Impact

An on-campus conference was held in 2016 entitled “Optimizing the Impact of the Humanities and the Social Sciences,” and its central questions were: how can the social impact of the humanities and the social sciences be improved? And how can society benefit from the knowledge that is the strength of the Tilburg scientific disciplines? This impact could be improved, many claim, if scholars from the humanities and the social sciences were to step up their collaboration with scientists with backgrounds in technology or health science. Such collaboration might be promoted using new concepts, such as living labs or academic workplaces.

Knowledge exploitation

Impact is also seen as a type of knowledge exploitation. Since 2016, Tilburg University has had a so-called Impact Program, in which scientists from a variety of disciplines work with social partners aiming to find “new insights and solutions for the challenges of individuals and society in the 21st century.” Research and collaborative programs focus on three themes: Empowering the Resilient Society, Enhancing Health and Well-Being and Creating Value from Data. A theme that cross-sects all these themes is The Digital Society, which refers to the ambition of the joint Dutch universities to set up the Netherlands as a living lab for people-centered digital technology.

Advancing society

April 2017 saw the publication of an essay entitled Advancing Society in a Digital Era - Science with a Soul by three professors involved in the Impact Program: Johan Denollet, Dick den Hertog and Ton Wilthagen. In this essay, they paraphrase sociologist Anthony Giddens, who argues that many major social issues such as climate change, environmental pollution or inequality have been created by people themselves but that their successful management is extremely complicated: “This far exceeds the capacity and the problem-solving ability of a single stakeholder. The problem of collective action, moreover, as by outlined by economists Adam Smith and Macur Olson, is fully apparent here: individual rationality may lead to collective irrationality.”