The spirit and practice of Innaxis are guided by a series of “principles” for the development of genuinely innovative projects.
Future and responsibility. Time is not an illusion. Neither is it universal nor homogeneous. The future is really open and unpredictability is intrinsic to most phenomena, especially to life and societies. Our future will be the result of human action, not of “natural laws” nor extra-terrestrial intelligence. “The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves” (W. Shakespeare).
Emergence. Uncertainty is not only irreducible, it is an essential mechanism to build far-from-equilibrium systems, like living organisms or human institutions. Understanding the nature of uncertainty is the first step to use it in a positive way, to favour the emergence of beneficial behaviours.
Foresight alliance. Time has come for a new alliance between Science and Society. As a discipline focused on the build-up of scenarios and the analysis of their feasibility, foresight can develop scientific foundations, so that interactions between systems, persons and knowledges stop being the problem overcoming our capacity to become the lever to build the best possible future for all.
Fruitful exchanges. To address complex and global challenges, the design of sustainable and creative solutions requires cooperation and cross-fertilization between disciplines, whether they are or not scientific in the classical sense. In order to achieve that, a new synthesis is needed between “hard” sciences, humanistic knowledge and social sciences.
Cooperative design. Decentralization, distributed reasoning, interoperability, active cooperation, communication and negotiation: these are the foundations to form a new engineering paradigm, oriented to put enough autonomy and intelligence in the designed systems so to make them adaptable to changing situations, while keeping “in mind” the overall objectives of each mission.
Projects = Problems x Dimensions. Science, technology, economy and society are unavoidable dimensions of any R&D project in the 21st century. Interdisciplinary by construction, the projects developed by INNAXIS adress those dimensions, as well as the specific knowledge for each problem and the appropriate modelling and computing techniques to formalize concepts and systems and to produce extensive simulations.
Innovation = Knowledges x Connections. INNAXIS is another node of a growing and global network: increasing connectedness and interactions between research communities all over the world is the best way to ensure a continuous flow of unexpected formulations, production of knowledge and new solutions to problems. The spirit of the human network is part of the way we are.
PERSONS. In the 21st century, science, engineering and foresight cannot ignore that persons are at the very center of everything. They do the research, take decisions, produce and consume, live in society and, in the end, for the best or worse, intentionally or not, they build up the future.
