Future-Oriented Technology Analysis

Over the last half century or so, various tools and techniques have been developed that seek to better anticipate and shape future technological developments. Some of these approaches, particularly early on, tended to be techno-determinist in their outlook, but more recently, a greater acknowledgement of the co-evolution of technology and society has led to the adoption of necessarily more complex perspectives. Some approaches have been purely quantitative, others purely qualitative, whilst a mix is often preferred. Some have involved only ‘experts’, whilst others have sought to initiate a societal dialogue. And some have sought to explore possible futures through extrapolation, whilst others have adopted a more normative stance, identifying targets and setting out action plans for achieving more desirable futures.

In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we first outline work done around tracing the evolution of FTA and its essential characteristics. We then discuss the relationship between FTA and decision-making processes, an area where there exists much misunderstanding and misplaced expectations. Thereafter, we explicate some of the main challenges facing contemporary FTA, particularly around impacts and their assessment, while in a final section, we provide a summary of the chapters that follow.

The origin of the term ‘future-oriented technology analysis’ can be traced to the planning for the IPTS Seminar ‘New Horizons and Challenges for Future-oriented Technology Analysis: New Technology Foresight, Forecasting and Assessment Methods’ held in Seville, Spain in May 2004 (IPTS 2004). In the run-up to this seminar the Planning Committee prepared a preliminary paper to stimulate the potential participants to select topics on which to present papers and posters. This paper was entitled ‘Technology Futures Analysis: Toward Integration of the Field and New Methods’ (Technology Futures Analysis Methods Working Group, 2004). The paper introduced what it called an umbrella concept to encompass the wide variety of technology-oriented forecasting methods and practices, namely, Technology Futures Analysis (TFA). It is interesting that between that point and the actual seminar, a subtle, but crucial change took place in that TFA became FTA. The essence of that change was that ‘technology-oriented’ gave way to ‘futures-oriented’. This indicated that the focus of the seminar would be clearly on the future and ways to develop useful information for shaping the future. The preparatory paper itself fostered the change in focus as it developed a series of challenging questions about the field of analysis of possible and desirable futures” (Scapolo 2005).

The objective of the Seminar was to analyse possible overlapping fields of practice among technology foresight, forecasting, intelligence, roadmapping, and assessment. The diversity among these disciplines reflects the complexity of demands for FTA relating to differences in scope (geographic scale and time horizon), relationship to decision making, the extent of participation, the purpose of the analysis (awareness raising, envisioning, consensus building, corporate technology planning, etc), and the reliability of source information.

In June 2007, the European Parliament’s Scientific Options Assessment (STOA) Panel celebrated its 20th anniversary with an exhibition at the Parliament’s premises in Strasbourg. The opening ceremony included speeches by the Parliament’s president, Hans-Gert Pöttering, and the European Commissioner responsible for Science and Research, Janez Potočnik. His predecessor, Philippe Busquin is now the chairman of the STOA panel which since his assumption of the chair has had a framework contract with a group of technology assessment institutions working for national or regional parliaments in Europe. This arrangement is leading to the production of a series of reports, based mainly on a review of existing literature and the involvement of experts. In particular M. Busquin, as chairman of the panel, has noted several times that such reports would also be of interest to national parliaments, notably those without their own capacities for technology assessment. In order to facilitate the necessary exchange, contacts have been established with the Directorate General Research of the European Commission, the organisation Busquin supervised for 5 years. While there is (no longer) any unit with explicit responsibility for technology assessment in DG Research, there is a Directorate with responsibility for, among other things, foresight. A meeting to sound out the feasibility of a Commission-funded project to disseminate findings for the STOA Panel included a discussion on the distinction between technology assessment and foresight, which finished with the conclusion that they overlap, although the two should not be totally confounded.

Foresight is now a well-established tool used by policy makers, strategists, and managers. It has been widely applied at the national level by science ministries and research funding agencies for developing shared long-term visions, for setting research priorities, and for strengthening interactions within research and innovation systems. It is being increasingly utilised in regions to formulate regional science and innovation policies. It is also used in organisations – both public and private — for scanning future threats and opportunities, and for formulating and future-proofing long-term strategies.

The argument in this chapter is that whilst the objectives set for foresight are increasingly wide-ranging, the conceptualisations of these activities, as indicated by their ‘intervention theories’, are somewhat lagging behind the latest insights offered by the social sciences and humanities (SSH). This conceptualisation gap has led to a situation where foresight activities are insufficiently understood, or even misunderstood, making any assessment of their outcomes problematic.

At the moment, policy makers and analysts are still trying to better define the expected outputs and outcomes of foresight, based largely upon an empiricist approach of learning from case experiences. Whilst an empiricist (inductive) approach is worthy and most definitely necessary, the argument in this chapter is that it is insufficient on its own. We argue that to improve our understanding of foresight, we must turn to the SSH for a more deductive mode of enquiry.

A strange thing about foresight is that you rarely hear anything about the future. In the futures work I have looked at and participated in the idea of the future ‘as such’, as the field or medium of our enquiry is, it seems, never mentioned. The future, while being the thing we are concerned with above all else, the thing we are trying to ‘think’ about, ‘debate’ and ‘shape’ in the words of the current European Commission definition of foresight on the foresight unit’s website is never the topic of theory or enquiry: absolutely everything else is, but not that. In fact, it is actually very difficult to say how the future is thought or theorised in most exercises, not at all easy to identify what idea of the future we are working with. At best, in most cases, it seems that it is considered to be unproblematic: a common-or-garden space and or time; empty but not quite a vacuum; waiting to be filled for good or ill by us or by others if we don’t get there first; something that will open up and close like an infinite concertina depending on how hard we push at the walls of it (although it is accepted that things get less clear the more we push); shorter or longer depending on how we chop it up; something that while vaguely way ‘out there’ leads right up to our feet, through us contemporary subjects, back to the past. But mostly there is silence: the future is just a kind of unformed assumption at the middle of the discourse.

There is a variety of interpretative frameworks for giving meaning to FTA activities (see Barré and Keenan in this volume). In this contribution we would like to explore an interpretation of Foresight from the perspective of the interdisciplinary body of knowledge that has become known as STS — Science and Technology Studies (c.f. Jasanoff et al. 1994). Drawing in particular on STS insights on the “social shaping of technology”, we would like to investigate the possibility of Foresight to support policy makers in influencing innovation trajectories according to societal needs.

The study of technological developments is a complex issue. First of all, technologies are not given in nature, but man-made constructs; they are the products of cultural evolution. The various actors involved may use different definitions of technology. Furthermore, technologies are continuously evolving in a social context. With the further development of technologies, their definitions and relevant perspectives may also have to change. These definitions and perspectives, however, are basic to the discursive traditions studying technology and its relevant contexts. We distinguish several perspectives in the study of technology: STS dealing with social and economic co-evolution of technology, and science and technology (S&T) policy analysis and R&D management through foresight. We argue that the combination of these three perspectives challenges us to consider technological change as a complex and reflexive process. From this combined perspective, it is implied that taking a holistic view on the future by looking at societal and technological elements together and aligning or even integrating companies and users visions on the future is not at all an easy thing to do. To actually develop socio-technical future visions Foresight needs to look at societal development and technological possibilities with the same degree of openness and expertise. STS results may give some indications for Foresight practice aiming to adopt such a holistic approach.

There are many reasons why strategic intelligence is required to support policy decisions. These primarily stem from the nature of today’s knowledge society with two contrasting trends. On one hand, there is a trend of increasing human intelligence in the economic, social and political systems (Hughes 2007). On the other hand, there is a trend towards dissolving certainties about the problems and solutions of today’s society (Hoijer et al. 2006). Clearly, more information does not always imply more certainties on how to act and even the same facts are often interpreted in markedly different ways. The same policy relevant information can and often does result in conflicting framing of a problem by different stakeholders. This is rather because of competing assumptions than because of inconsistent facts (Dunn 2004). Therefore, it is not surprising us that policy-makers are demanding for strategic intelligence to support their understanding of today’s challenges, including the relevant aspects and impact of science and technology and their possible future developments.

This chapter on strategic intelligence in decision-making reflects on policy analysis concepts, such as the evidence-based approach and the rational decisionmaking model, and explores the core problems concerning the effectiveness of SI applications to support decision-making. The hypothesis is that SI applications need to be better institutional embedded in terms of opportunity, purpose and legitimacy, so that SI applications do not become meaningless and useless for the decision-makers.

This chapter addresses Foresight and Future-oriented Technology Analyses (FTA) in the context of their application to the world of business. While there has been a great deal of emphasis on the development and use of FTA in the public sector and by governments, less attention has been directed to the substantial growth in foresight and future analysis in business. However, on closer inspection, it has become apparent that the term Corporate Foresight (e.g., Burmeister et al. 2004) is commonly being used to describe very different things. In order to clarify the term, and identify its various uses, this paper has been structured to address separately ‘FTA in business’ and ‘FTA for business’.

In recent years, the higher education sector has increasingly been perceived as a key part of innovation systems at all levels of analysis, including national and regional, and through the eco-system which links large and small firms together and with their collaborators (Coombs and Georghiou 2002). The core functions of Universities, training and basic research, have been subject to external forces, some of which have already made their effects felt, while others are keenly debated as societal expectations of the sector change. These activities have been supplemented by a drive towards the Third Mission, relating Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to their socio-economic and cultural context. As with, what are in many cases long-standing institutions which are either in the public sector or rely heavily upon its funding, the sector has also felt the pressures of public sector reform in its managerial and accountability structures. Despite an experience of major changes such as massification of student access, technological change, funding models, specialisation of mission, growth of research activity and internationalisation in all respects, there is a continuing expectation that further changes are coming and hence an apparent need for Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) activity to help institutions and their stakeholders to go forward.

Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) methods have been used in highly developed countries for the last decades to improve competitive strategies, evaluate social responses to technological development paths and foresee critical situations in sensitive areas, such as energy, the environment, natural resources and demographic trends, as well as to explore the implications of advanced technologies in areas like ICT technologies and basic research on molecular biology.

This chapter focuses on experiences with FTA methods in Latin America. It is possible to identify two different stages in the use of FTA in the region. The first, in the 1970s, had a holistic approach and was related to a Latin American view of development. The second, from the present decade, has a closer focus on specific problems and opportunities, within the framework of increasing globalization and the advent of the knowledge society. It remains to be seen whether the findings presented here are applicable to other LDCs outside the region.

This chapter describes new methodological developments in FTA reported at both the First and Second FTA Seminars. We offer some perspective. This chapter is being prepared as part of the synthesis of knowledge gained especially from the Second Future-oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) Seminar (2006). However, with respect to “new methods,” we incorporate considerable material from the First FTA Seminar (2004 EU-US Seminar) because its theme was “new methods”. We intend this chapter as an aid to the reader scanning for suitable technology intelligence, forecasting, assessment, roadmapping, or foresight tools. The “foundation papers” for the First FTA Seminar noted several important drivers that imply the need for new methods. Coates et al. (2001) observed that FTA had emerged from an extended dormancy with an upsurge in new forms and incipient new tools in the 1990’s. They perceived several potent changes and challenges for FTA:

As the chapters in this volume have demonstrated, FTA cannot be defined by a single methodology, nor by a single goal; indeed, it encompasses the tradition of a variety of schools of thought, each one embodying a stream of theory and practice referring more or less explicitly to an understanding of what is relevant and useful. The diversity of contexts of application leads understandably to a diversity of focus, methods and outcomes of FTA exercises. Nevertheless, on reviewing the different contributions from which this book is built, it appears that the term ‘FTA’ does refer to a number of common elements, beyond the differences of context of application and the variety of mode of expression linked to the various backgrounds among the authors. These deep-rooted common elements are the basis for a shared understanding of FTA, as follows: