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Exploring S&T foresight tools and techniques: Learning from a Canadian Federal Pilot Project
Jack Smith
Office of Technology Foresight, National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
The world is full of surprises, unforeseen events and developments that few have anticipated. A retrospective look at some of the events and challenges from the past 20 years demonstrates the high degree of uncertainty that has become the norm for the industrialized world. From the challenges of AIDS to the end of the Cold War, and from the Human Genome to the World-Wide Web, the global context is full of surprises. More recently, the SARS situation cost Canada $1B and temporarily damaged the perception of Toronto as a tourist destination. As one surveys Canada's increasing integration with the trade, technology and economic factors driving globalization, it is clear that Canada's place is firmly in the world and not detached from it.
To cope with the higher risks associated with this new reality - where security and resilience matter, where institutions and governance mechanisms are being transformed by technology, and where one's future is growing more contingent upon strategic choice - it becomes important for nations to increase their peripheral vision, contingency planning and preparedness capacities.
This was the context that underpinned the development of the interdepartmental Science and Technology Foresight Pilot Project carried out during 2002-2003. It involved thirteen federal Departments and Agencies in an exploration of S&T foresight with a view to better understanding some of the longer term, integrative and horizontal challenges and opportunities that the federal S&T community might have to cope with, looking ahead to 2015 - and beyond.
It is accepted that one can never predict the future through such efforts. However, the attempt to anticipate a variety of plausible developments, innovations and disruptive technologies that could cause major shifts in the social and economic environment represents a necessary flexibility-enhancing investment. Many western and most G8 countries have been actively engaged in some form of foresight for several years. Canada has not had a regular forum for societal or S&T focused foresight, but given the enormous complexity and vulnerabilities of a globalized world and the inevitability of major surprises, building some new contingency planning capacities through foresight is a logical and cost-effective investment - even if only to begin to learn how to better anticipate the unexpected, and to increase the resilience of Canada's S&T readiness. This was the conclusion of Deputy Ministers in March 2002.
At a Science Deputies dinner in March 2002, Dr Arthur Carty, President of the National Research Council offered NRC's expertise to lead a pilot project that would explore the application of foresight tools, and help to educate SBDA staff in their use. It was decided that this should be done as collaboratively as possible and that the resource requirements would be shared amongst the partners.
Two topics (Biosystemics and Geostrategics) were selected by an Interdepartmental Working Group. These were suggested by the IWG for several reasons:
- they represented longer term views associated with convergent technologies being mainly explored in the US through the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office, who are acknowledged as leaders in advanced infrastructure technologies
- they were able to subsume or be inclusive of most of the more narrow topics advanced by individual SBDAs
- they presented contrasting challenges and opportunities, one being more science determined, the other more applications and engineering oriented
- they each could enlist and stretch the expertise of several partners
- they were not directly replicating existing planning domains.
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