Paper short abstract:

The contemporary VUCA-world requires a shift from top down decision making to co-creation, based on a quintuple helix innovation model. Consequently, a stakeholder plurilogue, is needed which sees conflict not as a highway to dystopia, but uses it as a driver for reflection and consensual change.

Paper long abstract:

The characterization of our world as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) is not new (Stiehm 2002), but took considerable speed in recent years to describe a need for change in meeting philosophy and decision making processes. The concept's application shifted quickly from military strategy to business management and extended rapidly to describe the planning environment of nearly all spheres of live (Mack et al 2015). Simultaneously the quintuple helix innovation model (knowledge production by university-industry-government relations plus media-and culture-based civil society plus the perspective of the natural environments) was developed (Carayannis et al 2012). This development urges a shift from traditional linear to simultaneous and synergetic thinking for problem solving. This is where togetherness has currently to ground: on a trustworthy, efficient and professionally mediated plurilogue between all affected and interested stakeholders (Caser 2014, Vasconcelos et al. 2015). The exponentially growing technical and digital development is well likely to provoke societal conflict; even civil unrest is not improbable on the long run. There is a serious danger that science will look to what is coming up with a merely scientific interest. STS-scholars and scientists must not implement plurilogues for their own research purposes and argue that - at the same time - they are serving civil societies' needs and aspirations. This paper will propose a middle way between sociotechnical imaginaries in bringing things together and the implementation and mediation of plurilogue in the "real world out there".