Table of Contents Preface by Theodore Jay Gordon Back cover

Original Chinese Edition was published in Beijing, January 2002.
《Soft Technology: Space of Innovation, Essence of Innovation》
Zhouying JIN, ISBN 7-5011-5536-4 (Chinese Edition)

Table of Contents
Preface to the English Edition: Theodore Gordon
Acknowledgements
Detailed Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: The Evolution of Technology
Chapter Two: Historical Antecedents of Soft Technology
Chapter Three: The Characteristics and Classifications of Soft Technology
Chapter Four: Soft Technology and Innovation
Chapter Five: Soft-Tech Industries—Industrial Innovation of Soft Technology
Chapter Six: What is Technological Competitiveness?
Chapter Seven: Soft-Tech Talents and the Education Revolution
Chapter Eight: Soft Technology and the Fourth Generation of Technology Foresight
Postscript: The Principles for Development in the Twenty-first Century
Appendix: Organizational Innovation and Virtual Research Institutes
Bibliography
About The Author
Front & Back Cover: Hazel Henderson Rinaldo S. Brutoco and Karamjit S Gill

Preface by Theodore Jay Gordon
In this remarkable and groundbreaking book, Professor Jin begins the arduous process of organizing a new discipline: soft technology. We live daily with hard technology: it is the domain of tools, machines and equipment. Professor Jin defines it as the “skills, the tools, and rules that are employed by humans to alter, accommodate to and manage nature for human survival and development”. It is about things. It delivers the elements of our material life.
The new discipline she describes in this book represents the rest of the technological universe; she defines soft technology as “knowledge derived from the social sciences, non-natural sciences, and non-scientific (traditional) knowledge to solve various practical problems.” It is, she says, focused on human thought, not things, and is the realm of “ideology, emotion, values, worldview, individual and organizational behaviors, as well as human society.”
Soft technology is probably older, but hard technology is more systematically codified and understood. Hard technologies exist because of invention; but the invention process itself and the uses made of the hard technologies come from the soft side. Moral and ethical considerations are not a part of hard technology. How often have we heard that “technology cannot itself be evil, the evil lies in the way it’s used?” Hard technology relies on laws of nature and information about how to do things; soft technology falls back on the inner self and ancient epistemology.
Both hard and soft technologies involve knowledge systems; both are important because they affect the human condition, but they operate on vastly different wavelengths.
One can think of dozens of needed soft technology inventions. Consider inventing a way to protect intellectual property that rewards the inventor but does not withhold the fruits of the invention from people who need it but cannot afford it. Consider a soft technology for encouraging the use of futures research in decision-making, or the development of a new decision science that goes beyond economic cost benefit and includes intuition, explicit risk taking, artificial intelligence and neuro-psychiatry. How can conflict resolution be improved? How can old ethnic hatreds be tamed? Or consider how, in this modern world, children, CEO’s, clergy, and politicians, can learn values and moral behavior. These are worthy soft technology research projects.
There are a few other prospective soft technology inventions that deserve some thought. Science and the hard technologies that flow from it, have contributed to our material world for better or worse, improved health, lengthened life, and despite the poverty gap, increased abundance for most people. But on the horizon are possible developments flowing from science that seem threatening and give us pause. Further, science left to its own mechanisms, seems unlikely to provide solutions to pressing global problems. So, in a nutshell, how can science help capture the best and avoid the worst that the future has to offer? Or to put it in a different way, how can soft technology help shape science to make life better and less risky for all?
It is probably unfair to pose such difficult challenges to a new discipline. But the ease with which we can find jobs for it to do, illustrates its potential importance. God speed.
Theodore Jay Gordon
October 2002

Mr. Theodore Jay Gordon is a Senior Research Fellow for the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University. He started The Futures Group in 1971 and is the author of five books and hundreds of papers dealing topics associated with the future, space, and scientific and technological developments and global issues. He was a consultant to RAND, an early contributor to the use of the Delphi method, and the inventor of several futures research techniques.

Back cover by Hazel Henderson
Professor Jin’s new book, Global Technological Change: From Hard Technology to Soft Technology, is a powerful re-conceptualization of technological options and innovation management, which can help steer societies in assessing technologies for the 21st century.
As Zhouying Jin correctly points out: in emerging knowledge societies, the "soft" technologies are drivers of physical "hardware" technologies. These soft technologies include management, organizational design, education for creativity and entrepreneurship, good governance, prudent regulation, patent systems, efficient banking as well as fostering systems thinking, ecological and cultural balance. This book is a major intellectual advance that can help clarify human choices for decades to come.
Hazel Henderson
October 2002

Hazel Henderson’s many accomplishments and positions include: Advisory Council Member, US Office of Technology Assessment, National Science Foundation, National Academy of Engineering (1974-1980); author, Paradigms in Progress, Beyond Globalization; and, partner with the Calvert Group, Bethesda, MD on the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators.

Back cover by Rinaldo S. Brutoco
This book is the most thoroughly comprehensive look at technology from a Western and Chinese perspective that I have ever had the privilege to read. The sweep of Prof. Jin’s examination is matched by the breadth of her scholarship. Her development of “Soft Technology” as a concept which can bridge the divide between our planetary science and our cultural consciousness is a unique contribution to our understanding of the place where science meets awareness. Her work deserves to be studied in careful detail for the insight it might provide us, particularly in the West, of how to appropriately empower Eastern cultures to be fully equal global partners with the Western Industrial communities based upon Harmony, Balance and Equality.
Rinaldo S. Brutoco
1st November 2002
Rinaldo S. Brutoco is President of the World Business Academy

Back cover Karamjit S Gill
“This volume indicates that the complex problems we are facing in the 21st century can only be solved by a balance between‘yin-yang’environment, between the hard technology (machine-centred) and the soft technology (human-centred). This concept is invaluable as it conveys a new perspective of the assumptions about the relationships between technological innovation, institutional innovation, as well as of the gap between the developed and developing countries at the turn of the new millennium.“

Karamjit S Gill, Editor, AI& Society: Journal of Human-Centred Systems