[Letters] Creative convergence for future education

Rolf Jensen, a Danish futurist, predicts in his book, “The Dream Society,” that our society will evolve from the industrial society that values material goods through the information-based society we currently live in where knowledge is exchanged, to a dream society where values from dreams, such as passion, self-identity and stories, are sold and bought.

I believe what is essential to such a dream society is creative convergence.

The keywords businesses consider most for current global management paradigms are “network,” “win-win approach” and “consilience.” Our current age of networking allows consciousness and technology to converge, and individual intellectual capabilities to combine with technology, thus growing into a collective intelligence.

A CEO is, thus, required to encourage voluntary participation, sharing and open-mindedness among the members of a network. In other words, a CEO should see the members as companions with whom they live together with, try to recognize their sincerity and collect their ideas of achieving a dream.

The members, in turn, will understand that they are the ones who will participate in creating values in the organization and on integrative thinking. IBM is running a system called Innovation Jam in order to launch high-tech products through which the creative ideas of 150,000 people can be exchanged over a network.

With such efforts, they can create new sources of profit and novel values and carry out innovative works. Intel operates a program called people and practice research, through which psychologists, anthropologists, financial officers, marketers and consumers all over the world gather together to create new businesses.

One of the noticeable examples of this win-win approach is Google Cluster (an open corporate network). Through the platform, Google and its partners have produced and shared innovative ideas for their dream of customer comfort.

Observing these examples, I feel that our children, who dream of becoming CEOs, need to make efforts to be creative and broad-minded, which will make them live together, sharing good dreams. For that, our education of humanity and creation should be strengthened.

Consilience has been found in various fields such as the humanities and science. When different fields of academia or industry converge, a big bang of knowledge and synergy occurs. The fields with active convergence based on consilience (integrative thinking) are nanotechnology, life sciences, information science and cognitive science, on which novel businesses such as nano-design, robotics and virtual simulation have been created.

To put it simply, consilience has generated new power sources for sustainable development. The EU established the “Converging Technologies for the European Knowledge Society” in 2004. The society includes the environmental sciences, social sciences and humanities as well as the fields mentioned earlier.

Our schools are required to plant a message in a child’s mind: “In our future society with great convergence of knowledge, new and valuable results for humanity can be reached only through cooperation and interaction among studies.”

In our future society, different thoughts, technologies and lifestyles will be gathered together toward a good dream and new values. The catalyst for achieving a good dream is creative convergence.

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Pae Ki-Pyo, CEO of Copetition Consulting Company Limited