked how young people can be convinced to study science and mathematics. Too many people believe that engineering creates problems rather than solves them. Companies must figure out how to get across the message that doing good business can be good for the world. “A new generation of talented youngsters all over the world wants to see that we are able to do something good, and we have to be able to show that.”

Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
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Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
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Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
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Suggested Citation:"1 Perspectives on Global Technology." National Academy of Engineering. 2011. Global Technology: Changes and Implications: Summary of a Forum. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13073.
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Engineers know what they mean by the word technology. They mean the things engineers conceive, design, build, and deploy. But what does the word global in the phrase global technology mean? Does it mean finding a way to feed, clothe, house, and otherwise serve the 9 billion people who will soon live on the planet? Does it mean competing with companies around the world to build and sell products and services? On a more immediate and practical level, can the rise of global technology be expected to create or destroy U.S. jobs?

The National Academy of Engineering held a three-hour forum exploring these and related questions. The forum brought together seven prominent members of the engineering community:

  • Esko Aho, Executive Vice President of Corporate Relations and Responsibility, Nokia; former Prime Minister of Finland
  • Bernard Amadei, Founder, Engineers Without Borders, Professor, University of Colorado
  • John Seely Brown, Visiting Professor, University of Southern California; Former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation
  • Ruth A. David, President and CEO of Analytic Services, Inc.
  • Eric C. Haseltine, Consultant, former Associate Director for Science and Technology in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and former head of research and development at Disney Imagineering
  • Nicholas Negroponte, Founder, One Laptop Per Child Association Inc., Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Lab
  • Raymond S. Stata, Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, Analog Devices Inc.

In the first half of the forum, each panelist explored a specific dimension of the global spread of technology. The topics varied widely—from reducing poverty to the impact of young people on technology to the need for systems thinking in engineering. But all seven presenters foresaw a world in which engineering will be fundamentally different from what it has been. In the second half of the forum, the panelists discussed a variety of issues raised by moderator Charles Vest and by forum attendees.

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