Abstract
A symposium recently held in Colombia, sponsored by the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, focused on commercialization of technologies. Discussions there directed my attention to the unprecedented circumstance in which the issue is placed today. "Borderlessness" seems to be the keyword for this situation. Production sites are now distributed irrespective of national borders, resulting in introduction of the most advanced technologies into developing countries. Developing countries are no longer the market or competitors of advanced countries, but act as OEM supplier to the latter. The two parties are thus bound together with a common fate. Another form of "borderlessness" is found in the field of technology: no industry can stand any longer on a single technical field. Commercialization of a technology now requires a number of different technical disciplines integrated together. This means that the education and training of engineers must change. A further example of loss of border is experienced in some actual problems, such as the question of employment in a global scale, which are not adequately addressed within a neatly defined theoretical frame. Lack of a methodology of treatment of multi-principle, multi-object problems should present us an important task for research in future.
