Author Description

Professor Jin's new book, Global Technological Change: From Hard Technology to Soft Technology, is a powerful re-conceptualization of technological options and innovation management, which can help steer societies in assessing technologies for the 21st century. As Zhouying Jin correctly points out: in emerging knowledge societies, the "soft" technologies are drivers of physical "hard" technologies. These soft technologies include management, organizational design, education for creativity and entrepreneurship, good governance, preudent regulation, patent systems, efficient banking as well as fostering systems of thinking, ecological and cultural balance. This book is a major intellectual advance that can help clarify human choices for decades to come. (Hazel Henderson, Advisory Council Member, US Office of Technology Assessment, National Science Foundation, National Academy of Engineering (1974-1980); President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); member, Club of Rome) This volume indicates that the complex problems we are facing in the 21st Century can only be solved by a balance between 'yin-yang' environment, between hard technology (machine-centred) and soft technology (human-centred). This concept is invaluable as it conveys a new perspective of the assumptions about the relationships between technological innovation, institutional innovation as well as of the gap between the developed and developing countries at the turn of the millennium. (Karamjit S Gill, Editor, AI & Society: Journal of Human-Centred Systems)