Abstract
In the centenary year of Luigi Meneghello’s birth, it is appropriate to remember what the Venetian storyteller and linguist wrote about education in his book Fiori italiani (1976). In this text, a student addresses the teachers: “We are a vase of flowers. You should cultivate us delicately, make us bloom.”
Bloom how? Into ‘human resources’, each with its specific competence, to be employed in the service of artificial intelligence which, as it evolves, will end up replacing many work tasks anyway? Or into people who will use artificial intelligence to make discoveries, invent, devise? To produce blooms of the latter type, students must be invited to connect the dots between seemingly disparate realms of research: physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, philosophy, law, design research, political science, art: logic and imagination about how the world works are submitted to the test of reality. No less creative than writing novels, poems or musical scores, this is an exercise in achieving what the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson (1998) called ‘consilience’ – the unity of knowledge. The evidence-based physical sciences help to explain and resolve issues that bedevil the social sciences. The latter, in turn, add value to the discussion by facilitating the coming together of the many different competing ideas. It is as if a Tower of Babel is being erected, but, rather than confusing, it assists – from its various tongues we learn how to interpret the action as the curtain rises on the future of society and entrepreneurship. Only with such an approach can there be an evolutionary surge of culture to overcome the current constraints of economic models and lifestyles. At present, when science is translated into new entrepreneurship it becomes narrower, so that new discoveries and inventions do not lead to as many new enterprises as they might. Science cannot accommodate all the graduates and PhDs who are not absorbed by small and medium-sized family businesses.
Meneghello adds, “Our ideas were an elaboration of artisans’ ideas, or of peasants’ ideas interpreted by artisans (the peasants did not care to express them).” In today’s age of knowledge, there is a vase to be moulded in which scientists’, students’ and teachers’ experimental ideas can bloom. Students and teachers take their cue from the discoveries of scientists to experiment with scientific enterprise. As science advances, the Frontier of knowledge moves forward. The same happens at the Frontier of entrepreneurship, when doing business is a result of thinking about how to turn over the soil of tradition in order to regenerate it.
The pluralities and diversities of scientific and business research interacting in a coordinated effort give rise to great opportunities, such as manufacturing at scale in the microgravity environment. Scientific enterprise translates the transformation of science into saleable products. But such enterprise does not materialize for the sole purpose of selling. It acts like a living organism that initiates a fluid movement between two innovation objectives: one directed at the market and the other at the wellbeing of society. The focus must be on developing indicators that measure impacts on natural resources and negative externalities such as global warming. Thus, we do not lose sight of combining quantitative economic growth with concern for the quality of future life for all species on Earth and for the health and sustainability of rivers, lakes, seas and mountains. Scientific enterprise should thus contribute to the improvement of economic and environmental ecosystems.
Scientific ideas that become the basis of entrepreneurial endeavour require, therefore, combinations of the most diverse disciplines, building transdisciplinary bridges between the sciences and the humanities. The humanities can benefit from the explanatory depth of the sciences, which in turn can benefit from what the humanities can teach about behaviour and communication. Rather than exchanging ideas that are part of the common heritage of knowledge, ideas are intercepted and shared that are entirely new to all parties involved. The compelling reference here must be to multifaceted personalities like the Muslim Andalusian polymath Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmed ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes in the West) who devoted his scholarly life to connecting seemingly disparate streams of knowledge creation. Polymaths abandon the beaten paths. They do so because they are endowed with a cognitive flexibility that allows them to discern obstacles in those paths that will prevent success. Moreover, they single out the stimuli that trigger short-term stellar results as the cause of the malnutrition of innovation. Scientific enterprises must keep pace with such multifaceted and flexible people who refuse to reap the rewards at hand. Instead of easy, low-risk, quick actions, they prefer the “hard stuff”, aiming to escape the gravitational pull of the current environment.
Students are flowers who will blossom in the season of scientific entrepreneurship driven by transdisciplinary communities inhabited by polymaths. Then, with the students, scientific enterprises will flourish, and a virtuous circle will be set in motion. By observing, thinking, testing and validating ideas, a multifaceted generation of budding future scientists, engineers, computer scientists, sociologists, economists, designers and artists has the potential to shape scientific enterprises that will confront the challenges before us – such as pandemics, climate change and environmental degradation.