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I had struggled for a long time over the question: what does it mean to be an engineer? Some six years ago, a then student (Oluwafemi Alaofin) posted on the SPE blogs the following interrogation: “How to be a good engineer”. The answers were only two, short, one of them being a plain: “make sure it works”, which I liked, but does not concern engineers only. I hope that the struggle to make it work also applies to surgeons, politicians, diplomats, cooks and hairdressers, to name a few. Actually, one cannot define what a good engineer is, prior to defining what an engineer is.

One day, possibly overwhelmed by guilty annoyance, I went on saying in front of my bewildered office co-workers: “one who cannot integrate  x^-1  is not an engineer”. That may not have been very smart, but was a genuine statement. Engineering requires a minimum of mathematical background that is the foundation of science and philosophy. That morning, I got all sorts of answers such as “what do you mean by “integrate””, “I am too old for this”, and, "x⁰"^. Then, I thought to myself, why not “x⁰/0"?”; I fainted.

Therefore, Femi, to my standard, to be an engineer (and not necessarily a good one) you need a minimum of scientific culture, and the more, the better. However, being a scientist even a good one does not ensure you to be a good engineer; your question still remains or at least the “what else” part of the necessity that would make the whole sufficient. As engineers, what science do we need and what differentiates the scientist from the engineer? This is what I am going to try to answer now.

Lately, I have been involved in some partly publicly funded projects. Consortia are built that include academic institutions and industrial partners. These consortia work on topics that are of public interests for the future of the countries and also of humanity and of the planet. They target issues such as energy supply, transportation systems, artificial intelligence, food and agriculture, etc.

Because these projects have the double objective of solving important issues and funding research, they all include their share of people coming from all sorts of background and of course, many engineers and scientists. In a previous blog, I wrote “Engineering is about finding and applying practical solutions to real problems, with the help of the currently available scientific knowledge”, hence the “make sure it works” answer, but being technically fit, i.e. up-to-date on science and technology is a requirement for the “good” engineer. SPE membership and the active use of its benefits is one of the engineer’s building blocks that too many regard as superfluous.

It is the scientist’s role to create knowledge. That knowledge is made available to the public mostly through scientific publications, and to a lesser extent through education. Sometimes, practical applications arise directly from science, but it not its primary purpose. These applications are a by-products of knowledge creation. The engineer focusses on creating solutions or - to use “modern” language - on “value creation”. Value must certainly not be restricted to its monetary sense; many times value means bringing something positive to the people; many of us have experienced the frustration of seeing the management selecting more profitable solutions, when better and more elegant ones, involving more sound engineering were available. Sometimes these solutions result in knowledge creation too, but that knowledge is only the by-product of an engineering solution. A research that appears not to be relevant to the identified problem is quickly dropped by engineers when scientists would dig deeper in issues that may never find practical applications.

Scientists and engineers are buddies in their thirst for knowledge but they like to fight each other when something must be built and work, and even more so when time and money greatly limit the project's degrees of freedom. Because they can clearly express their issues and constraints, the best engineers get the best results from their fellow scientists. The best scientists are inspired by engineering and can produce the very useful knowledge that makes the world progress. The secret of innovation often resides in that fruitful collaboration, in which everyone is educated, respectful and open-minded.