The creativity imperative and the technology professional of the future

The world is apparently flat. It is being given over to a rising creative class, and it requires a whole new mind. A common conclusion drawn from authors such as Friedman, Florida, and Pink is that technology professionals in advanced economies must excel at creating new categories of product and service. Returns to routine engineering/technology labor are declining because of the ease with which these tasks may be outsourced. The talk will discuss this situation and the work of the iFoundry for Innovation in engineering education.

David E. Goldberg, is the Jerry S. Dobrovolny Distinguished Professor in Entrepreneurial Engineering and the co-director of iFoundry at UIUC and co-founder of ShareThis Inc., a web2.0 startup company. He is the author of Genetic Algorithms in Search, Organization, and Machine Learning (1989), The Design of Innovation (2002), and The Entrepreneurial Engineer (2006).