Visualising potential innovation pathways in a workshop setting: the case of nano-enabled biosensors

Abstract

A key element in many future-oriented technology analyses is the expert forecasting workshop. These workshops provide a means of combining codified and tacit knowledge to explore the plausibility of various technology options, providing key intelligence for assessing the potential innovations that may stem from them. This paper offers a five-stage approach to conducting such a workshop. It reflects on attributes of one such session, conducted within a larger study concerning biosensor innovation pathways. The workshop drew upon quantitative and qualitative data to stimulate the consideration of future prospects. We reflect on issues in conveying prior analyses to the workshop participants, keying on the value of succinct visualisations. Post-workshop synthesis resulted in the generation of three innovation pathways for nanobiosensors.

Keywords:

• foresight
• workshop
• nanotechnology
• biosensor

Acknowledgements

This research was undertaken at Georgia Tech drawing on support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (Arizona State University; Award No. 0531194); and the Science of Science Policy Program – ‘Measuring and Tracking Research Knowledge Integration’ (Georgia Tech; Award No. 0830207); and the National Science Foundation of China Young Funds (Beijing Institute of Technology; Award No. 71103015). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the NSF and NSFC.

Notes

Support systems for researchers to explore potential innovation and societal embedment challenges were the focus of a PhD dissertation which operationalised constructive technology assessment as a support for strategy articulation in R&D: D.K.R. Robinson, Constructive Technology Assessment of Emerging Nanotechnologies: Experiments in Interactions, University of Twente, The Netherlands (November 2010).

For further information on this activity, feel free to contact workshop co-organiser and animator Douglas Robinson (teQnode, Paris).

Here, Robinson has created a 250-page appendix reporting and analysing the workshop process for five projects, from initiation of the project, to preparation, orchestration, execution and assessment. The PhD thesis can be found at www.constructivetechnologyassessment.com. In addition, the authors would like to draw attention to another completed PhD manuscript which goes deeper into understanding and tracing learning in workshop situations (Robinson 2009).

Note that a co-location need not be the only approach. We chose this because of the need to exchange ideas and expertise and to contrast elements in order to create a more robust idea of future directions. One could also interview individual experts independently and explore their individual expectations of futures and collate those oneself as an analyst; however, this approach has the problem that it is down to the analyst to question and push the credibility of the information provided by the expert, and thus the analyst must have a good breadth of knowledge and legitimacy to question (this is written up in detail in both Robinson (2010) and Robinson (2009)). In conclusion to this extended footnote, the inconvenience of co-locating experts is counter-balanced by the benefits of allowing legitimate questioning of expert statements and, thus, a more robust output.

This approach was first applied to the field of micro- and nanotechnologies for single-cell analysis, linked to a programme of future-oriented technology assessment (FTA) activities coordinated within a European nanotechnology research network.