Master of science as change masters

Engineers are the driving forces of technological development – how do engineers obtain the relevant skills in order to fulfil this position? In this chapter, we ask whether the concept of change master could be a possible future direction for engineering skills. Developed by Kanter, the change master concept stresses the importance of creativity, innovation, leadership, and change. In this chapter, this concept will be analyzed and elaborated on partly in relation to the concepts of Bildung and Skill and partly to three different notions of engineering practice in technological innovation: a rational perspective, a natural perspective, and an open-system perspective. This is related to a normative perspective on technological innovation, including guidelines to successful technological innovation in the hands of the so-called Change Masters. This normative perspective on how the innovation process must be managed is together with the dynamic and comprehensive perspective on engineering practice used to shape the engineer of tomorrow, and by that we hint at overall trajectories in the design of engineering education. These trajectories call for exemplarity, inter-disciplinarily, integration of contextual matters, inter-cultural understanding along with social and ecological responsibility. In a knowledge-intensive society moving towards increasing globalization, engineers in the Western society are faced with new challenges. The ability to work in a problem-oriented and interdisciplinary manner at both the organizational and inter-organizational level is highly valued as Western countries increasingly compete on knowledge-intensive product development. Our motivating question is how to educate engineers to be capable of acting in accordance with this dynamic and comprehensive nature of technological innovation. This article is a modest attempt to initiate this debate, which in our opinion calls for more attention to action-oriented research. Our purpose is to contribute to a theoretical discussion on Bildung and Skill related to Engineering practice in order to show how different perspectives on engineering education can be argued based on different perspectives on learning and innovation. Furthermore, we use the more normative management perspective of Change Masters developed by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1986) & (1991) to determine today’s dominant understanding of how to deal effectively with innovation in the West, and from that point, develop a trajectory of the engineering practice of tomorrow. In the first section, we start by introducing different perspectives on Bildung and Skill. In the second section, three different perspectives on engineering practice in technological innovation are introduced and commented in relation to the different perspectives on Bildung and Skills. In the third section follows an introduction to, and a critical reflection on, the normative perspective on technological innovation developed during the 1980s and 1990s by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, which prescribes guidelines to successful technological innovation in the hands of the so-called Change Masters.