Complex Knowledge for Innovation in Economic and Social Development

The solution to the significant modern problems that impede the development of human society demands a cultural evolution based on knowledge. All the necessary disciplinary tools already exist; it is only essential to organize them into a coherent interdisciplinary complexity encompassing natural, social, and human sciences.

However, ignorance, in its most modern forms, conveniently disperses the diversity of disciplinary knowledge, transforming complementary differences into conflicts, the potential of diversity into the injustice of prejudice, and the power of complexity into the realm of complication. Human beings have the capacity to imagine and innovate their own future, to solve and dissolve with enlightenment the problems they have created in their ignorance, to liberate themselves and take responsibility, to develop values, and to create a coherent and objective vision of the world. They can imagine and build a synergy of personal and social futures, developing both in a sustainable way.

Modern interdisciplinary knowledge clearly shows that the future of humanity can be bright if it manages to consistently integrate natural, social, and human knowledge, overcoming the power of modern forms of ignorance that separate them and create artificial conflicts.

Rafael M. Gutierrez was born in Asunción, Paraguay, into a diverse family of Latin Americans and Europeans. In Argentina and Colombia, he studied physics, got his MSc in Canada and his PhD in USA in 'Natural, Social and Human Complexity'. His intercultural development continued in Switzerland and France, returning to Colombia to build interdisciplinary R&D&I groups, centers, and doctoral programs with continuous travels within international collaborations and public service as Deputy Director of the current Colombian Ministry of Science-Technology-Innovation. Currently, Rafael is a professor at Universidad Antonio Nariño in Bogotá, Colombia, and a visiting professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.