Confessions of an Innovation Manager

Humanities for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Campus Dragvoll, Trondheim, home of the Faculty of Humanities/NTNU

My name is Dagfinn Dybvig, and I’m an innovation manager at the Norwegian University of Technology & Science. In particular I am with the Faculty of Humanities, which has six departments: Language and literature, Historical studies, Cultural studies, Art & Media studies, as well as Music and my own former department — Philosophy & Religious studies. And this is my blog.

You may wonder what an innovation manager does. My job is to promote and facilitate the application of research from the Faculty of Humanities to “real world” problems. More concretely, I would say that my goal is to bring the Faculty of Humanities into the “new” economy/social reality, which is turning into an increasingly intangible web of services and information technology. You might even say that my goal is to bring the humanities into what has been termed the “fourth industrial revolution”:

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

In an innovation-driven economy challenging the very notion of humanity, and you might even say the very notion of reality, there ought to be room for the humanities — at least we ought to do what we can to make room for them. In practical terms, considering that what we work with in the humanities is mainly such material as text, pictures, sound/music, and in general human ideas and human relations, it should not be impossible to find a place in this brave, and abstract, new world. In a sense what we deal with in the humanities is already “information”, readily adaptable to a world of information technology.

Fortunately I am not alone. My base is in the Research Support Office at the Faculty of Humanities. And then there is about a dozen other Innovation Managers in our system, a wild bunch, which I meet regularly. Outside my campus here in Trondheim there are various spaces where I can meet other people who promote and facilitate innovation, such as NTNU Accel and Work-Work. If you follow me, I will tell you more about the people, places and events of my world!