The Future of Research - Scenarios to improve strategic planning

Do you need to understand future trends in research and technology to improve strategic planning? 

It’s always good to ensure strategic thinking is informed by what the future may hold, and there’s some very useful pieces of work around how the research sector may evolve. The UK Royal Society’s Research Culture: Embedding inclusive excellence: Insights on the future culture of research identifies cultural conditions that will best enable excellent research and researchers to flourish in the future, such as enhanced research mobility. 

Other relevant reports include those in adjoining sectors and those on global technology and societal trends: 

• STM’s Tech Trends 2022 examines key technology factors impacting the publishing community.
• European Commission’s 100 Radical Innovation Breakthroughs for the future provides insights on 100 emerging developments that may exert a strong impact on global value creation and offer important solutions to societal needs.
• CSIRO’s Australian National Outlook explores multiple two contrasting future scenarios for Australia in 2060 to identify major challenges.
•  CSIRO’s Our Future World: Global megatrends that will change the way we live explores changes that will have a major impact on Australia over the next 20 years. 

One of the common themes in these works is that citizen scientists may be playing a significantly expanded role in research. There is widespread acceptance that the future will be based a data-driven economy, with data increasingly better valued and utilised through better curation and sharing – giving rise to increased opportunities for wider involvement of the community in research. In future scenarios, the mix of publicly-funded research institutions, industry and citizen science could change in very interesting ways, and in less years than we think. The consequences of such a shift clearly needs consideration in strategic planning for many areas focused on digital innovation and research, and beyond.  

The UK Royal Society’s Museum of Extraordinary Objects includes an example of what research with increased citizen science could look like, as their Visions of 2035 workshops utilised objects from the future to initiate conversations about how research culture might evolve. This includes the future Lab Cab, “the first transport service in the UK to be fully accredited for transportation of live tissue, bacteria and other biohazardous materials from hospitals and public labs to community ‘hackspaces’ and home labs.” 

Similarly, 100 Radical Innovation Breakthroughs for the future identifies one of the thirteen radical social innovation breakthroughs (or upcoming social practices) to be “Valid information and knowledge co-creation”, which suggest that increased sharing of data and tools, combined with virtual communities of practice, will enable many more to undertake research. Securing the future of research computing in the biosciences contains predictions for the future of biocomputation that also includes a growth in citizen science, strongly supported by the growth in visualisation tools for data exploration.  

If you’re interested in developing your own future scenarios using these techniques, the European Commission has a “Megatrends Implications Assessment” workshop tool on anticipatory thinking and foresight for policy makers, and organisations such as STM use the Delphi method.