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The Year 2100 ... and the Process of Innovation ???
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Can we participate in this process? |
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Résumé/Abstract:
The Year 2100 ... and the Process of Innovation ???
Does Innovation come through "Intention" or through "Spirituality/Dreams"?
Can we participate in this process?
"Many researchers have spent time explaining why things are what they are ; very few, however, understand how they change and even fewer learn how to participate in that transformation.
Following my excellent training in the French Engineering Grandes Ecole system, I found myself placed with the "cast" of high-level civil servants in the French Administration. To my great surprise, I found there was extreme opposition to Innovation in this sector.
I began at this time to ask the question : how is it that a group, trained to think in a very sophisticated fashion, a group capable of adapting to all the changes in politics and power, can there be such an instinctive resistance to the supposedly favoured policy of giving priority to new ideas? Such resistance exists in other sectors of our society.
Does education privilege conformist attitudes and create a feeling of mistrust when confronted by the creative process?.
Such people assume that Knowledge comes from an institution, from an organisation. They feel that Knowledge is already present and it hangs over humanity ...and then one day the "Flux of TRUTH" descends upon them, like words dropping from the skies.
However, Creation proceeds from a completely inverse movement.. The Flux of Creativity moves upward, like the sap in a tree, towards a desire for light. Its chemistry is not of something transcending from above but that of something emerging from within.
In other words, institutions, organisations are mortal. They are created by the Innovative Process. They die of old age, of illness or from the blows of their predators.
My research , begun in the area of Technology, has thus been completed in the direction of Spirituality. I see Innovation, which has given rise to all modern technology, as the Incarnation of the movement of the Mind.
Certain readers will be surprised, perhaps distrustful, to see Technique and Spirituality linked together. They are only separated from one another through our prejudices.
There is a manner of speaking about the word, technique as if it were only something useful, in service of our needs, or even of our appetites. According to this point of view, only The Result Counts;
However there is a manner of speaking of Spirituality as if it didn't only concern the "elevation of souls". According to this other vision, Intention is not the only element that counts.
I refuse both these visions. Or, rather, I believe that one can only approach the reality of Innovation and of Spirituality by accepting the confrontation between Intention and Results, of Dream and Reality...but first of all the facts..."
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ATHENS LECTURE given by Thierry GAUDIN , a graduate of the ENSMP, who spent many years working, both at a French and international level, in the area of the Construction of a Policy of Innovation.
He is currently President of Prospective 2100 and Director of the Centre for Prospective and Technological Assessment.