OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2023
Enabling Transitions in Times of Disruption
Sociotechnical systems in areas like energy, agrifood and mobility need to transform rapidly to become more sustainable and resilient. Science, technology and innovation (STI) have essential roles in these transformations, but governments must be more ambitious and act with greater urgency in their STI policies to meet these challenges. They should design policy portfolios that enable transformative innovation and new markets to emerge, challenge existing fossil-based systems, and create windows of opportunity for low-carbon technologies to break through. This calls for larger investments but also greater directionality in research and innovation, for example, through mission-oriented policies, to help direct and compress the innovation cycle for low-carbon technologies. International co-operation will be essential, but rising geopolitical tensions, including strategic competition in key emerging technologies, could make this difficult. OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2023 explores these and other key issues and trends that present STI with a new operating environment to which it must adapt.
Mobilising science in times of crisis: Lessons learned from COVID-19
Science played an essential role in generating the knowledge and technologies needed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic offers lessons that can position science to respond more effectively to future crises. For instance, much can be learned from successful co-operation between various actors during the pandemic, but reinforcing these relationships over the longer term may require significant change to academic culture, structures, incentives and rewards. Many of the required changes – including in research performance assessment, public engagement, and transdisciplinary research – are already underway but have not yet been adopted at the necessary scale and speed because of embedded inertia in science systems. More radical change is necessary to spur science to engage with other societal stakeholders to produce the broader range of outputs and solutions that are urgently required to deal with complex global challenges and crises.
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