Patrick Gunkel
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Patrick M. Gunkel (1947 – 2017) was an American
futurist Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futures studies or futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities ...
and
independent scholar A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a terminal ...
best known as the originator of "ideonomy", a combinatorial "science of ideas". Although he never completed a degree, his career included positions at the
Hudson Institute Hudson Institute is an American Conservatism in the United States, conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1961 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation. Kahn ...
,
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
, and the
University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 students as of fall 2 ...
. Guido Enthoven describes Gunkel's ideonomy as one of three pioneering attempts to create a science of ideas (the others being
Antoine Destutt de Tracy Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (; 20 July 1754 – 9 March 1836) was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". Biography The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born in ...
's original notion of
ideology An ideology is a set of beliefs or values attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Form ...
and
Genrich Altshuller Genrikh Saulovich Altshuller (, ; 15 October 1926 – 24 September 1998) was a Soviet engineer, inventor, and writer. He is most notable for creating the TRIZ, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, better known by its Russian acronym TRIZ. He fou ...
’s
TRIZ TRIZ (; ) is a methodology that combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature. The development and improvement of ...
"system of inventive problem solving"), while
Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist, cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...
described ideonomy as "perhaps the most extensive study of ways to generate ideas". An archive of his works was assembled by Whitman Richards.


References

1947 births 2017 deaths American futurologists Independent scholars {{US-academic-bio-stub