Jack Smith

Guest Contributor
January 20, 2003

Exploring the collaborative capability of federal S&T

By Jack E. Smith

As a 21st century small economy and population, Canada must depend upon the world’s store of innovative knowledge for much of its future dynamism. Consequently, we must continually improve our ability to understand and seize opportunities being generated in the world of global S&T. Foresight is one of the new tools that can be applied in this regard. Horizontal collaboration on strategic topics amongst our key knowledge generators and institutions appears to be one of the most effective ways that Canada can work in these domains given our highly distributed learning and R&D systems.

Our society is beginning to comprehend the challenges of a knowledge-driven economy and the enhanced capabilities that developments in new domain and integrative knowledge will likely bring. And we are just starting to realize that these developments are going to challenge our cognitive frameworks and organizational models for their management and understanding.

From nanotechnology to genomics, and proteomics to quantum computing, the boundaries between traditional disciplines are evaporating rapidly. We are discovering that the old ways of classifying S&T may no longer be very useful. We now see a need for new frameworks and tools to anticipate, design and shape future capabilities that will enable our society to make sensible choices and to prepare for contingencies.

Within the federal government science system, these new domains are causing some consternation. Organizational, policy and procedural systems for examining horizontal applications and societal implications have not been adequately anticipated. In fact, most federal S&T organizations have not until now (and some would say still not) recognized the need to commit resources to these domains or at least engage in horizontal communities of practice that rely upon collaborative skills, foresight tools and new ways of approaching R&D risk and uncertainty for shared knowledge gain.

Herein lies the dilemma: relatively strong horizontal communities exist for policy and financial co-ordination ( i.e. central agencies such as Privy Council, Treasury Board and Department of Finance). But current federal S&T is more clearly managed as separate communities within the stove pipes of departmental missions, leaving the potential horizontal synergies quite disconnected.

Furthermore, the major enduring policy challenges that 21st century governments are now being asked to address by public, private and non-governmental organizations are increasingly interdependent and complex. Challenges such as the future viability of the health system and more effective use of advanced technology, strategies to counter or reverse global climate change, liveability of cities and sustainability of urban systems, and personal and community security from terrorist threats, are all beyond the scope of single organizations. They are challenging both the mission structure and the cognitive models and methods of sector-based departments and agencies.

Increasingly, government executives are asking: how to better design the full array of federal knowledge assets, cross-agency knowledge bases and investment and action instruments to improve Canada’s abilities and future confidence in these areas?

The above reality sets the context for the emergence of a potentially useful approach to building some new collaborative capacity within the federal S&T system. Last March, National Research Council president Dr Arthur Carty stepped forward and indicated that the NRC would be interested in leading a S&T foresight pilot project to explore how new domain challenges could be dimensioned within the context of federal S&T, acting strategically as a collaborative single resource capability. The focus for this pilot would be the community of science-based departments and agencies (SBDAs) and its collectively identified future needs. Opportunities could arise from projecting forward a series of plausible technical and societal scenarios that Canada may have to be prepared for in 2020, as a consequence of the forces of globalization, innovation and change in a global context.

Work is now progressing on a pilot collaboration involving federal departments and agencies to explore and document prospective developments, as well as potentially disruptive but plausible scientific and technological challenges that may require federal S&T investments in the coming decade.

Two broad areas are being examined between November 2002 and March 2003: geo-strategics — essentially the future of geo-spatial data applications married to advanced software capabilities and decision support systems; and bio-systemics —the intersection of information technology, biotechnology, ecological science, cognitive science and nanotechnology.

The pilot project will experiment with a range of tools and methods:

• Sector Scoping Workshops to elicit what developments and capabilities might be contemplated toward 2020;
• Expert Technical Panels that disaggregate the broad topics into more manageable parts and examine drivers and prospective future states of the technologies and their societal impacts;
• Multiple, Plausible Scenarios for the ways that these domains could unfold or disrupt existing conceptions of federal S&T and research practices;
• Syntheses of the many inputs and learning process steps involved to better understand how longer-term collaborative, anticipative systems for planning could or should be structured in future.

It’s still too early to indicate the range of findings. But the collaborative environment that has developed signals that this approach is going to contribute to a more effective forward planning capacity and learning system for federal S&T. But first the collaborative spirit must become a more regular way of doing business within the federal S&T community.

As we move further into the 21st century, Canada will continue to be challenged by the disruptive inventions of other nations. There is a need to develop a more coherent and integrated understanding of where Canadian talent can make a difference as we confront the many technological changes that are springing forth.

Building new collaborative capacity and imaginative anticipatory thinking through S&T foresight offers a useful step in the right direction. At the very least it will enable our scientists to become familiar with techniques already being used by Canada’s global competitors.

Jack Smith is the Leader of the Office of Technology Foresight for the National Research Council of Canada.