It seems there a number of reports concerning the US National Nanotechnology Initiative and their efforts and responses to the PCAST 2010 recommendations (I commented on another of their reports in my Dec. 13, 2011 posting). This fourth report/assessment was submitted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and focuses on efforts from various government agencies to follow recommendations from that 2010 PCAST assessment and set of recommendations.

According to the April 27, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

PCAST found that the Federal agencies in the NNI have made substantial progress in addressing many of the 2010 recommendations that were aimed at maintaining U.S. leadership in nanotechnology. One of the primary goals of the NNI is to stay ahead of heavily-investing competitors such as China, South Korea, the European Union, and Russia. Overall, PCAST concluded that the NNI remains a successful cooperative venture that is supporting high-quality research, facilitating the translation of discoveries into new commercial products, and ensuring the Nation’s continued global leadership in this important field.

The PCAST assessment particularly commends the expanded efforts of the NNCO [National Nanotechnology Coordination Office] in the area of commercialization and coordination with industry, and the NNCO’s release of a focused research strategy for addressing environmental, health, and safety (EHS) implications of nanotechnology. In addition, the assessment recognizes NNI’s strong and growing portfolio of research on the societal implications of nanotechnology, nanotechnology education, and public outreach.

Dexter Johnson at his Nanoclast blog on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) website comments in his May 1, 2012 posting,

Okay, pat on the back, job well done…uh, wait, there are still some new recommendations that PCAST would like to see addressed.  You can find them in the PDF of the full report on page vii. They fall into the areas of strategic planning, program management, metrics for assessing nanotechnology’s commercial and societal impacts, and…wait for it…increased support for EHS research.

Additional support for EHS research might be a required element for every PCAST report in the future. More interesting to me, however, is this continued emphasis on improved “metrics for assessing nanotechnology’s commercial and societal impacts.”

Dexter goes on to observe that many countries and corporations are interested in better metrics regarding  nanotechnology and its impacts and hints that he has a few ideas for better metrics.

I’ve looked at the report and found, to my surprise, mention of Canada. In analyzing the US NNI efforts, they also compare US government funding and corporate to that in other countries. On page 14 (print version; p. 30 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI, there’s a table which shows the top 10 countries for spending on nanotechnology,

As you can see, Canadian funding has been relatively flat throughout 2008 – 2010. It appears to have decreased slightly in 2009 and remained the same in 2010.

Aside: I’d dearly love to know how they sourced their data. A couple of years ago, a Canadian Member of Parliament (Peter Julian) asked for similar figures and received some 80 pages of Excel spreadsheets from various department listing any number of research projects that had been funded. (I’d asked Julian’s parliamentary assistant for a copy of the government’s response to his question, which is how I came to see that mess of paper.)

For anyone familiar with the Canadian scene (industrial research in Canada is rare), this next chart won’t be any surprise, from page 14 (print version; p. 30 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI,

However, this may be a surprise, from page 15 (print version; p. 31 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI,

Good grief! Canada is in the top five countries for venture capital spending on nanotechnology. Of course, we had our banner year in 2008, with quite a dip in 2009 but it looks like we rebounded mildly in 2010.

It’s always interesting for me to analyze the US nanotechnology efforts in relationship to the Canadian efforts (as well as, getting a sense of the international scene). Actually, I can’t analyze our efforts since the Canadian government doesn’t tend to share information (or provides reams of meaningless data) with its citizens so I’m driven to finding it in US government documents and materials provided by international governmental organizations such as the OECD (Organization for Econ0mic Cooperation and Development).

Getting back to the report, which after all is about the US situation, I’m particularly interested in the recommendations for metrics (thank you, Dexter) and EHS. From page 22 (print version; p. 38 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI (I have edited out some footnotes),

Agencies should develop a mission-appropriate definition of nanotechnology that enables the tracking of specific nanotechnology investments supported at the program level. The definition and funding details should be published in agency implementation plans to promote clarity.

This recommendation enables each agency to develop a mission-appropriate definition of nanotechnol­ogy to characterize its nanotechnology portfolio. Requiring each agency to publish its definition and the resulting budget allocations will improve clarity across the Federal nanotechnology portfolio and ensure that nanotechnology investments are accurately characterized.

The NNCO should track the development of metrics for quantifying the Federal nanotechnology portfolio and implement them to assess NNI outputs.

Current Federal efforts to measure public and private investment, scientific productivity, and workforce have been inconsistent and decentralized. The publication of agency-specific data will enable the NNCO to consistently track nanotechnology investments across the Federal government and enable it to report NNI impacts with greater confidence and transparency.

There is an extensive and growing body of high-quality academic research that is already working toward the establishment of nanotechnology metrics by drawing upon bibliometrics data from the public domain (e.g., publication and patent data). … Bibliometrics data are used as indicators of productivity beyond academia, often in the absence of other metrics from the private sector. As nanotechnology continues to mature and move closer toward commercialization, efforts to more accurately capture economic returns are picking up pace. Examples include the March 2012 International Symposium on Assessing Economic Impacts of Nanotechnologies sponsored jointly by the NNI and the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development held in Washington, DC, [mentioned in my March 29, 2012 posting] as well as the upcoming 2012 National Research Council review of the NNI.

A final area in need of metrics development is in the quantification of the nanotechnology workforce.  [emphasis mine] Accurately categorizing agency-level nanotechnology investments will facilitate the identification of nanotechnology trainees, including the academic, scientific, and professional nanotechnology workforce for which there is currently a paucity of data…. One area where such tracking would have significant impact is in the identification of nanotechnology-related jobs for which there are no standard occu­pational codes. Good data on the workforce will enable the implementation of additional measures to identify and mitigate future threats to occupational health and safety.

PCAST recommends that NNCO serve as a central repository to collect these metrics and leverage advances in metrics-development to collect, track, and analyze data regarding publications, patents, educational activities, and the workforce to produce and publish its own statistics on behalf of the NSET. This under­taking is an integral component of cross-agency coordination of the Federal nanotechnology portfolio.

That first recommendation seems problematic. The notion of agencies developing mission-specific definitions of nanotechnology, as recommended, sets the stage for multiple and competing definitions in a situation where you want to standardize as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the alternative is not an improvement. An attempt to standardize across all agencies would most probably lead to years of meetings and discussions before anything was ever measured.

I’m not quite as confident about bibliometrics as the authors of this report are but, as they hint, oftentimes it’s the only quantifiable data available. While there is much talk about establishing other metrics, there is no hint as to how this will be done or who will do it or whether money will be allocated for this purpose.

The recommendations for further EHS research, from pp. 22-3 (print version; pp. 38-9 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI, include (I have edited out a reference to an appendix),

The NSET should establish high-level, cross-agency authoritative and accountable governance of Federal nanotechnology-related EHS research so that the knowledge created as a result of Federal investments can better inform policy makers.

PCAST acknowledges that the NSET has acted on our recommendation to identify a central coordina­tor for nanotechnology-related EHS research within NNCO. The EHS coordinator has done a laudable job developing and communicating the 2011 NNI EHS research strategy. However, there is still a lack of integration between nanotechnology-related EHS research funded through the NNI and the kind of information policy makers need to effectively manage potential risks from nanomaterials. The estab­lishment of the Emerging Technologies Interagency Policy Coordination Committee (ETIPC) through OSTP has begun to bridge that gap, but without close integration between ETIPC and the NEHI working group, the gap may not be sufficiently narrowed. OSTP and the NSET Subcommittee should expand the charter of the NEHI working group to enable the group to address cross-agency nanotechnology-related policy issues more broadly.

The NSET should increase investment in cross-cutting areas of EHS that promote knowledge transfer such as informatics, partnerships, and instrumentation development.

The 2011 NNI EHS research strategy acknowledges the critical role that informatics, partnerships, and instrumentation development play in a comprehensive approach to addressing nanotechnology risks to human health and the environment. Nascent efforts in informatics should be supported so that advances can be accelerated in this critical cross-cutting area. Rather than continue to support the proliferation of databases that results from many new nano-EHS projects, the effort should be directed at enabling diverse communities to extract meaningful information from each other’s work. New networks that connect researchers together, along with new tools for extracting information from Federally funded research, should be established and supported through the NNI. The findings of the December 2011 workshop to establish a Nanoinformatics 2020 Roadmap19 in conjunction with the 2011 NNI EHS research strategy can serve as a guide for new work in this area.

Significant progress has been made in the area of partnerships with numerous examples of mul­tistakeholder and interagency collaboration underway. One of these is the Nanorelease Project,20 which brings together five NNI agencies, non-governmental organizations, a labor union, and several companies, among others, to develop methods for measuring the release of nanomaterials from com­mercial products. A specific area where better coordination could occur is in the area of occupational safety. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should work with companies in a non-enforcement capacity to develop better tools for hazard communication similar to the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety’s (NIOSH) partnership program. This is especially important as the United States seeks to bring its hazard communication standard in alignment with the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals. Greater engagement by OSHA would also begin to address some of the difficulties companies face in implementing good health and safety programs in their nanomaterial workplaces …

New modes of international cooperation, such as the joint funding of two environmental-impacts consortia by the EPA and the United Kingdom, have also emerged since the 2010 PCAST report. The NNI should increase funding for these cross-cutting activities to leverage the U.S. investment in nanotechnology-related EHS research.

The wealth of abbreviations makes this section a little hard to read. As I understand it, the recommendations are aimed at improving use of their current and future resources by better coordinating the research efforts, sharing data (with a special eye to providing information policymakers can use effectively), and collaborating internationally on EHS research.

It seems there a number of reports concerning the US National Nanotechnology Initiative and their efforts and responses to the PCAST 2010 recommendations (I commented on another of their reports in my Dec. 13, 2011 posting). This fourth report/assessment was submitted by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and focuses on efforts from various government agencies to follow recommendations from that 2010 PCAST assessment and set of recommendations.

According to the April 27, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

PCAST found that the Federal agencies in the NNI have made substantial progress in addressing many of the 2010 recommendations that were aimed at maintaining U.S. leadership in nanotechnology. One of the primary goals of the NNI is to stay ahead of heavily-investing competitors such as China, South Korea, the European Union, and Russia. Overall, PCAST concluded that the NNI remains a successful cooperative venture that is supporting high-quality research, facilitating the translation of discoveries into new commercial products, and ensuring the Nation’s continued global leadership in this important field.

The PCAST assessment particularly commends the expanded efforts of the NNCO [National Nanotechnology Coordination Office] in the area of commercialization and coordination with industry, and the NNCO’s release of a focused research strategy for addressing environmental, health, and safety (EHS) implications of nanotechnology. In addition, the assessment recognizes NNI’s strong and growing portfolio of research on the societal implications of nanotechnology, nanotechnology education, and public outreach.

Dexter Johnson at his Nanoclast blog on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) website comments in his May 1, 2012 posting,

Okay, pat on the back, job well done…uh, wait, there are still some new recommendations that PCAST would like to see addressed.  You can find them in the PDF of the full report on page vii. They fall into the areas of strategic planning, program management, metrics for assessing nanotechnology’s commercial and societal impacts, and…wait for it…increased support for EHS research.

Additional support for EHS research might be a required element for every PCAST report in the future. More interesting to me, however, is this continued emphasis on improved “metrics for assessing nanotechnology’s commercial and societal impacts.”

Dexter goes on to observe that many countries and corporations are interested in better metrics regarding  nanotechnology and its impacts and hints that he has a few ideas for better metrics.

I’ve looked at the report and found, to my surprise, mention of Canada. In analyzing the US NNI efforts, they also compare US government funding and corporate to that in other countries. On page 14 (print version; p. 30 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI, there’s a table which shows the top 10 countries for spending on nanotechnology,

As you can see, Canadian funding has been relatively flat throughout 2008 – 2010. It appears to have decreased slightly in 2009 and remained the same in 2010.

Aside: I’d dearly love to know how they sourced their data. A couple of years ago, a Canadian Member of Parliament (Peter Julian) asked for similar figures and received some 80 pages of Excel spreadsheets from various department listing any number of research projects that had been funded. (I’d asked Julian’s parliamentary assistant for a copy of the government’s response to his question, which is how I came to see that mess of paper.)

For anyone familiar with the Canadian scene (industrial research in Canada is rare), this next chart won’t be any surprise, from page 14 (print version; p. 30 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI,

However, this may be a surprise, from page 15 (print version; p. 31 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI,

Good grief! Canada is in the top five countries for venture capital spending on nanotechnology. Of course, we had our banner year in 2008, with quite a dip in 2009 but it looks like we rebounded mildly in 2010.

It’s always interesting for me to analyze the US nanotechnology efforts in relationship to the Canadian efforts (as well as, getting a sense of the international scene). Actually, I can’t analyze our efforts since the Canadian government doesn’t tend to share information (or provides reams of meaningless data) with its citizens so I’m driven to finding it in US government documents and materials provided by international governmental organizations such as the OECD (Organization for Econ0mic Cooperation and Development).

Getting back to the report, which after all is about the US situation, I’m particularly interested in the recommendations for metrics (thank you, Dexter) and EHS. From page 22 (print version; p. 38 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI (I have edited out some footnotes),

Agencies should develop a mission-appropriate definition of nanotechnology that enables the tracking of specific nanotechnology investments supported at the program level. The definition and funding details should be published in agency implementation plans to promote clarity.

This recommendation enables each agency to develop a mission-appropriate definition of nanotechnol­ogy to characterize its nanotechnology portfolio. Requiring each agency to publish its definition and the resulting budget allocations will improve clarity across the Federal nanotechnology portfolio and ensure that nanotechnology investments are accurately characterized.

The NNCO should track the development of metrics for quantifying the Federal nanotechnology portfolio and implement them to assess NNI outputs.

Current Federal efforts to measure public and private investment, scientific productivity, and workforce have been inconsistent and decentralized. The publication of agency-specific data will enable the NNCO to consistently track nanotechnology investments across the Federal government and enable it to report NNI impacts with greater confidence and transparency.

There is an extensive and growing body of high-quality academic research that is already working toward the establishment of nanotechnology metrics by drawing upon bibliometrics data from the public domain (e.g., publication and patent data). … Bibliometrics data are used as indicators of productivity beyond academia, often in the absence of other metrics from the private sector. As nanotechnology continues to mature and move closer toward commercialization, efforts to more accurately capture economic returns are picking up pace. Examples include the March 2012 International Symposium on Assessing Economic Impacts of Nanotechnologies sponsored jointly by the NNI and the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development held in Washington, DC, [mentioned in my March 29, 2012 posting] as well as the upcoming 2012 National Research Council review of the NNI.

A final area in need of metrics development is in the quantification of the nanotechnology workforce.  [emphasis mine] Accurately categorizing agency-level nanotechnology investments will facilitate the identification of nanotechnology trainees, including the academic, scientific, and professional nanotechnology workforce for which there is currently a paucity of data…. One area where such tracking would have significant impact is in the identification of nanotechnology-related jobs for which there are no standard occu­pational codes. Good data on the workforce will enable the implementation of additional measures to identify and mitigate future threats to occupational health and safety.

PCAST recommends that NNCO serve as a central repository to collect these metrics and leverage advances in metrics-development to collect, track, and analyze data regarding publications, patents, educational activities, and the workforce to produce and publish its own statistics on behalf of the NSET. This under­taking is an integral component of cross-agency coordination of the Federal nanotechnology portfolio.

That first recommendation seems problematic. The notion of agencies developing mission-specific definitions of nanotechnology, as recommended, sets the stage for multiple and competing definitions in a situation where you want to standardize as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the alternative is not an improvement. An attempt to standardize across all agencies would most probably lead to years of meetings and discussions before anything was ever measured.

I’m not quite as confident about bibliometrics as the authors of this report are but, as they hint, oftentimes it’s the only quantifiable data available. While there is much talk about establishing other metrics, there is no hint as to how this will be done or who will do it or whether money will be allocated for this purpose.

The recommendations for further EHS research, from pp. 22-3 (print version; pp. 38-9 PDF) of the PCAST 4th Assessment of the NNI, include (I have edited out a reference to an appendix),

The NSET should establish high-level, cross-agency authoritative and accountable governance of Federal nanotechnology-related EHS research so that the knowledge created as a result of Federal investments can better inform policy makers.

PCAST acknowledges that the NSET has acted on our recommendation to identify a central coordina­tor for nanotechnology-related EHS research within NNCO. The EHS coordinator has done a laudable job developing and communicating the 2011 NNI EHS research strategy. However, there is still a lack of integration between nanotechnology-related EHS research funded through the NNI and the kind of information policy makers need to effectively manage potential risks from nanomaterials. The estab­lishment of the Emerging Technologies Interagency Policy Coordination Committee (ETIPC) through OSTP has begun to bridge that gap, but without close integration between ETIPC and the NEHI working group, the gap may not be sufficiently narrowed. OSTP and the NSET Subcommittee should expand the charter of the NEHI working group to enable the group to address cross-agency nanotechnology-related policy issues more broadly.

The NSET should increase investment in cross-cutting areas of EHS that promote knowledge transfer such as informatics, partnerships, and instrumentation development.

The 2011 NNI EHS research strategy acknowledges the critical role that informatics, partnerships, and instrumentation development play in a comprehensive approach to addressing nanotechnology risks to human health and the environment. Nascent efforts in informatics should be supported so that advances can be accelerated in this critical cross-cutting area. Rather than continue to support the proliferation of databases that results from many new nano-EHS projects, the effort should be directed at enabling diverse communities to extract meaningful information from each other’s work. New networks that connect researchers together, along with new tools for extracting information from Federally funded research, should be established and supported through the NNI. The findings of the December 2011 workshop to establish a Nanoinformatics 2020 Roadmap19 in conjunction with the 2011 NNI EHS research strategy can serve as a guide for new work in this area.

Significant progress has been made in the area of partnerships with numerous examples of mul­tistakeholder and interagency collaboration underway. One of these is the Nanorelease Project,20 which brings together five NNI agencies, non-governmental organizations, a labor union, and several companies, among others, to develop methods for measuring the release of nanomaterials from com­mercial products. A specific area where better coordination could occur is in the area of occupational safety. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should work with companies in a non-enforcement capacity to develop better tools for hazard communication similar to the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety’s (NIOSH) partnership program. This is especially important as the United States seeks to bring its hazard communication standard in alignment with the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals. Greater engagement by OSHA would also begin to address some of the difficulties companies face in implementing good health and safety programs in their nanomaterial workplaces …

New modes of international cooperation, such as the joint funding of two environmental-impacts consortia by the EPA and the United Kingdom, have also emerged since the 2010 PCAST report. The NNI should increase funding for these cross-cutting activities to leverage the U.S. investment in nanotechnology-related EHS research.

The wealth of abbreviations makes this section a little hard to read. As I understand it, the recommendations are aimed at improving use of their current and future resources by better coordinating the research efforts, sharing data (with a special eye to providing information policymakers can use effectively), and collaborating internationally on EHS research.

The 4th edition of the Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) will take place in Calgary, Alberta as I hinted (I also suggested that Edmonton was in contention)  in my Feb. 20, 2012 posting. If you have an interest in presenting at the conference, this is the time to submit your session proposals.  From the April 23, 2012 CSPC notice,

Call for Canadian Science Policy Conference 2012 Sessions

Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) 2012 is inviting members of the science policy community to submit proposals for the conference program Nov 5-6, 2012 in Calgary, Alberta. All submissions must be received online by end of day June 8, 2012.

This year’s conference sessions will be under the following 4 themes:

Innovating on energy supply and demand for more sustainable resource management: a critical test for the integration of science, technology and policy
Re-imagining Canadian Healthcare: How innovation in science and policy can contribute to a more sustainable system
Food, Fuel and Farmers: Agriculture at the convergence of multi-disciplinary science policy issues
Science-Technology-Society-Nexus

CSPC has become the focal point for Canadian science policy issues, in large part because of the active participation it encourages from the science policy community. Bringing together professionals from business, academia, government and non-profit, CSPC provides an annual forum to discuss the most relevant issues to science, technology and innovation in Canada during its conference sessions. Help shape this year’s dialogue by submitting your session proposal now!

There are more details at the CSPC 2012 website including this excerpt from the conference’s Themes page,

Re-imagining Canadian Healthcare: How innovation in science and policy can contribute to a more sustainable system?

Canadian healthcare spending has been rising steadily over the past few decades with health expenditure to GDP ratios rising from 7% in 1979 to a peak at almost 12% in 2009. Canada, like many nations, has a population that is getting older, living longer, and demanding quality care as well as improvements to the universal healthcare system. Innovation can contribute to improved performance of the system, but the impacts of innovation on cost, efficiency, and health outcomes are not always straightforward.

This CSPC theme will explore the policies and approaches for innovation to positively impact the health system. It will examine innovation and policy issues that related to improving effective and efficient care, accessibility, universality, sustainability, and cost versus benefits.

Food, Fuel and Farmers: Agriculture at the convergence of multi-disciplinary science policy issues

Agriculture requires upwards of 40% of the world’s land area and over 70% of the global fresh water reserves, in turn, generating nearly $2 trillion in global revenues while feeding more than 7 billion people. The implications of agricultural practices and policies thus have a direct link to global economic, environmental and societal outcomes and impacts many other sectors. The global challenge for agriculture, therefore, is to increase production while simultaneously reducing the environmental footprint. Canadian farmers, scientists, policy makers and businesses are responding with innovations in water and land use, genetics, bioproducts and bioprocesses. Productivity isn’t just about yields any more; it’s about energy content and optimization as well as issues such as minimizing losses in the transportation and distribution systems.

This CSPC theme will explore how science is at the heart of these questions. Increasingly, we see that the next generation of farmers and ranchers need to be scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs. However, what does this mean for the universities, policies, regulation and markets that these farmers and ranchers need to thrive going forward? And what does today’s science and innovation applied to agriculture mean for agriculture, energy, environmental and trade policies in the future?

Science-Technology-Society-Nexus

Science and technology are significant pillars in our society and are increasingly transforming the world we live in as well as how we live within that world. Society expects solutions to our most pressing issues, and developments in S&T can bring answers and perspective to these issues. However, advances in S&T can also create new questions. Additionally, popular debate can polarize the public, and controversial S&T issues grow in number. It is, therefore, vital for the science policy community to identify such issues, contribute to discourse, and propose solutions or a way forward.

This theme, within the overarching context of S&T and Society, will examine a variety of issues such as engagement; education and public outreach; publication and data; peer-review; the bread and nature of the innovation system; social innovation; communication; and other major or topical issues in Canadian science policy.

Details about the proposal format, etc. are on the conference’s Submissions page,

PROPOSAL FORMAT

Please submit a brief proposal that outlines the title and subject of your session, as well as proposed speakers (including bios), format and goals of the proposed conference session. Please note the word limit on the website.
Proposals must be submitted to the CSPC program committee online at www.cspc2012.ca/presentationsubmissions.php for evaluation prior end of day June 8, 2012. CONFERENCE THEMES:

This year’s conference themes are under the 4 categories of energy, health, agriculture and major issues in science and society. The theme descriptions are under the following titles:

Innovating on energy supply and demand for more sustainable resource management: a critical test for the integration of science, technology and policy
Re-imagining Canadian Healthcare: How innovation in science and policy can contribute to a more sustainable system
Food, Fuel and Farmers: Agriculture at the convergence of multi-disciplinary science policy issues
Science-Technology-Society-Nexus

They are intended to spark some insightful exploration and debate on the issues, but more importantly they seek to highlight some of the innovative ways in which science, technology and policy can contribute to an integrated and systemic approach to solving these issues in Canada and the world.

…

EVALUATION CRITERIA:
The CSPC 2012 Program Committee will review each of the proposals and evaluate them based on the following criteria:

Quality of the proposed session: CSPC tries to cover topics that are highly relevant or timely for the science policy community in Canada to discuss. Sessions that can draw together strong speakers or facilitators on subjects that are either garnering much attention publically or politically, or that are enduring societal problems, will rank more competitively than those that don’t. Sessions with confirmed speakers will rank more competitively than those without.

Alignment with the conference objectives: The conference objectives seek to support innovation in Canada and build both community and ideas for strengthening the science policy environment. The session proposal will be evaluated on its ability to support these primary objectives.

Alignment with the conference themes: CSPC strives for a balance that dives deep enough into the issues to identify specific elements of what works and what doesn’t from planning through to implementation, yet is still able to make the discussion accessible to a broader audience. Sessions should include experts that can provide detailed examples under the CSPC 2012 themes to support their arguments, and translate those details into more transferable lessons learned and best practices.

Representation of a diverse range of speakers: CSPC doesn’t have a specific formula for evaluating session speakers, but it does embrace diversity as one of its core values. The more diverse the range of perspectives that your speakers can offer in terms of roles (government, business, academia, non-profit etc.) or discipline, gender, ethnicity, geography, experience or other aspects, the stronger your proposal will be relative to the others.

SESSION FORMAT & AUDIENCE:

Sessions are 90 minutes. Typically they have followed a panel presentation format, but some adopt more of a workshop or facilitated discussion style. CSPC has received enthusiastic feedback regarding sessions that allow for more interaction between the speakers and the delegates, and also those that bring a lively debate. Case studies and stories are easier for people to engage with than lists, facts and rhetoric. Consider challenging your speakers to be more creative when sharing their ideas.

The majority of the delegates will be fairly educated on different fields of science policy, but may not understand your field. You may want to include materials to prime the audience in order to allow your session to explore things to a greater depth. Many of the delegates are also practitioners in the science policy community, hungry for things to take back to their work beyond education and awareness. Often we’re asking people to “step outside their comfort zones” in order to foster more creativity in the way we think about and approach science, technology, policy and innovation. The more you can challenge your audience to participate in some way, such as writing down their biases or the first things that come to their mind, sharing with the person next to them what they think the key issues are, or hosting full break-out discussions the better.

Based on past attendance the majority is from academic, government, or non-profit institutions. CSPC is trying to target participants from the private sector for whom science policy is highly relevant, yet underrepresented. If you can propose a session which will engage this audience or if you have suggestions on how to better engage this sector please let us know!

Conference registration is free for speakers and facilitators.

As for suggestions about how to engage with folks from the private sector, that’s an interesting problem. I find it encouraging that they want to extend the discussion to a larger audience but I’m  not sure which part of the private sector they want to engage.  Investors? Venture capitalists? Bankers? Lawyers? Startup business owners? Big business? Accountants? Youthful entrepreneurs? New media? Gamers? etc.This gives me a lot to think about.

One small historical note, the first CSPC conference led to the creation of the Canadian Science Policy Centre which exists online here.

Good luck with your submissions!

The 4th edition of the Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) will take place in Calgary, Alberta as I hinted (I also suggested that Edmonton was in contention)  in my Feb. 20, 2012 posting. If you have an interest in presenting at the conference, this is the time to submit your session proposals.  From the April 23, 2012 CSPC notice,

Call for Canadian Science Policy Conference 2012 Sessions

Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC) 2012 is inviting members of the science policy community to submit proposals for the conference program Nov 5-6, 2012 in Calgary, Alberta. All submissions must be received online by end of day June 8, 2012.

This year’s conference sessions will be under the following 4 themes:

Innovating on energy supply and demand for more sustainable resource management: a critical test for the integration of science, technology and policy
Re-imagining Canadian Healthcare: How innovation in science and policy can contribute to a more sustainable system
Food, Fuel and Farmers: Agriculture at the convergence of multi-disciplinary science policy issues
Science-Technology-Society-Nexus

CSPC has become the focal point for Canadian science policy issues, in large part because of the active participation it encourages from the science policy community. Bringing together professionals from business, academia, government and non-profit, CSPC provides an annual forum to discuss the most relevant issues to science, technology and innovation in Canada during its conference sessions. Help shape this year’s dialogue by submitting your session proposal now!

There are more details at the CSPC 2012 website including this excerpt from the conference’s Themes page,

Re-imagining Canadian Healthcare: How innovation in science and policy can contribute to a more sustainable system?

Canadian healthcare spending has been rising steadily over the past few decades with health expenditure to GDP ratios rising from 7% in 1979 to a peak at almost 12% in 2009. Canada, like many nations, has a population that is getting older, living longer, and demanding quality care as well as improvements to the universal healthcare system. Innovation can contribute to improved performance of the system, but the impacts of innovation on cost, efficiency, and health outcomes are not always straightforward.

This CSPC theme will explore the policies and approaches for innovation to positively impact the health system. It will examine innovation and policy issues that related to improving effective and efficient care, accessibility, universality, sustainability, and cost versus benefits.

Food, Fuel and Farmers: Agriculture at the convergence of multi-disciplinary science policy issues

Agriculture requires upwards of 40% of the world’s land area and over 70% of the global fresh water reserves, in turn, generating nearly $2 trillion in global revenues while feeding more than 7 billion people. The implications of agricultural practices and policies thus have a direct link to global economic, environmental and societal outcomes and impacts many other sectors. The global challenge for agriculture, therefore, is to increase production while simultaneously reducing the environmental footprint. Canadian farmers, scientists, policy makers and businesses are responding with innovations in water and land use, genetics, bioproducts and bioprocesses. Productivity isn’t just about yields any more; it’s about energy content and optimization as well as issues such as minimizing losses in the transportation and distribution systems.

This CSPC theme will explore how science is at the heart of these questions. Increasingly, we see that the next generation of farmers and ranchers need to be scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs. However, what does this mean for the universities, policies, regulation and markets that these farmers and ranchers need to thrive going forward? And what does today’s science and innovation applied to agriculture mean for agriculture, energy, environmental and trade policies in the future?

Science-Technology-Society-Nexus

Science and technology are significant pillars in our society and are increasingly transforming the world we live in as well as how we live within that world. Society expects solutions to our most pressing issues, and developments in S&T can bring answers and perspective to these issues. However, advances in S&T can also create new questions. Additionally, popular debate can polarize the public, and controversial S&T issues grow in number. It is, therefore, vital for the science policy community to identify such issues, contribute to discourse, and propose solutions or a way forward.

This theme, within the overarching context of S&T and Society, will examine a variety of issues such as engagement; education and public outreach; publication and data; peer-review; the bread and nature of the innovation system; social innovation; communication; and other major or topical issues in Canadian science policy.

Details about the proposal format, etc. are on the conference’s Submissions page,

PROPOSAL FORMAT

Please submit a brief proposal that outlines the title and subject of your session, as well as proposed speakers (including bios), format and goals of the proposed conference session. Please note the word limit on the website.
Proposals must be submitted to the CSPC program committee online at www.cspc2012.ca/presentationsubmissions.php for evaluation prior end of day June 8, 2012. CONFERENCE THEMES:

This year’s conference themes are under the 4 categories of energy, health, agriculture and major issues in science and society. The theme descriptions are under the following titles:

Innovating on energy supply and demand for more sustainable resource management: a critical test for the integration of science, technology and policy
Re-imagining Canadian Healthcare: How innovation in science and policy can contribute to a more sustainable system
Food, Fuel and Farmers: Agriculture at the convergence of multi-disciplinary science policy issues
Science-Technology-Society-Nexus

They are intended to spark some insightful exploration and debate on the issues, but more importantly they seek to highlight some of the innovative ways in which science, technology and policy can contribute to an integrated and systemic approach to solving these issues in Canada and the world.

…

EVALUATION CRITERIA:
The CSPC 2012 Program Committee will review each of the proposals and evaluate them based on the following criteria:

Quality of the proposed session: CSPC tries to cover topics that are highly relevant or timely for the science policy community in Canada to discuss. Sessions that can draw together strong speakers or facilitators on subjects that are either garnering much attention publically or politically, or that are enduring societal problems, will rank more competitively than those that don’t. Sessions with confirmed speakers will rank more competitively than those without.

Alignment with the conference objectives: The conference objectives seek to support innovation in Canada and build both community and ideas for strengthening the science policy environment. The session proposal will be evaluated on its ability to support these primary objectives.

Alignment with the conference themes: CSPC strives for a balance that dives deep enough into the issues to identify specific elements of what works and what doesn’t from planning through to implementation, yet is still able to make the discussion accessible to a broader audience. Sessions should include experts that can provide detailed examples under the CSPC 2012 themes to support their arguments, and translate those details into more transferable lessons learned and best practices.

Representation of a diverse range of speakers: CSPC doesn’t have a specific formula for evaluating session speakers, but it does embrace diversity as one of its core values. The more diverse the range of perspectives that your speakers can offer in terms of roles (government, business, academia, non-profit etc.) or discipline, gender, ethnicity, geography, experience or other aspects, the stronger your proposal will be relative to the others.

SESSION FORMAT & AUDIENCE:

Sessions are 90 minutes. Typically they have followed a panel presentation format, but some adopt more of a workshop or facilitated discussion style. CSPC has received enthusiastic feedback regarding sessions that allow for more interaction between the speakers and the delegates, and also those that bring a lively debate. Case studies and stories are easier for people to engage with than lists, facts and rhetoric. Consider challenging your speakers to be more creative when sharing their ideas.

The majority of the delegates will be fairly educated on different fields of science policy, but may not understand your field. You may want to include materials to prime the audience in order to allow your session to explore things to a greater depth. Many of the delegates are also practitioners in the science policy community, hungry for things to take back to their work beyond education and awareness. Often we’re asking people to “step outside their comfort zones” in order to foster more creativity in the way we think about and approach science, technology, policy and innovation. The more you can challenge your audience to participate in some way, such as writing down their biases or the first things that come to their mind, sharing with the person next to them what they think the key issues are, or hosting full break-out discussions the better.

Based on past attendance the majority is from academic, government, or non-profit institutions. CSPC is trying to target participants from the private sector for whom science policy is highly relevant, yet underrepresented. If you can propose a session which will engage this audience or if you have suggestions on how to better engage this sector please let us know!

Conference registration is free for speakers and facilitators.

As for suggestions about how to engage with folks from the private sector, that’s an interesting problem. I find it encouraging that they want to extend the discussion to a larger audience but I’m  not sure which part of the private sector they want to engage.  Investors? Venture capitalists? Bankers? Lawyers? Startup business owners? Big business? Accountants? Youthful entrepreneurs? New media? Gamers? etc.This gives me a lot to think about.

One small historical note, the first CSPC conference led to the creation of the Canadian Science Policy Centre which exists online here.

Good luck with your submissions!

In what way, and on what basis, should we attempt to steer the development of technology? This is the fundamental question that underlies at least two discussions that I keep coming back to here – how to do industrial policy and how to democratise science. But some would simply deny the premise of these discussions, and argue that technology can’t be steered, and that the market is the only effective way of incorporating public preferences into decisions about technology development. This is a hugely influential point of view which goes with the grain of the currently hegemonic neo-liberal, free market dominated world-view. It originates in the arguments of Friedrich Hayek against the 1940′s vogue for scientific planning, it incorporates Michael Polanyi’s vision of an “independent republic of science”, and it fits the view of technology as an autonomous agent which unfolds with a logic akin to that of Darwinian evolution – what one might called the “Wired” view of the world, eloquently expressed in Kevin Kelly’s recent book “What Technology Wants”. It’s a coherent, even seductive, package of beliefs; although I think it’s fatally flawed, it deserves serious examination.

Hayek’s argument against planning (his 1945 article The Use of Knowledge in Society makes this very clearly) rests on two insights. Firstly, he insists that the relevant knowledge that would underpin the rational planning of an economy or a society isn’t limited to scientific knowledge, and must include the tacit, unorganised knowledge of people who aren’t experts in the conventional sense of the word. This kind of knowledge, then, can’t rest solely with experts, but must be dispersed throughout society. Secondly, he claims that the most effective – perhaps the only – way in which this distributed knowledge can be aggregated and used is through the mechanism of the market. If we apply this kind of thinking to the development of technology, we’re led to the idea that technological development would happen in the most effective way if we simply allow many creative entrepreneurs to try different ways of combining different technologies and to develop new ones on the basis of existing scientific knowledge and what developments of that knowledge they are able to make. When the resulting innovations are presented to the market, the ones that survive will, by definition, the ones that best meet human needs. Stated this way, the connection with Darwinian evolution is obvious.

One objection to this viewpoint is essentially moral in character. The market certainly aggregates the preferences and knowledge of many people, but it necessarily gives more weight to the views of people with more money, and the distribution of money doesn’t necessarily coincide with the distribution of wisdom or virtue. Some free market enthusiasts simply assert the contrary, following Ayn Rand. There are, though, some much less risible moral arguments in favour of free markets which emphasise the positive virtues of pluralism, and even those opponents of libertarianism who point to the naivety of believing that this pluralism can be maintained in the face of highly concentrated economic and political power need to answer important questions about how pluralism can be maintained in any alternative system.

What should be less contentious than these moral arguments is an examination of the recent history of technological innovation. This shows that the technologies that made the modem world – in all their positive and negative aspects – are largely the result of the exercise of state power, rather than of the free enterprise of technological entrepreneurs. New technologies were largely driven by large scale interventions by the Warfare States that dominated the twentieth century. The military-industrial complexes of these states began long before Eisenhower popularised this name, and existed not just in the USA, but in Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, in the USSR, and in the UK (David Edgerton’s “Warfare State: Britain 1920- 1970″ gives a compelling reinterpretation of modern British history in these terms). At the beginning of the century, for example, the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen was rapidly industrialised by the German chemical company BASF. It’s difficult to think of a more world-changing innovation – more than half the world’s population wouldn’t now be here if it hadn’t been for the huge growth in agricultural productivity that artificial fertilisers made possible. However, the importance of this process for producing the raw materials for explosives ensured that the German state took much more than a spectator’s role. Vaclav Smil, in his book Enriching the Earth, quotes an estimate for the development cost of the Haber-Bosch process of US$100 million at 1919 prices (roughly US$1 billion in current money, equating to about $19 billion in terms of its share of the economy at the time), of which about half came from the government. Many more recent examples of state involvement in innovation are cited in Mariana Mazzucato’s pamphlet The Entrepreneurial State. Perhaps one of the most important stories is the role of state spending in creating the modern IT industry; computing, the semiconductor industry and the internet are all largely the outcome of US military spending.

Of course, the historical fact that the transformative, general purpose technologies that were so important in driving economic growth in the twentieth century emerged as a result of state sponsorship doesn’t by itself invalidate the Hayekian thesis that innovation is best left to the free market. To understand the limitations of this picture, we need to return to Hayek’s basic arguments. Under what circumstances does the free market fail to aggregate information in an optimal way? People are not always rational economic actors – they know what they want and need now, but they aren’t always good at anticipating what they might want if things they can’t imagine become available, or what they might need if conditions change rapidly. There’s a natural cognitive bias to give more weight to the present, and less to an unknowable future. Just like natural selection, the optimisation process that the market carries out is necessarily local, not global.

So when does the Hayekian argument for leaving innovation to the market not apply? The free market works well for evolutionary innovation – local optimisation is good at solving present problems with the tools at hand now. But it fails to be able to mobilise resources on a large scale for big problems whose solution will take more than a few years. So, we’d expect market-driven innovation to fail to deliver whenever timescales for development are too long, or the expense of development too great. Because capital markets are now short-term to the point of irrationality (as demonstrated by this study (PDF) from the Bank of England by Andrew Haldane), the private sector rejects long term investments in infrastructure and R&D, even if the net present value of those investments would be significantly positive. In the energy sector, for example, we saw widespread liberalisation of markets across the world in the 1990s. One predictable consequence of this has been a collapse of private sector R&D in the energy sector (illustrated for the case of the USA by Dan Kammen here – The Incredible Shrinking Energy R&D Budget (PDF)).

The contrast is clear if we compare two different cases of innovation – the development of new apps for the iPhone, and the development of innovative new passenger aircraft, like the composite-based Boeing Dreamliner and Airbus A350. The world of app development is one in which tens or hundreds of thousands of people can and do try out all sorts of ideas, a few of which have turned out to fulfil an important and widely appreciated need and have made their developers rich. This is a world that’s well described by the Hayekian picture of experimentation and evolution – the low barriers to entry and the ease of widespread distribution of the products rewards experimentation. Making a new airliner, in contrast, involves years of development and outlays of tens of billions of dollars in development cost before any products are sold. Unsurprisingly, the only players are two huge companies – essentially a world duopoly – each of whom is in receipt of substantial state aid of one form or another. The lesson is that technological innovation doesn’t just come in one form. Some innovation – with low barriers to entry, often building on existing technological platforms – can be done by individuals or small companies, and can be understood well in terms of the Hayekian picture. But innovation on a larger scale, the more radical innovation that leads to new general purpose technologies, needs either a large company with a protected income stream or outright state action. In the past the companies able to carry out innovation on this scale would typically have been a state sponsored “national champion”, supported perhaps by guaranteed defense contracts, or the beneficiary of a monopoly or cartel, such as the postwar Bell Labs.

If the prevalence of this Hayekian thinking about technological innovation really does mean that we’re less able now to introduce major, world-changing innovations than we were 50 years ago, this would matter a great deal. One way of thinking about this is in evolutionary terms – if technological innovation is only able to proceed incrementally, there’s a risk that we’re less able to adapt to sudden shocks, we’re less able to anticipate the future and we’re at risk of being locked into technological trajectories that we can’t alter later in response to unexpected changes in our environment or unanticipated consequences. I’ve written earlier about the suggestion that, far from seeing universal accelerating change, we’re currently seeing innovation stagnation. The risk is that we’re seeing less in the way of really radical innovation now, at a time when pressing issues like climate change, peak cheap oil and demographic transitions make innovation more necessary than ever. We are seeing a great deal of very rapid innovation in the world of information, but this rapid pace of change in one particular realm has obscured much less rapid growth in the material realm and the biological realm. It’s in these realms that slow timescales and the large scale of the effort needed mean that the market seems unable to deliver the innovation we need.

It’s not going to be possible, nor would it be desirable, for us to return to the political economies of the mid-twentieth century warfare states that delivered the new technologies that underlie our current economies. Whatever other benefits the turn to free markets may have delivered, it seems to have been less effective at providing radical innovation, and with the need for those radical innovations becoming more urgent, some rethinking is now urgently required.

Canada’s Minister of Industry, Christian Paradis, has just announced a $339,386 investment in Integran Technologies Inc. The company is based in Mississauga [sometimes identified as Toronto], Ontario and I mentioned it most recently in my March 26, 2012 posting in regard to a business deal with Pratt & Whitney and Integran’s electroplating process for the aerospace industry. (Integran is also mentioned in my Sept. 4, 2008 posting about $4.5M in research funds from the Canadian government for coatings in the US-led Joint Strike Fighter Program [presumably military airplanes].)

Here’s a little more about the investment, which is to be repaid, (from the April 16, 2012 news item on Nanowerk),

The Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister of Industry, today announced a repayable [emphasis mine] government investment of $399,386 in a project by Integran Technologies Inc. The Mississauga-based company is developing innovative nano-structured aerospace and defence products that will offer superior performance while meeting the highest environmental standards. The contribution will be made through the Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative.

…

Integran’s project will result in the creation of next-generation metal alloys that are more robust and free from toxic beryllium copper. This will help expand the company’s product line and its customer base. As part of the initiative, Integran will collaborate with graduate-level engineering students from the University of Toronto.

“Since being founded over 12 years ago, Integran has been committed to developing environmentally benign alternatives to toxic materials and processes,” said Gino Palumbo, Integran’s President and CEO. “Integran is confident that through this program, our core patented nanotechnology can be optimized and demonstrated to be a viable, cost-effective alternative to the alloying of copper with toxic beryllium-a strengthening process that remains in widespread use for various industrial, aerospace and defence applications.”

The latest funds appear to be part of a new approach to science and research funding by the Canadian government.  From the news item,

Economic Action Plan 2012 commits $1.1 billion over five years to directly support business innovation and makes available $500 million for venture capital to realign the government’s approach to promoting innovation and create better opportunities for businesses. This includes helping high-growth firms access risk capital, increasing direct support for business innovation, supporting private and public research collaboration, supporting innovation through procurement, refocusing National Research Council Canada, and improving the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax incentive program.

The mention of venture capital, supporting innovation through procurement, refocusing the National Research Council, etc. were all recommendations made in the Jenkins report (Innovation Canada: A Call to Action aka, Report on Review of Federal Support to R&D). I last posted about the report on Oct. 21, 2011 at about the time it was released.

Here’s the information from Euractiv JobSite for the Policy Officer on Chemicals and Nanotechnology position at the EEB – European Environmental Bureau (note: I have edited this so you may want to check out the full job posting here),

Job Experience

1 to 3 years

Job Location

Brussels

[Deadline]

23 April

Job Description

The EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL BUREAU [EEB] a federation of more than 140 environmental citizens’ organisations based in Brussels, has a vacancy for a POLICY OFFICER on Chemicals and Nanotechnology

The Policy Officer will report to the Director of EEB’s Policy Unit:

Her/his work will focus on policy and implementation in the areas of chemicals (notably REACH, EQS directive, horizontal issues such EDCs and cocktail effects) and nanotechnology.

The Policy Officer’s work comprises:

Liasing with EEB members and coordinating the relevant EEB Working Groups to promote activities to influence EU decision-making in the areas of chemicals and nanotechnology.
Advising and assisting members and the EEB Secretary General in drafting EEB position papers.
Representing the EEB and defending its positions in relevant meetings or conferences.
…
Coordination of experts taking part in the working group activities (as appropriate).
Dealing with media in collaboration with the Policy Unit and the Communications Unit.

Qualities and Experiences sought:

The selected candidate should:

Have a strong technical background in the relevant issues, including proven knowledge and at least 2 years experience in the field of chemicals, including in particular risk/hazard assessment.
Have experience in environmental policy work, including analysis of policy proposals, and formulation and presentation of oral and written comments/proposals for change
…
Have a sound grasp of the operation of EU Institutions and EU chemicals legislation, in particular REACH.
…
Be fluent in English (spoken and written). Other widely-used EU languages are an asset.
Be prepared to work outside normal office hours, if necessary, and to travel at short notice.

EEB offers:

a gross monthly salary in the range €3,209 to €3.449 (depending on level of experience), plus benefits [holiday bonus, 13th month, pension scheme, luncheon vouchers]
a dynamic working environment

Place: Brussels

Start Date: as soon as possible

Application Procedure:

Please send in your application with your C.V.
to Pieter de Pous, EEB Policy Director
by Monday, 23 April 2012
e-mail : personnel@eeb.org

That’s an impressive set of job benefits especially for someone with one to three years experience.

Here’s another nanotechnology debate in Europe—this one is different according to the organizer, Dr. Robert Doubleday, Head of Research at the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge (from the University of Cambridge March 23, 2012 news release),

There have been a number of public dialogues about nanotechnology in recent years, but what makes this online debate different is its ambition to lead directly to new research. It aims to address gaps in knowledge about the use of nanotechnologies in society.

“This dialogue is not about reaching any conclusions; it’s about generating questions, which highlight the areas that need to be looked at in more detail,” said Dr Doubleday. “What we hope will come out of it is a series of concrete research questions that we will actively follow up.”

The March 28, 2012 news item on Nanowerk has a description of PERARES, the project which includes these debates as part of its larger policy mandate,

The nanotechnology Knowledge Debate is part of PERARES (Public Engagement with Research and Research Engagement with Society), a project funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme. PERARES consists of a network of universities and research organisations across Europe committed to carrying out research in response to questions raised by civil society organisations and the wider public. The PERARES Knowledge Debate provides a means of discovering what potential consumers and citizens think about nanotechnology and addressing any issues that arise.

There’s a description of the PERARES debates and links to the debates on the PERARES – Transnational Online Debate page at Living Knowledge where you can also find information on how to participate (there doesn’t seem to be a requirement regarding nationality, i.e. it appears that anyone from anywhere is free to participate),

Introduction

An introduction to a series of debates arising from innovations of new nanotechnologies

Renewable Energy and Nanotechnology

What are your views on the potential for bioelectricity production from waste water using microbial fuel cells? Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) are literally the use of microbes as fuel ‘batteries’, through ‘bio-nanotechnology’ processes.

Cancer Nanotechnology

How can advances in liposomal research change cancer diagnosis and treatment?

Ambient Intelligence and Healthcare

The development of nano-enabled devices in healthcare and Ambient Intelligence
A current development in healthcare is to move from hospital care to home care (care-at-a-distance). Promises of Ambient Intelligence can contribute to the realization of this future vision of healthcare, namely the realization of: “an environment that is aware of our presence and responsive to [...]

Environmental Life Cycle Analysis of Applications of Nano-Particles

Nano-sized materials have new, useful properties. However, whether their use is better for the environment than their alternatives, can only be assessed in an Environmental Life Cycle Analysis. We welcome any (requests for) case studies on this!

Food, nanotechnology and labelling

Nanotechnologies have a wide range of potential food applications. Possibilities range from enhancing the flavour, texture and nutritional quality of processed foods, to the use of sensors to monitor food safety. However, there are significant questions about how risks should be assessed and regulated; how nano ingredients should be labelled; how open the food industry should be about its development of nanomaterials; and the role of public dialogue about whether these promised benefits are needed and the relative value of alternative approaches.

I checked out the ‘nano and food’ debate and found the comments (although a little sparse in number given the topic) quite illuminating.

The UK’s Science Minister, David Willetts, gave a speech last week on “Our High Tech Future”. The headlines about it were dominated by one somewhat odd policy announcement, which I’ll come to later, but what’s more interesting is the fact that he chose (apparently at quite short notice) to give the speech at all, only weeks after the publication of a strategy for “Innovation and Research for Growth”, that was widely regarded as, at best, a retrospective attempt to give coherence to a series of rather random acts of policy. I’m tempted to interpret the speech as a signal that a not completely formed government policy is still evolving in some quite interesting directions. In short, after 32 years, the Conservatives are rediscovering the need for industrial policy.

To recap the story so far, the Coalition government came to power in 2010 led by a party with very few views about science one way or another, but with determination above all quickly to reduce public spending. Whereas commitments had been made to protect budgets in areas such as health and education, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) – in which the budgets for science and higher education reside was “unprotected”, so had to take a disproportionately large cut. Given the large fraction of this budget taken up by Universities and science spending, something had to give. The outcome was that recurrent spending for science was protected in cash terms, but the price for this was to slash university teaching budgets by a near-tripling fees and to more or less halve science capital budgets. Political discourse in 2011 was dominated by the controversial student fees policy, and a summer 2011 White Paper on higher eduction barely mentioned research at all. Meanwhile, however, the rapid bounce-back in the economy that the coalition was counting on has failed to materialise, and the question of how the government was going to promote economic growth was, by the autumn of 2011, becoming very pressing. In this context, the preservation of the recurrent science budget in cash terms was given new political prominence as a central part of the government’s attempt to present a narrative about promoting economic growth, and the autumn saw some rather abrupt new spending initiatives, for example a research centre for graphene and money for high performance computing, which restored some, but not all, of the cuts to capital budgets.

Unsurprisingly, then, Willetts’s speech starts by emphasising growth as the central problem facing the government, and outlining some of the supply side measures in place to promote it. The dilemma that Willetts faces is that, while it’s clear that generic policies such as regulatory reform aren’t by themselves enough to promote growth, there’s a deep reluctance to support specific business sectors – that government can’t “pick winners” is now an article of faith. But Willetts acknowledges not only that government does need to make choices – for example in deciding where our energy is going to come from, but also that choices the government has made in the past have, in effect, amounted to a tacit industrial policy. The example Willetts uses to illustrate this is a particularly striking one – when the government funded the extension to the Jubilee line (at a cost estimated at £3.5 billion in 1999), this was justified as necessary for the development of the financial service industry in its new centres in East London. So if we do have an industrial policy, we might as well be open and thoughtful about what it is, and when the government talks, as it does, about rebalancing the economy away from financial services towards manufacturing we must recognise that what we are talking about is, indeed, an industrial policy.

So we soon get back to the familiar question of how we can turn a strong science base into “high tech growth”. The speech celebrates the strength of the research base across the board – specifically including arts, humanities and social sciences – and points to the recent report The International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base as evidence of this strength. Willetts’s stated aim is to make the UK “the best place in the world to do science”, and this means it must be properly funded – hence the maintenance of the science budget (in cash terms, excluding capital, one needs to add here).

But how do we decide how this money is spent? Here Willetts makes a strong claim that one source of the strength of UK science is its independence from government – that it is “protected by the Haldane principle that Ministers do not decide on funding for particular research projects or particular university departments”. Many readers in academia will contrast this statement with the evident reality that funding agencies are being increasingly directive about what sort of science they will support, and increasingly active in pushing the scientific enterprise to support their strategic priorities – surely, they will ask, this tendency is running contrary to the Haldane principle? Like so many things in British public life, the Haldane principle is an invented tradition that is used by all sides in support of their own arguments; note that Willetts defines his version of it precisely here, in a way that is entirely consistent with research councils, or for that matter ministers, making judgements about which areas of science to prioritise. Within the research councils, there is a balance between “responsive mode” research and more directed programmes, though Willetts does make the point that this distinction doesn’t really map directly onto a division between “blue skies” and more applied research – some applied research is funded through responsive mode, while some directed programmes look pretty blue skies (the example he chose for the latter category – CERN – is important though hardly typical). But for those in the scientific community currently agitating against things like EPSRC’s “Shaping Capability” activity, it’s clear that he has only limited sympathy – “there comes a point when the Research Councils have to think about impact and priorities. I know this is controversial – and I do receive mass letters from aggrieved sections of academia who fear the Research Councils have failed to recognise their special significance. But it has to be done and the Councils try to do it in an open way that commands the consent of the research community they serve.”

One slightly unusual feature of the UK research system in comparison to much of the rest of the world is the dominance of universities in the publicly funded research landscape – in contrast, say, to the importance of Max Planck Institutes in Germany and National Laboratories in the USA. We do have some institutes with the characteristics of national labs in the UK – Harwell/Rutherford Lab, Daresbury, Norwich and Babraham. There does seem to be a growing emphasis on non-University research centres, with extra funding going to these campuses and the very large funding going into the new Crick Laboratory at St Pancras. But Willetts does recognise that universities do have a very large role in our research system, and that the number of UK universities in the top 100 and 200 of the various league tables is a source of strength. In fact, he wants to increase this number, saying “Today I set our ambition of aiming for the number of our universities in the top 100 to grow”.

At the moment, the number of UK top 100 universities is between 10 and 19 according to which ranking you use. This prompts two thoughts. For some years now, there’s been an explicit policy from government of increased concentration of research in a smaller number of universities. This has been enthusiastically supported by lobby groups of the most research-intensive universities, such as the Russell Group (my own university, Sheffield, is one of the twenty members of this group). But there’s been a certain amount of worry, even paranoia, that the current government’s research concentration agenda, together with a greater focus on national labs, might go further than that, with most research ending up in the top 5 or so. Since research strength is a major ingredient in these league tables, further research concentration is probably not consistent with pushing up our numbers in the world top 100.

But this discussion about league tables brings out another important point. In the evolution of the government’s strategy on higher education, there’s been an almost complete separation of research and teaching, and indeed a sense that the two missions are in tension. But the lesson of the league tables is that university reputation isn’t partitioned in this way. High league table places attract students, even when (as in the case of the Shanghai Jiao Tong table) the league table place depends entirely on measures of research performance. The students are not being irrational at all here – a substantial part of the value of the degree depends on the reputation of the university that grants it, and that reputation is driven largely by research. This separation of research and teaching in the thinking of government about universities has had another consequence – an almost complete neglect of the important role of postgraduate students in universities.
Postgraduates do, for a change, get a mention in Willetts’s speech, but in a rather puzzling context – the announcement that “the Coalition is inviting proposals for a new type of university with a focus on science and technology and on postgraduates.” It’s this announcement that gathered the headlines, with many people subsequently pointing out the difficulties of doing this in the absence of any government money. There’s not much I can add to other people’s analysis here (for example, this Nature editorial).

How do we turn excellent research into money? Not for the first time, Willetts expresses his scepticism about the emphasis on commercialising protectable IP through venture capital funded spin-outs – “the classic model expects venture capitalists to be following what is happening in universities and to invest in the IP after the university has spun out a company. This is the conventional sausage machine and it can work on some occasions but it is not widespread or straightforward. We have expected venture capital firms to finance early stage start-ups much further upstream than is realistic. Then we beat up on ourselves that our venture capitalists do not take risks they do in the US when even there the model is rather different.” But the reference to the USA does lead to an important new development – a growing realisation in the government that the USA, for all its free market rhetoric, is a state that is as shamelessly interventionist in technology and innovation as France or Korea. As Willetts says, the scales falling off his eyes: “The land of free enterprise has an innovation and research system which depends on federal and state government just like everywhere else in the Western world.”

In the UK, state intervention in nearer market technology is the role of the Technology Strategy Board, and our colleagues in TSB will be pleased to see the centrality of their role asserted in this way, especially since they had a few nervous months after the formation of the Coalition in which no-one in government seemed to mention them. Our TSB friends might also note that their budget wasn’t included in the science ring fence, even with flat cash, so at the same time as they’ve had reduced resources they’ve had an increasing number of responsibilities and new initiatives given to them to handle, such as the new “Catapult Centres” for translational research in collaboration with industry.

Once one has accepted the need for government to intervene, and has identified the agencies to deliver this intervention, the next question is how to decide what interventions to make. Here we do see more policy evolution from the government, with the idea of “sector leadership councils” set up by BIS to identify priorities. We already have such councils for space, automotive, aerospace, and life sciences, and further ones for e-Infrastructure and synthetic biology are being set up now. I think this is a positive development. I’ve written before of the difficulties research councils face (Some questions for British research policy) in being expected to deliver science in support of national priorities when there isn’t really a mechanism for deciding what those priorities are or should be, and when it isn’t obvious that the research councils have the capacity to make such judgements themselves. So a more thoughtful and informed way of deciding on those priorities should be a good thing.

But any such approach isn’t without dangers – to state the obvious, the quality of the advice these councils give depends on the quality of people on them. There’s the danger of incumbency bias and group-think, and a worry that the interests of existing industry have too strong a voice. This could have the effect of locking in place the existing UK industrial structure, and excluding the voices of those who might be able to deliver truly disruptive innovation. And there’s an even greater danger that the voice of ordinary people, those who will be profoundly affected by new technology without necessarily having a big stake in it, will be excluded as well. This will certainly be a very pointed issue for synthetic biology. The Minister has in the past spoken very approvingly of the public dialogue about synthetic biology that the research councils organised; the question must be, as the technology develops, will this involvement of the public continue to ensure that this technology is developed in a way that meets widely shared public goals and aspirations and recognises public worries?

Talking about “sector councils” makes clear that their are different ways of classifying and organising science and technology areas. Classifying by the technological needs of a particular industry sector – the automotive sector, say – is one extreme, while classifying by academic discipline and field – synthetic chemistry, for example – is another. A third classification which has been growing in prominence recently refers to societal grand challenges such as the ageing population, sustainable energy, or food security. Willetts finishes by talking about a fourth classification, with a nod to the idea of “general purpose technologies”, which have the potential to transform many different industries. The formulation Willetts uses is one with origins in the USA – the “bio-info-nano-cogno” technologies – though he is sceptical of the more overheated claims about the convergence of these technologies and wishes to add “carbo” for low carbon energy.

Using this as a checklist, we find bio covered via the government’s Life Sciences strategy, an emphasis on agricultural biotechnology, especially food security as envisaged by BBSRC, and a new roadmap for synthetic biology. For info and cogno, the East London TechCity development gets a mention, but the focus is on high performance computing and a new government report from Unilever’s Dominic Tildesley (which actually calls for quite a lot of government intervention). For nanotechnology, there’s the new investment in graphene research, but another new industry group has been set up to look at it. This is of particular interest to me, of course; it’s been a year or two since the last nanotechnology strategy and in the meantime the subject disappeared from UK science policy, prompting my post last summer Why has the UK given up on nanotechnology?

For low carbon, Willetts notes that “High on our agenda now is nuclear fission and fusion after a challenging report from the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords”. The report being referred to here – Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities – is “challenging” in the sense of offering withering criticism of the government’s belief that it is possible to have a significant new build of nuclear power without an underpinning strategic research effort (though of course the main culprit here is the Dept for Energy and Climate Change, which is not Willetts’s responsibility).

So, to summarise, what we’re seeing here is a small-government Conservative rather thoughtfully working through the implications of a realisation that more government intervention is needed in order to deliver on the promise of economic growth from the science base. For me, two issues arise. Firstly, the obvious problem seems to be that Willetts is willing the ends while being unable to provide the means, in terms of the resources needed. Secondly, what I don’t yet see is a connection between this important debate about where our growth is going to come from and the widespread dissatisfaction with the particular variety of capitalism we seem to have ended up with. This was the subject of my earlier post Good capitalism, bad capitalism and turning science into economic benefit. The argument here is that rebalancing the economy will have to involve discouraging bad capitalism as well as encouraging the innovation we’re all in favour of. Bad capitalism crowds out responsible innovation.

How should the hard economic times we’re going through affect the amount of money governments spend on scientific and technological research? The answer depends on your starting point – if you think that science is an optional extra that we do if we’re prosperous, then decreasing prosperity must inevitably mean we can afford to do less science. But if you think that our prosperity depends on the science we do, then if growth is starting to stall, that’s a signal telling you to devote more resources to research. This is a huge oversimplification, of course; the link between science and prosperity can never be automatic. How effective that link will be will depend on the type of science and technology you support, and on the nature of the wider economic system that translates innovations into economic growth. It’s worth taking a look at recent economic history to see some of the issues at play.

UK Government spending on research and development compared to the real growth in per capita GDP.

R&D data (red) from the Royal Society Report The Scientific Century adjusted to constant 2005 £s. GDP per person data (blue) from Measuring Worth. Dotted blue line – current projections from the November 2011 forecast of the UK Office of Budgetary Responsibility (uncorrected for population changes).

The graph shows both the real GDP per person in the UK from 1946 up to the present, together with the amount of money, again in real terms, spent by the government on research and development. The GDP graph tells an interesting story in itself, making very clear the discontinuity in economic policy that happened in 1979. In this year Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government overthrew a thirty year broad consensus, shared by both parties, on how the economy should be managed. Before 1979, we had a mixed economy, with substantial industrial sectors under state control, highly regulated financial markets, including controls on the flow of capital in and out of the country, and the macro-economy governed by the principles of Keynesian demand management. After 1979, it was not Keynes, but Hayek, who supplied the intellectual underpinning, and we saw progressive privatisation of those parts of the economy under state control, the abolition of controls on capital movements and deregulation of financial markets. In terms of economic growth, measured in real GDP per person, the period between 1946 and 1979 was remarkable, with a steady increase of 2.26% per year – this is, I think, the longest sustained period of high growth in the modern era. Since 1979, we’ve seen a succession of deep recessions, followed by periods of rapid, and evidently unsustainable growth, sustained by asset price bubbles. The peaks of these periods of growth have barely attained the pre-1979 trend line, while in our current economic travails we find ourselves about 9% below trend. Not only does there seem no imminent prospect of the rapid growth we’d need to return to that trend line, but there now seems to be a likelihood of another recession.

The plot for public R&D spending tells its own story, which also shows a turning point with the Thatcher government. From 1980 until 1998, we see a substantial long-term decline in research spending, not just as a fraction of GDP, but in absolute terms; since 1998 research spending has increased again in real terms, though not substantially faster than the rise in GDP over the same period. Underlying the decline were a number of factors. There was a real squeeze on spending in research in Universities, well remembered by those who were working in them at the time. Meanwhile the research spending in those industries that were being privatised – such as telecommunications and energy – was removed from the government spending figures. And the activities of government research laboratories – particularly those associated with defense and the nuclear industry – were significantly wound down. Underlying this winding down of research was both a political motive and an ideological one. Big government spending on high technology was associated with the corporate politics of the 1960′s, subscribed to by both parties but particularly associated with Labour, and the memorable slogan “The White Heat of Technology”. To its detractors this summoned up associations with projects like the supersonic passenger aircraft Concord, a technological triumph but a commercial disaster. To the adherents of the Hayekian free market ideology that underpinned the Thatcher government, the state had no business doing any research but the most basic and far from market. In fact, state-supported research was likely to be not only less efficient and less effectively directed than research in the private sector, but by “squeezing out” such private sector research it would actually make the economy less efficient.

The idea that state support of research reduces support of research by the private sector by “squeezing out” remains attractive to free market ideologues, but the empirical evidence points to the opposite conclusion – state spending and private sector spending on research support each other, with increases in state R&D spending leading to increases in R&D by business (see for example Falk M (2006). What drives business research and development intensity across OECD countries? (PDF), Applied Economics 38 p 533). Certainly, in the UK, the near-halving of government R&D spend between 1980 and 1999 did not lead to an increase in R&D by business; instead, this also fell from about 1.4% of GDP to 1.2%. Not only did those companies that had been privatised substantially reduce their R&D spending, but other major players in industrial R&D – such as the chemical company ICI and the electronics company GEC – substantially cut back their activities. At the time many rationalised this as the inevitable result of the UK economy changing its mix of sectors, away from manufacturing towards service sectors such as the financial service industry.

None of this answers the questions: how much should one spend on R&D, and what difference do changes in R&D spend make to economic performance? It is certainly clear that the decline in R&D spending in the UK isn’t correlated with any improvement in its economic performance. International comparisons show that the proportion of GDP spent on R&D in the UK is significantly lower than most of its major competitors, and within this the proportion of R&D supported by business is itself unusually low . On the other hand, the performance of the UK science base, as measured by academic measures rather than economic ones, is strikingly good. Updating a much-quoted formula, the UK accounts for 3% of the total world R&D spend, it has 4.3% of the world’s researchers, who produce 6.4% of the world’s scientific articles, which attract 10.9% of the world’s citations and produce 13.8% of the world’s top 1% of highly cited papers (these figures come from the analysis in the recent report The International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base).

This formula is usually quoted to argue for the productivity and effectiveness of the UK research base, and it clearly tells a powerful story about its strength as measured in purely academic terms. But does this mean we get the best out of our research in economic terms? The partial recovery in government R&D spending that we saw from 1998 until last year brought real terms increases in science budgets (though without significantly increasing the fraction of GDP spent on science). These increases were focused on basic research, whose importance as a proportion of total government science spending doubled between 1986 and 2005. This has allowed us to preserve the strength of our academic research base, but the decline in more applied R&D in both government and industrial laboratories has weakened our capacity to convert this strength into economic growth.

Our national economic experiment in deregulated capitalism ended in failure, as the 2008 banking collapse and subsequent economic slump has made clear. I don’t know how much the systematic running down of our national research and development capability in the 1980′s and 1990′s contributed to this failure, but I suspect that it’s a significant part of the bigger picture of misallocation of resources associated with the booms and the busts, and the associated disappointingly slow growth in economic productivity.

What should we do now? Everyone talks about the need to “rebalance the economy”, and the government has just released an “Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth”, which claims that “The Government is putting innovation and research at the heart of its growth agenda”. The contents of this strategy – in truth largely a compendium of small-scale interventions that have already been announced, which together still don’t fully reverse last year’s cuts in research capital spending – are of a scale that doesn’t begin to meet this challenge. What we should have seen is, not just a commitment to maintain the strength of the fundamental science base, important though that is, but a real will to reverse the national decline in applied research.