Innovation in tomorrow’s infrastructure, products, and services involves long-term thinking. Companies must be strategic about the technologies they invest in, which markets they position themselves to serve, and how inevitable change is likely to disrupt their existing business. Governments have to prepare to regulate new technologies to ensure that they don’t represent a danger to the public, and must anticipate the needs of their citizens and the tools that they will need to remain competitive. Universities and research councils have to decide what to study, and whether emerging fields are likely to have long-term significance or just a brief period in fashion. Even individual engineers need to look to the future to ensure their skills don’t become obsolete.
This minor provides students with tools to analyze the trends in today’s science and engineering research and put them in the context of global changes in economics, demographics, and the environment. Students learn to compare new technologies with their appropriate competitors, think through the problems they may cause (and how to mitigate them), and identify the opportunities and threats that global changes will create for industry. They also learn to communicate their findings to a range of different audiences via broadcast media (print and electronic magazines, radio, and television), narrowcast media (blogs and podcasts), and reports.
Whether their interest is in becoming a thought leader in their field, an industrial strategist, a management consultant, an investor, a government advisor, or a journalist, this programme gives students the tools to both analyze and communicate the future of engineering.
The minor consist of three modules:
BENG0026: Tech Journalism: Writing, Researching, and Reporting News in Technology, Science, and Engineering
Lecturer: Dr Sunny Bains
An intermediate module on research and writing methods for journalism and consultancy. Focusses on news, technical argument, and researching new topics using both online and face-to-face sources.
MSIN0035 Engineering, Technology and Innovation: The Long View
Lecturer: Dr Peter Antonioni
An advanced module that uses principles of management and economics to analyse future trends. Provides students with tools to enable graduates to understand the roll out and adoption of innovations and the competitive environments where they appear.
BENG0027: Advanced Tech Journalism: Advanced Analysis and Communication in Engineering and Technology
Lecturer: Dr Sunny Bains
An advanced course that pushes students to consolidate all they have learned by predicting medium/long-term changes in the fields they cover, illustrating emerging technology trends in news features, and writing opinion pieces and reviews showing the insight they have gained.
For full information about the modules, please click the links at the top or search for them directly on the UCL Module catalogue.