ABSTRACT
How does academic research lead to technological innovation? Innovation models for ‘entrepreneurial science’ encourage scientists and engineers to move back and forth between industry and academia, and even to operate in both domains at the same time. New hybrid spaces of inquiry emerge at the intersection of these domains, for example when academics set up spin-off companies with the purpose of commercialising their research. This chapter discusses the findings of ethnographic research we conducted with award-winning innovators who work at the intersection of academia and industry. It focuses, specifically, on the creative processes that engineers undertake when designing new technologies in hybrid spaces of inquiry that combine engineering and business knowledge. We develop the concept of multi-engineering to describe a specific mode of knowledge production that our research participants employ when designing new technologies. This involves connecting multiple fields in a flat epistemology, where each field provides the tools to solve one part of the problem that is being addressed. These fields are placed in a relationship of complementarity and they are given equal interpretative power. Finally, we ask what it would mean for the anthropology of futures to develop and employ a multi-engineering approach in interdisciplinary collaborations with engineers and technologists.
