Technology, Policy and Management
Research Themes for Delft Technology Fellowship 2022-2023
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Climate change and related sustainability transitions such as the energy transition are future oriented and complex policy challenges. To deal with knowledge uncertainties and normative conflicts, governmental actors try and compose different sets of futures: possible, plausible, and desirable futures. This type of future oriented or forward-looking governance (Pot 2022) can provide new action repertoires for current governing actors which is very much needed in sustainability transitions.
More recently, imaginative futures are being developed to move beyond the current state of thinking and modelling about possible or desirable futures, but to also break with path dependencies and work toward radical transformative sustainability governance to accelerate the sustainability transitions.
The research fellow working under this theme will further conceptualize the notion of future oriented governance, the role of nature, technology in it – and will contribute to different ways of designing and modelling out of the box and plausible futures in order for governmental organizations to better address these future sustainability challenges in every day policy making.
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Today, technology is more deeply rooted in society. From the next generation of engineers, it is expected that are better to align societal needs and technology potential by innovating new products and services that increase value to organizations and society. In response to these expectations, technology universities, emphasize developing curricula that prepare future engineering students with entrepreneurial skills, e.g. creative and lean thinking, a proactive attitude. And the European Commission has initiated the agenda to embed entrepreneurial skills across educational levels (The New European Skills Agenda, 2021). However, from a theoretical and methodological perspective, a significant gap exists in our understanding of entrepreneurship education. Especially, little is known about the current pedagogies and practices that are appropriate, relevant, coherent, impactful and efficient to embed entrepreneurship education in engineering education. This research focuses on developing pedagogies and methods to embed entrepreneurial education in engineering education that make impact.
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The ETI Section is looking for ambitious academics, who may come from various disciplines (economics, business and management science, innovation studies, or related fields) and who are eager to participate in the broad research of ETI with the aim to contribute to TU Delft’s overarching research mission ‘Impact for a better Society’.
The research objective of the section Economics of Technology and Innovation (ETI) is to understand the “drivers” of technological change in organisations, markets, and society as a whole. We also seeks to improve understanding of the “outcomes” of technology development i.e., the organizational, market and societal impacts resulting from technological change.
The rapidly changing technological environment and urgent societal challenges experienced today, such as related to digitization and AI, climate change and the energy crisis, require extensive study from several disciplines. The section is embedded in the multi-disciplinary environment of the VTI (Values of Technology and Innovation) department at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) of TU Delft. The Faculty of TPM studies these pressing issues related to sociotechnical systems, and the VTI department specifically studies them through the lens of values and responsible innovation. The section aims to leverage this knowledge to formulate and provide governance (policy) and management (strategy) advice.
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AI is omnipresent and influences our society and daily activities. Our researchers detect bias, inclusions and other values to improve complex AI systems. There is a need to analyse and improve the trustworthiness of complex AI systems in all the domains covered by the department. They use these insights to develop trustworthy AI and other systems and services. See for example the Horizon-funded SPATIAL programme, which aims to achieve trustworthy, transparent and explainable AI for cybersecurity solutions: spatial-h2020.eu.
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Logistics and Resilience of Health Systems (department Engineering Systems and Services)
Health is a new domain in the ESS department, and these can be connected to the expertise of our researchers in the resilience of socio-tech systems and logistics. Resilience in health systems becomes key given the uncertainties in the world. Furthermore, health logistics is a topic that connects well to the deep knowledge of logistics systems to improve health systems, see for example https://www.tudelft.nl/tbm/resiliencelab/projects/heros
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Circularity modelling (department Engineering Systems and Services)
The Circular economy faces challenges in which the whole chain from raw material to the continuous reuse of materials needs to be addressed. In the circular economy, we design new solutions that consider the complex product composition, the end-to-end supply chain, the supporting ICT and the behaviour of people. Modelling is key for understanding the dependencies. See for example the NWO- funded Vici project, which focuses on using alternative raw materials in industrial clusters: www.nwo.nl/en/projects/ttw-vic183010.
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More and more data becomes available which can be used for providing public services in for making decisions. Our researchers design and test system architectures and public services to capitalise on the potential of these developments while ensuring critical values such as transparency and accountability. Our leading role in the DigiCampus, which develops citizen-centric digital services and is funded by a consortium headed by the Ministry of the Interior, attests to our impact in this area: www.dedigicampus.tech.