2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Surveys of bioengineering facilities within the bioeconomy highlight a limited diffusion of socio-technical knowledge and expertise about new innovations at the pilot and demonstration scales, compared to technical knowledge. To improve on this, it is critical to develop awareness among new technology developers about different stakeholders within the bioeconomy, as well as about the non-technical impacts of their work within a broader context. This paper describes a workshop with graduate bioengineering researchers. The use of system mapping tools for improving socio-technical knowledge diffusion at their bioengineering institute are evaluated. Participants were asked to describe the impacts of their research projects on non-technical stakeholders using system mapping tools in teams of 3-8 people. Each individual was also surveyed before and after the workshop to better understand their learning goals, projects, and awareness of system mapping. Structural coding was used to study resulting maps and survey data, against a conceptual framework for systems thinking. Most maps only focused on the diffusion of technical knowledge from the research field outwards to the public and assumed that good research from academia would lead to overall good in the system. Although most teams identified various stakeholders on their maps, only technical expertise was acknowledged across many of them. For the few instances where regulations, ethical, social, environmental and economic considerations were included on maps, this knowledge was considered as limiting technical research and scale-up, and not supporting it. Participant surveys suggest that the application of mapping tools allowed them to shift into more holistic thinking about their roles and impact on biotechnology adoption. For some participants, this holistic view was encouraging as it moved them away from taking their impacts too personally, to understanding that their work exists in a broader context of relationships and non-linear networks of causal effects. For others, the largeness of socio-technical implications felt overwhelming. Introducing system mapping topics to bioengineering students at a slower more gradual pace over multiple teaching events may improve this sense of overwhelm. In addition, using the conceptual framework as an explicit prompting device to structure mapping activities may address the ambiguity experienced by participants from task instructions at the workshop. As a next step, it would be interesting to facilitate this exercise with a group having more mixed stakes and roles, over multiple events or in a graduate course setting.