Abstract
Most of our secondary school graduates have poor skills in mathematics and sciences. This negative handicap makes them refractory to study engineering or science, thus reaching a minimum of aspirants. The innovation we foresee and wish to promote across our countries will undoubtedly require of the alumni, who possess solid bases to design and create products with an important added value, in order to satisfy demands and exceed the expectations in this era, where technology evolves very fast. Creativity awakens the power of our numbed imagination; it is boldness, adventure, discovering and learning from change. To provoke creativity, few things are as important as the time that is dedicated to the cross-pollination with other fields. Many countries are revising the programs of scientific education and the application of new pedagogic paradigms that tend to revert the downward trend of enrollments. We propose a palliative measure, consisting of an introductory course that strives for the training of students in the Stokes diagram, called Pasteur quadrant, seeking to concentrate the scientific task according to the existent knowledge concepts, in the fact that engineering is the motor of innovation, through increasing and consolidating the creative process, teaching them to think and stimulating their critical mind by means of peer teaching.
Highlights
That a nation needs to create wealth to be thriving is a truism
The key question is: how does research in universities contribute to the creation of wealth? The excellence in science and engineering research in universities is linked to the creation of wealth in the economy of a country in three ways: by supplying students who graduate and add up-to-date knowledge in the top areas of science and engineering, taking into account that their instructors are creators of knowledge in those areas themselves; through the establishment of joint research partnerships between universities and businesses, to be able to develop innovative products and processes, and guarantee their rapid insertion into the markets; through inventions developed by basic research, an indisputable element of innovation, which become commercialized throughout the country
Thinking linearly—and quite naively—a stronger R&D promotion will result in more innovation in all areas of the regional and national industry, with more international and regional presence of these local innovations in goods and services
Summary
That a nation needs to create wealth to be thriving is a truism. Cartesian essays and exuberant speeches assert that such wealth is reached through added value: integrating knowledge to products and processes, which are later sold worldwide. Thinking linearly—and quite naively—a stronger R&D promotion will result in more innovation in all areas of the regional and national industry, with more international and regional presence of these local innovations in goods and services. It would undoubtedly strengthen prosperity by creating wealth, both individual and collective, increasing investments in support of our values: health, infant welfare, education, environment, etc., achieving a higher standard of living in the country. One of the three Nobel laureates of Argentina, warned about the three main factors that hinder progress (Houssay, 1952) He said the first and most powerful was misoneism: the resistance to anything new, with eagerness to avoid the innovation that inevitably comes from each scientific advance. Professional or nationalist pride; a mix of ignorance, immaturity and selfdefense of the mediocre
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