15: Learners: Flowers Blooming as Agents of Scientific Entrepreneurship. Visionary Investors Turn to Them^*

We took some thoughts from the unwritten (not yet) encyclopaedia of scientific entrepreneurship. Its manifestation makes the irreversible transformation following repeated and close shocks palpable and arouses disquiet in those who preserve the illusion of continuity with the past. The transformative scientific enterprises of the Knowledge Age have thoughts and ways of acting that differentiate them significantly from those of the Industrial Age. Progressive and attentive to the fairness of relations with and among all living species and nature, scientific entrepreneurship is on a collision course with economic thinking that expresses itself in the language of growth quantity, budgets and cost-benefit studies that conflict with its values of fairness. According to this language, young people should receive ‘useful’ education and training, i.e. aimed only at their professionalisation, disregarding the usefulness of seemingly useless knowledge. Such is the cultivation of the intellect and the enlargement of mind that the polymath John Henry Newman (1801–1890) placed at the head of the learning mission.