21: Transformative Diffusion Policies: Strategic intelligence and new policy spaces for anticipating and accelerating scaling (Douglas K. R. Robinson, Susan Borrás, Wouter P. C. Boon)
STI policy making is under increasing pressure to consider downstream diffusion issues – a broadening from a traditional focus on fostering STI towards accelerating the uptake of STI solutions, for example, solutions to address grand challenges, to achieve missions, or to respond to urgent and threatening crises.
Such STI policies for transformative change ideally connect directly to the deployment and diffusion stage of innovation, requiring consideration of, and connection with, other policy areas such as sectoral policies, regulatory policies, and welfare policies. Anticipating the diffusion of STI is made more complex because of the systemic nature of transformative change, linking various actors, networks and institutions.
These complexities call for a deeper exploration of scaling and diffusion processes for transformative change – i.e. reimagining diffusion theories – as well exploring what intelligence is needed to inform upstream transformative diffusion policies as part of STI policies more broadly, and transformative innovation policies in particular. These complexities also require concertation, and even coordination, across multiple policy areas – are new spaces of cross-policy dialogue and coordination needed to achieve STI enabled transformative change? This track seeks to explore the following questions:
• How is scaling and diffusion being reimagined for transformative innovation policies?
• How are diffusion policies, as part of transformative innovation policies, being set up, executed and evaluated in theory and in policy practice?
• Which spaces for cross-policy coordination and concertation are opening up to facilitate joined up approaches to STI development, scaling and diffusion policies? Are there illustrative examples, such as coordination with sectoral, regulatory and welfare policy domains?
• Which forms of strategic intelligence, such as foresight, technology assessment, anticipatory impact assessment, are being mobilized to inform transformative diffusion policies?
• What lessons can we learn from participatory foresight for transformative innovation policies, which often includes the upstream imagining of scaling and diffusion? How is such intelligence being mobilized?
• Are we already learning about transformative diffusion policies through implementation of challenge-oriented and mission-oriented STI policies? For example, via STI policies such as the EU missions, the US bold goals and the Japanese moonshots?
• Are there effective ways to consider ethical, legal and societal issues at an early stage of diffusion?
• How is anticipation on transformative diffusion being combined with anticipation on discontinuation and destabilization of existing socio-technical systems (the outcomes of transformative diffusion)?
Contributions are welcome on these and similar themes. Submissions that make clear the relevance and potential contribution to shaping or informing STI policy will be very much welcomed.
Keywords: transformative Diffusion Policy, transformative Innovation Policy, Strategic Intelligence, Cross-policy coordination, reimagining scaling and diffusion