I like to use this opportunity to share my story regarding how I became acquainted with Professor Cai Wen in order to remember this great scholar and good friend.
It was several years ago that I attended his event and his team’s celebration for the founding and great successes of the theory of extenics since 1982 in Beijing. After that conference, I had the honor to host him at my local town in America and later to visit the Research Institute of Extenics and Innovation Methods, in Guangdong.
As a result of these exchanges of ideas and visits, I spent a good amount of time and effort to study the theory of extenics, born out of Professor Cai’s initial work published in early 1980s. To help spread the influence of this theory, I cited some of the relevant works of extenics in two of my publications:
Simultaneous consumer utilities, multi-sided markets and consumer synergies. Proceedings of the 2019 annual meeting of national association of business, economics and technology, pp. 101-121.
Value in Business: A Holistic, Systems-Based Approach to Creating and Achieving Value (Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest and Yong Liu). Springer, 2021.
At the end, I wish that colleagues and I will be able to achieve more theoretical and practical successes of extenics in the years to come; and that Professor Cai will rest in peace.
Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest
Department Mathematics,Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, PA 16057, USA
President of International Institute for General Systems Studies.Inc.. USA