Innovation Ecosystem Dynamics, Value and Learning I: What Can Hamilton Tell Us?

Held in Dublin, Ireland, IS2024 invites us to refresh understanding of contributions to systems engineering by Ireland's greatest mathematician— Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), professor of astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and royal astronomer of Ireland. His profound contributions to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) deserve greater systems community attention. Supporting theory and practice, they intersect foundations and applications streams of INCOSE's future of systems engineering (FuSE) program. Strikingly, key aspects apply to systems of all types, including socio-technical and information systems. Hamilton abstracted the energy-like generator of dynamics for all systems, while also generalizing momentum. Applied to the INCOSE innovation ecosystem pattern as dynamics of learning, development, and life cycle management, this suggests an architecture for integration of the digital thread and machine learning in innovation enterprises, along with foundations of systems engineering as a dynamical system.