THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL SEVILLE SEMINAR ON FUTURE ORIENTED TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS (FTA)

Transcription

1 THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL SEVILLE SEMINAR ON FUTURE ORIENTED TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS (FTA) European Commission Directorate General Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies DG (JRC IPTS), Seville, Spain, September 2006 Introduction Building on the success of the joint EU US Seminar on Future oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) in 2004 ( a second event is being organised for the sharing of ideas and experiences among FTA experts, practitioners, and decision makers. The 2006 Seminar will focus upon the impact of FTA approaches on policy and decisionmaking and will place emphasis on the delivery of concrete and valued policy outcomes and impacts from FTA activities. The seminar intends to enlarge the geographical base of participants from that of the previous seminar..academics, practitioners and public and private sector decision makers from Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Australasia are therefore invited to broaden the network and to increase understanding of advances in the field of FTA. The FTA acronym refers to strategic foresight, forecasting and technology assessment. The Seminar s target audience includes: The public sector, Participants with an interest in business and other non governmental FTA activities, and Those active in areas where FTA tools and approaches have been newly applied. The Seminar organisers are particularly interested in receiving abstracts concerning FTA adaptations to decision making contexts in developing countries. The Seminar will cover two full days, during which time, papers and multimedia e posters will be presented. This announcement includes a call for paper and e poster abstracts within four relevant themes, the details of which can be found below or at the Seminar web site ( The Seminar will also involve considerable workshop activity. In particular, specific issueoriented working groups will meet and report back on recommendations to advance the FTA community and its processes. Seminar Themes Reflecting the Seminar s emphasis upon FTA impacts and outcomes, the four themes in which papers and multimedia e poster presentations are invited are as follows: 1. FTA Assumptions, Methods and Approaches in the Context of Achieving Outcomes 2. FTA Evaluation, Impact and Learning

2 3. FTA in a Business Context 4. FTA on Higher Education Further details on each of these themes can be found in the Annex below or by visiting the Seminar web site ( Submitting Abstracts Only abstracts submitted directly to the Seminar web site through the form available at ( will be considered by the reviewers. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. The deadline for submitting abstracts is 15 May Authors will be informed of reviewers decisions by 31 May 2006, with full texts of papers and multimedia e poster presentations to be delivered no later than 31 July Abstracts should clearly indicate whether they aim to contribute either as papers or multimedia e posters. Guidelines Papers should ideally be between words. A key aim of the Seminar is to prepare a collection of chapters for a book on FTA, to be published in Those papers not included in the edited book could be considered for special editions of two leading journals in the field. The Seminar organisers are currently in discussion with journals on this possibility. E posters should be prepared using MS PowerPoint and should be no longer than two minutes in length. The aim is to upload e posters to the Seminar website and to have them running at multiple points and locations during the Seminar. Authors will also be asked to prepare a short (4 page) brief to accompany their multimedia presentations. Further guidelines on the preparation of e posters and briefs will be issued after completion of the abstracts revision process. The Seminar will have a limited number of places. Seminar Registration will open before the end of May Annex: Full Theme Descriptions Theme 1: Assumptions, Methods and Approaches in the Context of Achieving Outcomes Over the past decade, FTA activities have multiplied across a wide spectrum of settings and at different levels. Reflecting this rich diversity of contexts, FTA activities have assumed a range of labels (e.g. technology foresight, technology assessment, technological forecasting, horizon scanning, technology road mapping, critical technologies, etc.), have had multiple objectives and rationales, and have used different methodological designs. By extension, expectations of outcomes and impacts tend to be context dependent, and vary from concerns with the take up of FTA knowledge in policy and investment decision processes, through to organisational visionbuilding or the active inclusion of normally excluded groups in decision making processes and fora. This variety might suggest that different objectives, methodologies, and expected impacts can somehow be related to different contexts and conditions. But at the moment, there is still little understanding of the relationships among these variables, leading to a situation where much reinvention occurs in many settings. It can be argued that there is a need for some stock taking of FTA activities, with a view to identifying patterns of relations between these variables that could serve policy making or decision makers in their contexts. The focus of this theme is therefore to better elucidate the relations between FTA context, content and approach, with a view to exploring the possibility of designing activities that are fit for

3 purpose. Whilst many FTA practitioners argue that recipe books are not possible for FTA activities given the various contingencies at play in any particular context, it should be possible to demonstrate that, for example, some methodological approaches are better suited than others in certain situations. Alternatively, notions of systemic and adaptive FTA, where FTA activities are responsive to evolving environments, provide a different approach to the design challenge. Abstracts can deal with particular cases or can provide secondary analysis and interpretation from FTA project reviews and databases. Where feasible, the focus should be on both successes and failures, since the aim of this theme is to learn about what works in different settings. Abstracts should avoid an over emphasis on FTA definitions, though it will be important to provide clarity on meanings and interpretations. Abstracts may also focus on defining the general limits of FTA and how these might be relayed in the management of expectations surrounding such activities. Theme 2: Evaluation, Impact and Learning Pleas from sponsors of FTA activities for better accounts of demonstrable impacts are as old as FTA itself. Yet, little work has been done in this area, with most accounts of impacts confined to individual case study descriptions. Practitioners are inclined to contend that evaluating the impacts of FTA activities is difficult, on account of their behavioural additionality, their distribution across a system of actors, and delayed effects associated with the time horizons involved, to name but a few reasons. The evaluative demands of sponsors are also often dismissed as being ill informed and therefore unreasonable, relying upon overly narrow linear models of cause effect that draw upon rational models of decision making. On the other hand, from the sponsors perspective, without better and fuller accounts of impacts, the future sponsorship of FTA activities (and certainly their wider diffusion and expansion) is rendered more difficult and places the whole activity under threat. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that FTA practitioners need to pay greater attention to accounting for outcomes and impacts before their activities can ever be more mainstreamed. More and better accounts of impacts from case studies could help to increase our understanding of FTA and its effects, but will be insufficient on their own. There is now a need to submit FTA practices to interpretation of their significance by the relevant disciplines of the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In this regard, some work has already been done in closely related areas, such as programme evaluation, futures studies, planning, and the study of evidence based policy and scientific advice regimes. Extension of concepts and theoretical insights from these areas might therefore prove fruitful. But it is likely that a wider examination of FTA will be required, drawing upon relevant SSH disciplines, such as epistemology, political science, sociology, economics, and management and organisation science. These will provide a variety of interpretative lenses that offer the possibility to expand our conceptualisation of FTA, which will in turn improve the prospects for evaluating processes and outcomes (for example, through the development of suitable indicators). The following suggestions from a variety of SSH disciplines could offer potentially useful lines of interpretative enquiry within which authors might consider focusing: From epistemology, the status of knowledge claims generated through the use of FTA methods; FTA knowledge production in the continuum from scientifically certified to socially robust to politically relevant knowledge From political science, FTA as an instrument of deliberative democracy; the role of FTA in the evolving multi level governance structures of knowledge societies; the legitimacy of FTA activities in relation to the mainstream political system; the construction and operation of FTA regimes for decision making under conditions of uncertainty and lack of knowledge From sociology, FTA as a process of co production of stakeholder communities (social capital); FTA and the ecology of promises of science and technology; FTA as an

4 instrument of transaction among social groups and stakeholders; symbolic and cultural uses of FTA From economics, FTA as a coordination mechanism of the agents in a knowledge economy; FTA analysed with the concepts of knowledge economics, including characterisation of the flows of knowledge in FTA exercises; FTA analysed with the concepts of evolutionary economics, for example, the role of FTA in the shaping of behavioural and adaptive routines of agents From management and organisation science, FTA as a collective learning mechanism through the sequential interplay between codified and tacit knowledge; development of absorptive capacity and readiness to utilise FTA processes and outputs; the organisation and location of FTA operations in relation to issues of strategy and governance; relation of FTA to the development of anticipatory, inclusive and adaptive capacity This list is far from exhaustive, and abstracts can draw upon any appropriate conceptual models that offer insights on FTA activities and their effects. Whilst case studies are welcome, they should be accompanied by an extensive interpretation of what is happening and the impacts achieved so far, and should, ideally, be limited to illustrations of some wider argument or phenomenon. Theme 3: FTA in a Business Context There is evidence that an increasing number of businesses, industrial associations and industry foundations are using FTA tools for a variety of reasons, including horizon scanning (e.g. of weak signals), strategy setting, development of corporate visions, portfolio analysis, and as an aid in the management of supply chains. The tools being used include technology road mapping, scenario planning, internal and external surveys, and visioning, among others. Whilst there are a few descriptions in the literature of this work, there has been little coverage of how FTA activities fit into the firm (embeddedness), how they relate to (innovation) strategy, and the conditions for their impact. Outside of the firm, many industrial associations have used FTA tools to provide future oriented insights into their sectors and to build collaborative linkages among members. In some instances, the public sector (mostly national and regional governments) has sought to promote private sector use of FTA approaches, particularly in small and medium sized enterprises and towards the further development of industrial clusters. Again, little of this activity has been reviewed and critically analysed. Abstracts that examine the implementation and use of FTA approaches in (and for) the private sector are therefore welcome. As with the other streams in this conference, abstracts should emphasise the impacts of FTA activities, linking their analysis to actual practice, to theories of the firm, to the innovation strategy literature, etc. The embedding of FTA tools and concepts in companies from the organisational point of view is as interesting for analysis as the implementation approaches (e.g. results) enacted by associations, foundations or the like. Theme 4: FTA on Higher Education Universities are increasingly facing new challenges brought on by a number of major disruptive drivers. These include: globalisation and the accompanying mobility of students and scientists; the impacts of new technologies (e.g. the impacts of the internet on teaching); demographic change; increased competition and the need to do well in national and global rankings; the ongoing rapid expansion of the sector (more students and increasing demand for postgraduate education); demands for a greater emphasis upon problem oriented interdisciplinary research; and a continuing reassessment of relationships with the private sector and the innovation related Knowledge Economy agenda (e.g. through third stream activities), to name but a few. One response to the resulting rapid change and its associated uncertainty has been to use FTA tools at the institutional and sectoral levels. Typically, these have been used to extrapolate

5 current trends and drivers into the future, to assess alternative futures, and to build visions in which strategy can be based. A lot of work already exists in this area, yet little is known of its impacts. Therefore, in this stream, abstracts should focus upon the implementation and use of FTA tools and approaches in the Higher Education sector. For example, abstracts can concentrate on individual examples of FTA approaches being implemented in institutional settings, examining how they have contributed to organisational prioritisation, strategy and visionbuilding. Alternatively, they can examine the many government and EC funded FTA activities that have focused upon the future of the sector and assess their contribution to Higher Education reform. It could also be interesting to consider the linkages between FTA for the sector, for example, such as that carried out by national governments and the European Commission, and those FTA activities carried out by HE institutions. Reflecting the underlying theme of the conference, abstracts should, in all cases, describe and explain the impacts of the FTA activity.