Patrick Gunkel

Patrick M. Gunkel (1947 – 2017) was an American futurist and independent scholar best known as the originator of "ideonomy", a combinatorial "science of ideas". Although he never completed a degree, his career included positions at the Hudson Institute, MIT, and the University of Texas.

Guido Enthoven describes Gunkel's ideonomy as one of three pioneering attempts to create a science of ideas (the others being Antoine Destutt de Tracy's original notion of ideology and Genrich Altshuller’s TRIZ "system of inventive problem solving"), while Marvin Minsky described ideonomy as "perhaps the most extensive study of ways to generate ideas". An archive of his works was assembled by Whitman Richards.