Linking science and strategy: challenges and opportunities for using technology mining - Дипломная работа

However, the process of setting global priorities and strategic goals for Science and Technology (S&T) development as a foundation for economic growth (Sokolov & Chulok, 2015) from both research topic and investment perspectives always remains the responsibility of governments as a part of strategic planning and Foresight projects. Policy-makers do not always take Foresight seriously due to long-term horizons and lack of scientific credibility (Cagnin et al., 2015), or, in other words, data evidence. The rising demand for evidence-based policy affects Foresight activities, especially at the first phase of gathering knowledge about the current state of S&T development activities (Amanatidou et al., 2012), or, in terms of Systemic Foresight Methodology (Saritas, 2013), the “Intelligence” phase. Similar process displayed in the figure 1 is used even to support Foresight in the German Federal Armed Forces (Durst et al., 2015). Figure 1:Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS) - a foresight support system for the German Federal Armed Forces Source: (Durst et al., 2015) Georghiou & Harper (2011) with the help of Rafael Popper compiled the list of the most popular foresight objectives based on 50 exercises: Analysis of the future potential of technologies (22%) Support of policy or strategy development (17%) Network building (14%) Priority setting for S&T (11.5%) Methodology and capacity building (9.5%) Articulating supply and demand (9.5%) Public engagement (5.5%) Other (10.6%) Impact of Foresight on Strategy development adds coherence to STI policy (Pietrobelli & Puppato, 2015). It allows predicting future demand for innovation solutions, their market potential, and is the basis for integrated roadmaps (Vishnevskiy et al., 2015) However, one of the challenges is that policy-makers do not always take Foresight seriously due to long-term horizons and lack of scientific credibility (Cagnin et al., 2015). Furthermore, the focus of Foresight is more on broad-based priority setting rather than on engineering major changes in STI policy (Georghiou & Harper, 2011). In order to solve the problem, the realization of S&T strategy, developed through Foresight process, should be constantly monitored and linked with S&T development. R&D programmes and grants are one of the most important STI policy instruments in the US (AAAS, 2016) and can be monitored and analyzed in systemic way through the available databases, such as National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH) and others. Moreover, project funding based on the experience of the NSF (Smith, 1990) demonstrate the increase in the number of EU countries (Lepori et al., 2007) compared to the decline of block funding (Martin & Irvine, 1992). The next subchapter of literature review focuses on Technology Mining methods and tools to analyze STI-related documents, which is further used in the methodology to process documents indicating S&T development and STI policy implementation. Technology Mining for monitoring S&T development Once long-term S&T priorities are set, strategy is developed and STI policy instruments are implemented, the main question that arises is how to monitor the progress, and at the same time continuously analyze other events, which could potentially affect the plans (e.g. new breakthrough technology developed in other country or economic crisis leading to decline of some markets).