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Innovation, herd behavior and regional development

In our paper we want to investigate the question whether it will make sense for regions to compete for new high-tech industries to settle down in their region. The justification for giving subsidies is based on the general believe in politics that attracting high-technology firms will cause positive externalities in the sense of Arrow (1962) and of course will directly create working places and an additional tax revenue in the long run. Additionally, it is a general believe in politics that competition between regions will enhance the efficiency of local authorities and local administration. At the moment such new high technologies are bio-technology firms, ICT firms, nanotechnology firms etc.

Optimist

It is argued that a world can exist in which man is not a plague, in which we do not take away all diversity with cheap copy-paste mass production to worship a system world that makes everything uniform everywhere and in which we wrongly believe that we are working to establish heaven on earth. Optimists believe we can change, turn the tide. It is a feeling, a belief, and in the absence of evidence and certainty, a trust (because trust, like faith, is only necessary when you have no certainty). But after that feeling, the heart, comes the head, the knowing, and then the hands, the working. The Inner Development Goals show the way.

KLM Cares

Introduction to “Inspired to change: A kaleidoscoop of transitions in higher education“

Technological developments have a major impact on how we live, work and learn together. Several authors refer to a fourth revolution in which robots and other intelligent systems take over an increasing number of the current (routine) tasks carried out by humans (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Est et al., 2015; Ford, 2016; Helbing, 2014; Ross, 2017; Schwab, 2016). The relationship between man and machine will change fundamentally as a result. We are already noticing this shift, most specifically in the workplace. E.g., in the field of health care, digitalisation and robotisation can empower patients and their families. Hospitals are primarily intended for clients with complex care needs. This has consequences for the tasks carried out by nurses, who become more of a ‘care director’ or ‘research nurse’. Hospitals approach this in different ways, resulting in considerable diversity as to how these roles are fulfilled. These changes, albeit diverse, can also be seen in the roles of accountants, police officers and financial advisers at banks (Biemans, Sjoer, Brouwer and Potting, 2017). The traditional occupational profiles no longer exist and the essence of these professions is shifting. This does not make such occupations less attractive, but requires different qualities. The demand for more highly educated professionals who can carry out complex tasks in a creative and interdisciplinary manner will increase (McKinsey, 2017). Also, other social developments, such as migration and greenification, prompt us to ask new questions, resulting in new paths towards identifying solutions.

'Realism' in video games

Innovation believers

It is argued that if we decide to keep a technology or practice if we get at least one positive result from it, we do not have to change anything at all. Even factory farming, and wars, have some positive results... Due to the complexity and all the "smart" devices and apps, we may have started to feel, think and connect less. However, we have definitely not lost these deep-rooted properties of our human nature. We only have to put the devices away, play a board game together, or go for a walk in nature, and our sense of direction returns almost immediately, literally and figuratively. Addiction to our modern substances is broad, but superficial. There is a way back, or rather forward. We have lost nothing, not even our judgment, we know that we should not believe in innovation, but in our own Inner Development