Strategic Challenges

New Technology, Innovation and Skills

Contemporary economies rely on innovation. Already, 40 per cent of the UK's value added arises from knowledge-intensive services and high-tech manufacturing.The economic downturn offers scope to rebalance the economy as investment moves into areas where the UK may have or may be able to build comparative advantage.

Economic resilience depends on the capacity of people, firms and governments to innovate. Individuals need new kinds of expertise, technical skills and understanding. Firms must develop, adopt and adapt cutting edge services, products, processes and ways of working. Governments need to create policies and set frameworks for innovation and address the social, technical and ethical challenges set by biological, nano-, communication and other technologies. Emergent technologies can challenge our understanding of what government can do, what constitutes an organisation, even what it means to be human.

Social scientists need to play active roles in innovation, demonstrating how social, economic and political drivers shape new technologies. Research has helped to explain why some new technologies enjoy public confidence and rapid uptake while others do not and how outmoded linear models of innovation can be replaced by more useful open ecosystem based models. Our evidence has also demonstrated how innovative teaching can stimulate interest in science and how well designed education technologies enhance learning. In the area of skills, social scientists have shown how and why early years education contributes to lifelong opportunity as well as the benefits of learning throughout life.

However there is more that the social sciences can contribute. In a time of global instability the UK needs to be well placed to develop and exploit new technologies and enhance the range of skills needed to drive the UK economy forward. Challenges include:

• The opportunities and threats of the explosion of human interaction on the internet and related technologies (particularly mobile technologies) and how future semantic web based technologies can underpin both economic and learning opportunities and open up new platforms for civic participation in contemporary democracy
• The social drivers and implications of developments in ubiquitous computing, nano-technologies and bio-technologies, particularly in criminal justice, transport, health and social care
• Determining how apparently autonomous technologies in areas as diverse as finance and defence can be regulated, governed and made accountable
• Skill development at all levels from initial numeracy, language and communication to advanced post graduate science, mathematics and engineering to lifelong learning in the workplace to meet the social, cultural and economic needs of society.

This challenge links to , for example in how new technologies contribute to economic prosperity while submitting to global governance.There are also connections to including, for example, how people behave in technology mediated environments (like the internet) and how people and organisations develop long-term skills relevant to an increasingly dynamic knowledge intensive economy; to around the potential for socially viable technologies in environmental protection; to where there are issues around cyber-security, identity management, and the acceptability of the use of technologies for security purposes; and to where the potential - and dangers - of web-based technologies for the renewal of democracy remains unclear.

In all this the ESRC will look to collaborate with business, industry, all of the other Research Councils and the TSB. All are concerned with the problem of how to secure the design, diffusion and governance of new technologies. Here social science has the potential to provide essential insights.

Achievements 2005-2008

• Investigating how lifelong learning promotes economic competitiveness and social cohesion, including the social and cultural foundations of learning, knowledge production and transfer, and innovation, within the context of a changing economy.
• Through the promotion and support of world class theoretical, empirical, policy- and practice-oriented research, contributing to global innovation processes by shaping and exploring how they work both in the UK and within an international comparative context.
• Improving learning throughout the lifecourse, by building capacity in high quality educational research and bringing different research methods together. In addition research on technology enhanced learning will improve the quality of formal and informal learning, and make accessible forms of knowledge that were previously inaccessible.

Priorities for 2009-2014

By 2014 the ESRC will have:

• Provided, with partners, a sustained body of research and knowledge transfer on the challenges and opportunities from open, holistic systems of innovation
• Worked with partners on development and impact of key technologies including nano-technologies, renewable energy, health care technologies, and the next generation of the digital economy
• Through funding largescale studies such as the Workplace Employees Relations Survey, developed a deeper appreciation of the evolving skills requirements needed for the UK to sustain competitive advantage
• Exploited the potential of new technologies for research itself by promoting methodological developments, the application of new methodologies to the exploitation of data resources and innovation in e-infrastructure.