Training Engineers for Innovation

Conclusion Perspective: Engineering Training, from Yesterday to Tomorrow

In our technological societies, the question of innovation is not new. Certainly, one can legitimately feel that we are living in a period in which the range of available products is infinite and where every day brings its share of novelties. No doubt we have entered a new phase of the Industrial Revolution with the gradual generalization of the digital world, which we feel that this ongoing process is already beginning to change our ways of life. Is such a phenomenon new? A look back at the past would remind us that our ancestors had to experience the same type of feeling. The invention of the steam engine and its development, concomitant with the exploitation of coal and the progress of metallurgy, allowed the development of the big industry, inducing new modes of production, but also transforming social relationships. One of the variations of this technological revolution was the creation of railways around the world that, in each country, remodeled land use planning and amplified the movement of the men and products. We use electricity today: pressing a button to light a room is a “natural” behavior and we pay no attention to it. But an interruption of the electrical flow over time such as we have known at the time of the great storms would paralyze a given region’s economic and social life. Electrification, started at the end of the 19th Century, has definitively transformed the life of societies ...