Process Engineering Renewal 3

1Between Innovation in Process Engineering and Creativity

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. (Orwell 1949)

Creation consists of both shaping a substance and giving substance to a form. (Rappoport cited in van der Leuw 1994)

To invent something new, we determine the necessary scientific level and arrive at fundamental research to find a solution to a technical problem. (Gille 1978)

Technology does not form an independent system like the Universe; it exists only as part of human culture. (Mumford 2010)

The development of technological changes [is] like a succession of fairly diffuse periods of acceleration, rather than a sequence of discrete moments of inventive insight. This trend becomes all the more marked if we move from the process of invention to the process or processes of innovation development, i.e. to those in which a technological innovation is brought to the state of a workable prototype. (Fox 1994)

The development of the curriculum in chemical engineering has benefited in the past from the tension between, on the one hand, imparting to the students a good understanding of the sciences underpinning our discipline and, on the other, the perceived need to help aspiring engineers to develop and enhance the skills necessary to practice as an effective professional. (Perkins 2002)

One of the difficulties of the creative process is to fine-tune the times of divergence and convergence, to nourish the process, to open them ...