Technology discontinuation as a continuous process: diesel, sustainability, and the politics of delay
In: Research policy: policy, management and economic studies of science, technology and innovation, Band 54, Heft 4, S. 105198
ISSN: 1873-7625
14 Ergebnisse
Sortierung:
In: Research policy: policy, management and economic studies of science, technology and innovation, Band 54, Heft 4, S. 105198
ISSN: 1873-7625
In: Research Policy, Band 46, Heft 3, S. 557-572
The Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education were developed and adopted to support and encourage international cooperation and enhance the understanding of the importance of quality provision in cross-border higher education. The purposes of the Guidelines are to protect students and other stakeholders from low-quality provision and disreputable providers (that is, degree and accreditation mills) as well as to encourage the development of quality cross-border higher education that meets human, social, economic and cultural needs. The Guidelines are not legally binding and member countries are expected to implement them as appropriate in their national context. Based on a survey of the main recommendations of the Guidelines, this report monitors the extent to which the OECD countries and a few non-member countries comply with its recommendations. The Survey was sent out in June 2010 to all OECD countries. The Secretariat has also collaborated with the UNESCO Secretariat to have the questionnaire sent to all UNESCO non-OECD country delegations. Twenty-three responses were obtained from 22 Members: Australia, Austria, Belgium (Flemish and French communities), Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States; and 9 non-Members: Bulgaria, Colombia, Fiji, Indonesia, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Oman, Rwanda. Government representatives were asked to co-ordinate with the other stakeholders covered to answer the survey. The main conclusion of the survey is that (responding) countries report a high level of compliance with the Guidelines recommendations. On average, compliance performance of the responding OECD countries reaches 72%. The level of compliance decreases to 67% when recommendations to student bodies are included, but the level of missing information, and thus uncertainty about actual compliance, increases significantly. Tertiary education institutions are the group of stakeholders that follow most of the recommendations of the Guidelines, with an average compliance index of 0.80 (80%). The governments' average compliance is 76%. Paradoxically, quality assurance and accreditation bodies' compliance with the Guidelines is lower than governments' and tertiary education institutions'.Student bodies only conform to 51% of the recommendations – with the caveat that information about their activities was generally scant in the survey answers. The objectives or desirable practices emphasized by the Guidelines are: 1) the inclusion of crossborder higher education in countries' regulatory framework, 2) the comprehensive coverage of all forms of cross-border higher education, 3) student and customer protection, 4) transparency in procedures (for providers), 5) information access and dissemination (for potential international students), 6) collaboration. Four of these objectives are largely met on average: countries have regulatory frameworks or arrangements in place, cover different forms of cross-border higher education comprehensively, are transparent in their procedures, and are engaged in national and international collaboration. The current main weaknesses in compliance lie in ensuring an easy access to information and the level of student and customer protection. While there is probably no need for a revision of the Guidelines, countries should continue to disseminate and implement the recommendations. The main areas of improvement lie in measures to improve student and customer protection as well as the transparency in procedures of assessment, registration, and licensing for providers. Further progress in the ease of access of information for students would also be welcome.
BASE
In: Research policy: policy, management and economic studies of science, technology and innovation, Band 52, Heft 3, S. 104704
ISSN: 1873-7625
In: Research Policy, Band 48, Heft 9, S. 103826
In: Research policy: policy, management and economic studies of science, technology and innovation, Band 48, Heft 4, S. 895-904
ISSN: 1873-7625
In: Research policy: policy, management and economic studies of science, technology and innovation, Band 48, Heft 9
ISSN: 1873-7625
Test beds and living labs have emerged as a prominent approach to foster innovation across geographical regions and technical domains. They feed on the popular "grand societal challenges" discourse and the growing insight that adequate policy responses to these challenges will require drastic transformations of technology and society alike. Test beds and living labs represent an experimental, co-creative approach to innovation policy that aims to test, demonstrate, and advance new sociotechnical arrangements and associated modes of governance in a model environment under real-world conditions. In this paper, we develop an analytic framework for this distinctive approach to innovation. Our research draws on theories from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Innovation Studies, as well as in-depth empirical analysis from two case studies - an urban smart energy campus and a rural renewable energy network. Our analysis reveals three characteristic frictions that test beds face: (1) the limits of controlled experimentation due to messy social responses and co-creation activity; (2) a tension between lab-like open-ended experimentation and pressures to demonstrate success; (3) the opposing needs of local socio-cultural specificity and scalability, i.e. the inherent promise of test bed outcomes being generalizable or transferrable because the tested "model society" is presumed to represent a future society at large. These tensions suggest that thinking of test beds as mere technology tests under real-world conditions is insufficient. Rather, test beds both test and re-configure society around a new set of technologies, envisioned futures, and associated modes of governance - occasionally against considerable resistance. By making social order explicitly available for experimentation, test beds tentatively stabilize new socio-technical orders on a local scale in an "as-if" mode of adoption and diffusion. Symmetric attention to the simultaneous co-production of new technical and social orders points to new opportunities and challenges for innovation governance in test-bed settings: Rather than mere enablers of technology, test beds could serve as true societal tests for the desirability of certain transformations. This will require rethinking notions of success and failure, planning with a view towards reversibility, and greater scrutiny of how power is distributed within such settings. Likewise, rather than envisioning test beds as low-regulation zones to drive innovation, they could be strategically deployed to co-develop socially desirable governance frameworks in tandem with emerging technologies in real-time.
In: Social studies of science: an international review of research in the social dimensions of science and technology, Band 54, Heft 3, S. 352-376
ISSN: 1460-3659
This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investigates the relationship between innovation and maintenance and repair. This literature argues that the obsession with innovation crowds out attention to maintenance, that innovation creates future obligations of maintenance that are often not factored into technological promises, and that ordinary maintenance and repair practices are often innovative in their own right. Empirically, we explore a case where maintenance and repair become the explicit target of high-level, high-tech innovation initiatives and how, as a result, innovation logics colonize maintenance practices. Conceptually, we explore how repair and maintenance sensitivities can be applied to innovation practices to reveal the invisible work needed to align innovation instruments with socio-material and institutional configurations. Drawing on an in-depth case study of sewer inspection robots in Barcelona, we find that attempts to innovate maintenance require a symmetric effort to maintain innovation. In our case study, innovation processes as deployed by the European Commission, research consortia, and companies required substantial repair work to function reliably in specific settings. Our study shows how divergent understandings of the public good in innovation and maintenance contexts may lead to significant tensions, and that much can be gained analytically from not treating innovation and maintenance as opposites.
In: Science and public policy: journal of the Science Policy Foundation, Band 50, Heft 3, S. 433-444
ISSN: 1471-5430
Abstract
Co-creation seems to be flourishing across innovation policy discourses: The concept suggests that engaging diverse actors throughout innovation processes will unlock new sources of innovation and conduce robust outcomes. While co-creation seems to embrace new and diverse participation opportunities, it is necessary to interrogate how it affects existing notions of public engagement. In this paper, we explore the discursive uptake of co-creation in European innovation policy. Drawing on a qualitative discourse analysis of European Union (EU) publications, we scrutinize the value propositions of co-creation and discuss them in light of the existing public engagement literature. We find that the EU tends to foreground alleged economic benefits of co-creation over questions of social justice. To that effect, it consistently conflates citizens, consumers, and users and blurs the line between self-motivated opportunity and democratic legitimacy. Countering the prevalent co-creation optimism, we propose a more nuanced outlook on co-creation that should prompt further scholarly inquiry.
In the past decade, many countries have designed explicit internationalisation policies for their higher education systems, acknowledging the benefits of international exposure to prepare students for a globalising economy as well as the many opportunities of cross-border mobility for innovation, improvement and capacity development in higher education and in the economy. Cases of fraud and opportunistic behaviour have shown that these promises come with risks for students and other tertiary education stakeholders though. It is precisely to help all stakeholders to minimise these risks and strengthen the dynamics of openness, collaboration and transparency across countries that UNESCO and OECD jointly developed the Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education. This book monitors the extent to which tertiary education stakeholders complied with the Guidelines in 2014. It will be of interest to policy makers, leaders of tertiary education institutions and quality assurance agencies, as well as to academics and other parties interested in higher education and its internationalisation.
Complex international partnerships have emerged as a policy instrument of choice for many governments to build domestic capacity in science, technology and innovation with the help of foreign partners. At present, these flagship initiatives tend to be primarily practitioner-driven with limited systematic understanding of available design options and trade-offs. Here, we present an analysis of four such partnerships from the university sector between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and governments in the UK, Portugal, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. Using a system architecture approach in conjunctions with in-depth case studies and elements of interpretive policy analysis, we map how in each country distinct capacity-building goals, activities, and political and institutional contexts translate into different partnership architectures: a bilateral hub-&-spokes architecture (UK), a consortium architecture (Portugal), an institution-building architecture (Abu Dhabi), and a functional expansion architecture (Singapore). Despite these differences in emergent macro-architectures, we show that each partnership draws on an identical, limited set of 'forms' that can by organized around four architectural views (education, research, innovation & entrepreneurship, institution-building) and four levels of interaction between partners (people, programs/projects, objects, organization/process). Based on our analysis, we derive a design matrix that can help guide the development future partnerships through a systematic understanding of available design choices. Our research underscores the utility and flexibility of complex international partnerships as systemic policy instruments. It suggests a greater role for global research universities in capacity-building and international development, and emphasizes the potential of targeted cross-border funding. Our research also demonstrates the analytic power of system architecture for policy analysis and design. We argue that architectural thinking provides a useful stepping stone for STS-type interpretive policy analysis into national innovation initiatives in different political cultures, as well as more custom-tailored approaches to program evaluation.
BASE
Complex international partnerships have emerged as a policy instrument of choice for many governments to build domestic capacity in science, technology and innovation with the help of foreign partners. At present, these flagship initiatives tend to be primarily practitioner-driven with limited systematic understanding of available design options and trade-offs. Here, we present an analysis of four such partnerships from the university sector between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and governments in the UK, Portugal, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. Using a system architecture approach in conjunctions with in-depth case studies and elements of interpretive policy analysis, we map how in each country distinct capacity-building goals, activities, and political and institutional contexts translate into different partnership architectures: a bilateral hub-&-spokes architecture (UK), a consortium architecture (Portugal), an institution-building architecture (Abu Dhabi), and a functional expansion architecture (Singapore). Despite these differences in emergent macro-architectures, we show that each partnership draws on an identical, limited set of 'forms' that can by organized around four architectural views (education, research, innovation & entrepreneurship, institution-building) and four levels of interaction between partners (people, programs/projects, objects, organization/process). Based on our analysis, we derive a design matrix that can help guide the development future partnerships through a systematic understanding of available design choices. Our research underscores the utility and flexibility of complex international partnerships as systemic policy instruments. It suggests a greater role for global research universities in capacity-building and international development, and emphasizes the potential of targeted cross-border funding. Our research also demonstrates the analytic power of system architecture for policy analysis and design. We argue that architectural thinking provides a useful stepping stone for STS-type interpretive policy analysis into national innovation initiatives in different political cultures, as well as more custom-tailored approaches to program evaluation.
BASE
In the past decade, many countries have designed explicit internationalisation policies for their higher education systems, acknowledging the benefits of international exposure to prepare students for a globalising economy as well as the many opportunities of cross-border mobility for innovation, improvement and capacity development in higher education and in the economy. Cases of fraud and opportunistic behaviour have shown that these promises come with risks for students and other tertiary education stakeholders though. It is precisely to help all stakeholders to minimise these risks and strengthen the dynamics of openness, collaboration and transparency across countries that UNESCO and OECD jointly developed the Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education. This book monitors the extent to which tertiary education stakeholders complied with the Guidelines in 2014. It will be of interest to policy makers, leaders of tertiary education institutions and quality assurance agencies, as well as to academics and other parties interested in higher education and its internationalisation. [Publisher website]
In: Educational research and innovation