History

TPM was born in 1997 from a merger between the two faculties at the time:

• Technology and Society (TS) and
• Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management (SEPA)

The Faculty of TS was a "joint faculty". The main task of the Faculty of TS was to provide service education in disciplines including Philosophy, Economics, Skills, Technology Assessment, Law and Gender Studies. Most of the research was education-dependent and highly fragmented due to the variety of study programmes on offer. In 1996, this research was informally reviewed. This review was one of the reasons for the Executive Board to merge TS with SEPA.

The Faculty of SEPA was the DUT's youngest faculty. It was built “from scratch” and started in 1992 with a new curriculum and a new research programme. The instructions given by the Executive Board were to develop an interdisciplinary research programme, in which issues of technology, policy and management could be addressed by means of an integrated approach. The aim was to form a body of knowledge to train a new type of Master of Science. The background to the latter idea was the recognition that the solution for many organizational and social problems requires the integration of technology, policy and management.

Because the Faculty was built from scratch, it was relatively easy in SEPA to develop a consistent structure as well as an education and research programme.

Staff numbers

The following figure shows the development in the number of academic staff of the entire faculty from 1998 to 2002.

^{Development of academic staff in FTEs in the Faculty of TPM from 1998 to 2002}

1997 merger

In 1997, the then Executive Board decided that TS and SEPA should merge. Once the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management had been set up in 1997, the staff made an energetic effort to:

• integrate two completely different faculties, each with its own culture and structure, into one new organization with a uniform administrative and business structure. As always, this merger process required a major administrative effort.
• develop a new research portfolio, comprising a number of  research programmes. The guiding principle here was that good research should be incorporated into the portfolio, whereas weak research should be discontinued.
• develop a new education portfolio.

Research

After the merger, a number of research themes and programmes of Technology and Society were repositioned. An important guideline here was the 1996 Evaluation Report. Partly because of this report, research themes or programmes were discontinued, positioned elsewhere in the university, or they were included in the new TPM research portfolio. For example, the chair in Applied Linguistics and Business Economics was scrapped and the chair in Technology Assessment was moved to the Faculty of Design, Engineering and Production. The whole of the existing SEPA research was included in the new research portfolio.