Time & duration

Beginning (205)
Durations (82)
Past (48)
Present (220)
Temporal arrangement (27)
Temporal properties (23)
Time (574)
Time periods (504)

Synopsis: Time & dates: Time & duration:

The starting point and ideas behind the organisation of the Seminar were to learn and consolidate from the recent rejuvenation and growth in future-oriented technology analyses (FTA).

In fact, during the recent sharp expansion of FTA, that mainly took place in last two decades,

The diversity among these disciplines reflects the complexity of demands for FTA relating to differences in scope (geographic scale and time horizon;

It was suggested that maybe technology foresight could learn something from the past 20 30 years in socioeconomic study of science and technology,

if taken some future time. This does not mean that all strategic decisions should be deferred. Rather it is the careful combining of commitment

a development that in conjunction with the new possibilities offered by information and communication technologies has given rise to an internationalisation of research and innovation.

which we could observe during the past decades. Several interconnected research traditions have transformed our understanding of innovation processes

K. M. Weber/Technological forecasting & Social Change 75 (2008) 462 482 tendances lourdes can be identified like the development of electricity and propulsion technologies starting in the late 19th century and information

and communication technologies in the present era, the ability to predict at an early stage which particular pathways

As a second important trend, foresight has become an increasingly participatory activity. Initially, foresight activities were mainly based on S&texpert opinion,

and thus at least over time should be able to overcome the impressionism of conventional foresight, while on the other hand not capitulating to the conventional wisdom as might be the case

This strand of thinking has been developed by many researchers and practitioners over a considerable time-span.

designed to exploit progressively improved understanding as time goes by. Combining insights on limitations to foresight (used here as an everyday term) and control,

In the face of the uncertainty that a fire might break out in one's house at some future point in time,

(strategic decision-making In the context of that example there is obviously no scope for sequential strategic decision-making in the sense of acquiring fire-protection assets once information on a beginning fire starts coming in 10

and reconsider over time. It is here and in other domains with similar characteristics e g.,

Moreover, the impact and effectiveness of policies depend on their time of implementation. 2. 2. 3. Portfolios of options We have used so far the term package to catch the need to combine a number of elementary options to achieve a robust,

K. M. Weber/Technological forecasting & Social Change 75 (2008) 462 482 adaptable enough to allow the second-period decision to go for any of the considered visionary structures at reasonable lead-time

Depending on the available time such a workshop can be used to start off several of the phases,

After all, it is external developments that drive the need for adaptation. 24 The understanding of innovation systems analysis as used here is based on the conventional actor-oriented approach as pioneered by Freeman 44 and Lundvall 45 in the late 1980s and early 1990s

in a way useful also for non-experts in innovation research, convey the notion that the complex innovation system logic discussed above may develop over time in alternative, qualitatively different, ways.

Plausible in the sense that they start from (aspects of) the current situation and develop in ways consistent with established knowledge.

each scenario should present interesting strategic issues, and the whole set of scenarios should represent the full range of most salient such issues as well as possible (for tractability the number of framework scenarios is held normally at just three or four).

which are likely to create trend-breaks form a useful starting point for drafting framework scenarios. Before the actual sketching,

A possible starting point is therefore a debate on visions related to the focal issue of the exercise.

(and perhaps the beginnings of Phase 3). It should then be developed further in conjunction with the back-office work in Phase 3,

this stagewise backcasting of the scenario pathways allows also discussing the appropriate timing of policy and other measures,

and offensive by keeping options open until their time has come (or they can be discarded);

Forskning och energi i svensk politik Time of the Big Programmes: Research and Energy in Swedish Politics, Akademilitteratur, Stockholm, 1984.28 K. M. Weber, Foresight and portfolio analysis as complementary elements in anticipatory policy-making, in:

and the management of multiple interfaces present in European-wide innovation policy coordination. 2. Foresight within ERA NETS The ERA NET scheme3 seeks to strengthen the coordination

Research activities are due to start in 2008. The activities in Woodwisdom-Net are carried out in five work packages (WP.

Moreover, the tasks in the last phases were specified not fully at the outset (e g.,, workshop activities),

if such a project were to be launched at a later time. Industrial leaders consisted of R&d and business managers in the forestry-related industry.

2. Assessment of research issues Researchers December‘05 Mid-january‘06 3. Assessment of research issues Industrial leaders Three last weeks of January‘06 4. Initial

At the beginning, the workshop agenda was presented briefly to the participants. Then, the participants were invited to comment on the proposed solicited issues and their assessments (approx. 1. 5 h),

whereby the participants were invited to put forth their thoughts on them (approx. 1. 5 h). Second, within each 492 V. Brummer et al./

sufficient time will be needed for deliberative discussions of intermediate results. In addition, there are many more interfaces to be accounted for (e g.,

However, regulatory impact assessment is the starting point for our contribution. The paper goes one step further and tries to address especially approaches which allow the identification of future fields for regulatory action,

Older attempts at planning the future by developing heuristic models (in the sense of futurology) were based on the assumption that the future is predefined as a linear continuation of present trends 12,13.

The overview of methodologies in Section 2 starts with a list of possible methodologies which are also relevant for assessing the impact of public R&d policies.

and over time. The most important science and technology indicators are publications in scientific journals and patents 20.

The use of indicators to perform regulatory foresight exercises is just beginning. Since research activities only being performed in basic research are less likely to create challenges for the regulatory framework in the near or mid-term future

the time between the applications of patents and the market introduction of products based on these patents requires in general several years

or even more than a decade, like in pharmaceuticals undergoing long-lasting clinical trials or even in some fields of electronics,

e g. the first MP3 patents were applied for in the late 1980s whereas the broad commercialisation started ten years later 23.

The need for regulatory adjustment is highest in those fields with a rather low level of activity at the starting point,

The start of standardisation activities within services is rather recent. De vries 32 33 was one of the first researchers who conducted first case studies on standards for services

In a survey among German service companies, Mörschel and Schwengels 35 present a ranking of future standardisation areas according to their priority,

However, one outcome of the second study was the publication of a programming mandate addressed to CEN

Hence this assessment mainly depends on the experiences collected during the recent past and some previous studies cited above:

Surveys are rather time-intensive, since they require the development of a questionnaire, the performance of a survey either via traditional postal mail or via online survey, the collection and cleaning of the data and finally, the analysis of the data.

In the following Sixth Japanese and Second German Delphi studies 45,46, all obstacle categories were changed into policy measures

already published in 2001, with regard to their expected time of realisation, their importance, the effectiveness of policy measures, like R&d support,

sophistication of e-commerce networks and improved efficiency of business cycle times, resulting in a dramatic reduction of inventory risk for companies. 2014 3. 65 3. 42 1. 86 2. 35 2. 38 All public transport bookings, confirmation of transport services,

and time-consuming, involving numerous experts. They require a very careful performance of the often multi-stage methodological processes.

since the time frame of such studies should not be much more than ten years. A classical feature of the Delphi methodology is the promotion of a convergence process leading to a consensus by surveying the experts at least twice

However, this is only a starting point of an assessment of regulatory foresight methodologies. Despite the availability of a number of foresight methods, there is a scope

countries and over time Little information about possible types of regulation Detailed analysis allows the identification of specific regulation-relevant content

and the organisation Detect insights of specific needs for future regulation High cost and time-consuming Qualitative Assessment of future relevance of regulation,

or earlier situations) Long time series generally not available Delphi studies Qualitative Qualitative and semiquantiitativ data from Delphi surveys Consensus-building to reduce uncertainty about regulatory priorities

) and future time horizon 513 K. Blind/Technological forecasting & Social Change 75 (2008) 496 516 representatives of public organisations and regulatory bodies,

In addition, the time frame of Delphi studies focusing on regulatory issues should be much shorter covering only the next ten years,

like the patent or copyright system, longer time ranges may be appropriate. In order to illustrate and analyse different regulatory options,

'and capitalising on fortuitous events until such time that there is a feeling of stabilisation and assessments and forecasts have become more reliable.

and interviews done in conjunction with the work discussed here, we can add that unless start-ups and SMES are part of networks

Van den Belt and Rip 36 extended the Nelson Winter Dosi models for the late 19th synthetic dye industry,

The aim was to explain what microeconomics at the time was unable to do: Why do certain technologies become dominant

They can be defined as‘socio-technical entanglements which over time enable and constrain alignments and activities of persons,

'14 Irreversibilities grow over time, shaping and being shaped by the historical affordance structures which guide path dynamics.

Thus over time as the S&t field becomes more stabilised, the patchwork of emerging irreversibilities become part of the affordance structure that shapes ongoing dynamics within the socio-technical path.

by repositioning the notion of path as something that is evolving/emerging in real-time, one can attempt to modulate/steer dynamics towards the more desirable actor arrangements

a plan to connect the present to the future. In both cases managing for the most desirable path is the goal,

Also, in the field of biomedical research, off the back of the Human Genome Project15, a major emphasis in cell biology over the last decade has been focused on in areas related to genomics, proteomics, medical diagnostics,

The grey crescent represents the present barrier which must be crossed in order to produce an integrated lab-on-a-chip device.

and (5) general time axis and stages of innovation chain. The actual MPM would show many more specific paths plotted within the clusters of MCA

These scenarios in themselves contained reliable information on the current situation and selected prospective chronologies of innovations in cell-on-a-chip (rather than possible choices to go for.

there is little acknowledgement of time spent on doing this as opposed to research and teaching. 23 One way of doing this is developing an integrated platform based on an interesting 18 This agglomeration effect of technology platforms is particularly strong for nanotechnologies 67.

From the outset 533 D. K. R. Robinson, T. Propp/Technological forecasting & Social Change 75 (2008) 517 538 no preference can be given to any chain,

and over time, reshape the portfolio. MPM helps answering relevant questions such as: What specific kinds of innovation chains can be stimulated?

At the time of writing (March 2007) we can undertake some preliminary impact assessment because the conceptual development and refinement of the MPMS was linked up with an interactive workshop.

Rev. 43 (2)( Winter 2001) 139 160.19 D. Rigby, C. Gillies, Making the most of management tools and techniques:

Policy, 11 (3)( 1982) 147 162.35 R. R. Nelson, S g. Winter, In search of useful theory of innovation, Res.

Policy 6 (1)( 1977). 36 H. Van den Belt, A. Rip, The Nelson Winter Dosi model and synthetic dye chemistry, in:

However, indirect and/or unanticipated impacts that fall outside the scope of specific programme goals and objectives have also been reported.

The research mainly involved a literature review of available documentation on past and present foresight programmes and their results. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Actors'alignment 1. Introduction The present article presents results to date2 from research leading towards the production of a Phd thesis entitled Assessing the contribution of Foresight to a more participatory knowledge society.

although sharing some methodological characteristics and similarities in terms of time horizons and audiences addressed, usually have different aims, scopes and levels of implementation.

As a starting point, a conceptual framework is presented which outlines the major characteristics of emerging knowledge societies. This is based on a review of the available literature.

The alignment of actors goes beyond the usual actors in previous times (i e. government, industry and scientists.

Typically, logic model approaches start with specific programme goals and objectives and attempt to identify paths to potential goal attainment by treating foresight programmes as systems comprised of a number of basic elements, namely context, actors, processes

In this instance, the starting point cannot be the rationale and objectives of the programme. Instead, the impact assessment framework has to be built the other way round,

The evaluation of the latest UK Foresight programme 5 sheds light on several direct and indirect impacts and highlighted several factors that affected the overall success of the UK foresight exercise.

Even though neither the second nor the first round were organised by government but by a consortium of agencies,

The organisers regarded the results of the first round as a starting point for wider discussion of more social orientation This meant,

which echoed political discussions that were occurring more widely in Sweden at the time, did not manage to attract the same level of publicity

The Swedish foresight initiative also demonstrated that the timing of an initiative has a critical influence on its ability to affect policy.

For the purpose of the present article, the area of networking and actors'alignment is discussed.

Perceptions and goals may change over time. Two processes thus facilitate alignment within constituencies: consultation and communication concerning the nature of perceptions and goals and the possibility of aligning existing perceptions and goals by maximising collaboration and minimising competition;

An Evaluation of the Second Round of Swedish Technology foresight, Teknisk Framsyn, 2002 2004,2005. 7 J. Cassingena Harper, L. Georghiou, The targeted and unforeseen impacts of foresight on innovation policy:

A review of recent works on the future of higher education shows that the starting point in these exercises is either an existing or an abstract university.

Multilevel governance 1. Introduction The first universities emerged as responses to the need to harness the expanding intellectual forces of the era to the increasingly demanding knowledge requirements of the surrounding society

& Social Change 75 (2008) 558 582 starting point the‘unit of analysis'is either an existing or an abstract (hypothetical) university.

the starting point here is the EU, as the broadest socioeconomic context for universities, with its own science, technology and innovation (STI) policy tools,

The Spring European council meetings, assessing the progress towards the Lisbon strategy, using several indicators on HE performance,

in Section 4 alternative visions are devised at three levels, with the time horizon of 2020 2025.

and its standing vis-à-vis the Triad regions are considered as major‘variables'of the alternative futures for the EU. At the second,

etc. 8 Several ERA visions have been devised by putting governance issues into the centre, see e g. 18 20 the ones developed in this paper follow a different logic. 9 The term‘universities'is used as shorthand for all sorts of higher education organisations. 10 The first attempt to do so can be found in a previous

The last few decades, however, saw a major change: with 30 48%of the relevant age cohort attending tertiary education in most OECD countries, we cannot speak of the same‘higher'education (HE) system.

higher education and‘basic'science are not that closely interconnected nowadays as they used to be, partly because of the changing nature of higher education,

and that dimension is interconnected obviously closely with the research activities of universities, both in terms of the present research projects (in

instead of returning to the EU. This proportion has risen notably over the past decade: from 44.5%at the beginning of the 1990s to 57.5%at the turn of the millennium (43, p. 57.

That might lead to a much larger share of research classified by governments as military R&d. 23 A few decades ago no one would have thought of e g.

The second refers to lists of priorities and proposed actions (for different stakeholders, in this case e g. university rectors and deans, regional, national and EU policy-makers, businesses and local communities as partners of universities), inputs

Futures for universities can be devised by using various starting points. One possibility is to take the perspective of the sector,

The modest aim is to sketch consistent and coherent descriptions of alternative hypothetical futures that reflect different perspectives on past, present,

and along the time dimension, too, i e. short-,medium-and long-term policies also need to be harmonised 48.

strong academia industry co-operation, mutually beneficial, intense links among large firms and SMES in a large number of regions (gradually increasing over time) Intense communication among businesses, academia,

Moreover, devising 10 15 visions for the ERIA (2 3 ERIA visions times 5 EU visions) would introduce an unmanageable complexity into this exercise.

however, concerns the present, rather than the future: several commonly used notions and widely held beliefs are out of Table 4 Driving forces

Further, as nowadays 30 40%of the relevant age group attend higher education courses, an ever larger number of higher education organisations offer mainly or only teaching.

The main advantage of taking existing or hypothetical universities as a starting point unit of analysis is that a wealth of micro-level factors can be considered.

or a starting point for actual policy preparation or strategy building exercises by considering different future states first for the EU and the European research and Innovation Area,

especially in terms of time needed for background analyses and then discussions among the participants. It has several advantages, too;

given the time needed for these processes, as well as the potential tensions occurring while discussing the actions and their consequences.

References 1 P. A. David, Europe's Universities and Innovation Past, Present and Future, SIEPR Discussion paper No. 06-10,2006. 2 EC, The role of universities in the Europe

http://www. bruegel. org. 7 STRATA-ETAN EXPERT group, Higher education and Research for the ERA:

Status and Impact of future-Oriented Technology analysis, Anchor Paper for the Second International Seminar on Future-oriented technology analysis: Impact of fta Approaches on Policy and Decision-making, Seville, 28 29,september 2006 available at:

Policy 30 (6)( 2001) 953 976.21 A. Havas, Futures for Universities, paper presented at the Second International Seminar on Future-oriented technology analysis:

-ECE Spring Seminar 2004: Competitiveness and economic growth in the ECE region, Geneva, 23,february 2004 47 K. Aiginger, A. Guger, The European Socio-economicmodel:

Differences to the USA and Changes Over Time, WIFO, 2005.48 J. Romanainen, National Governments, Contribution to the DG Research Expert Group on The Future of Key Research actors in the European research area, 2005.

another Finnish team, bring this novel focus on tools further into the interface with policy approaches in their timely paper on the Role of Technology barometer in Assessing Past and Future development of National Innovation system.

biotechnology and material sectors 1. The forces impelling convergence at the time are seen as radical, revolutionary,

the actual choices at the time appeared divergent and highly contested. One approach to the management of technological uncertainty has been to initiate the technological forecasting process only once a dominant design has emerged 3. Once a dominant design has been selected,

In this section, the paper explicates the social and technological organizational structures which may permit a new era of open innovation.

and the edges are the component relationships that are present between the respective technologies. The challenge of the technology analyst is to usefully structure this information to anticipate change.

then the designer will be free to spend more time at value-enhancing activities. The roadmapping activity achieves value by providing a single locus for coordinated research and development activity (see for instance 19.

This network configuration should be expected to be observed 4. 3%of the time, or roughly one in 24 times.

In contrast, realization 2 is a possible but unlikely realization of the network since most of the high probability connections did not actually occur (Fig. 2). This network occurs 0. 8%of the time,

or roughly one in 125 realizations. These likelihoods may be calculated by an equation closely related to the binomial distribution.

We therefore need a way to structure the search to spend most of our time on the most likely network structures.

The second is the clustering coefficient, which is a measure of excess links between closely related nodes.

a million runs are completed in 54 s of processing time. In practice, the algorithm is let run as long as there are consistent improvements in model fitting and likelihood.

This new standard for rich Internet applications was incorporated in a recent beta version of Internet explorer 8. 5. Policy impacts These developments in ARIA are less than a year old at the time this paper was written the W3c posted a working draft

high costs, high uncertainty, technological inexperience, business inexperience, lengthy time to market, and the general destruction of firm competence 17,29, 30.

and therefore already present within the system. The author suggests that the original conception of architectural change,

Due to long life times of infrastructures, strategic decision making has to explicitly consider uncertainties in context conditions,

The present paper argues that foresight informed strategic planning, allows addressing trade-offs related to context uncertainties,

and the politically set criteria of effective, homogenous and affordable infrastructure services 2. It is fair to say that this socio-technical constellation has been highly successful over the past decades.

Nowadays infrastructure organizations are confronted with an increasing amount of future uncertainty 3 that calls for a fundamental reconsideration of the former success model, at least in three respects:(

Over the past decades, strategic planning in these sectors was focused mostly on narrowing down context uncertainties, value considerations and system configurations to reduce complexity and ease implementation 1, 4. Given the increased range of uncertainties,

and suggesting implementation strategies 7. In the present paper, we want to build on foresight methods for improving strategic decision making in infrastructures through the method of Regional infrastructure foresight RIF.

In the present paper, we aim at explicating the contribution of the foresight approach to the identification of trade-offs.

Due to the long life time of their key technical components and the strong coupling between technological and institutional structures they exhibit strong path dependencies 11.

They are particularly strong in OECD countries where infrastructure networks have been established since decades. In the social science literature, the couplings have been described as socio-technical regimes.

Given the long life times of most infrastructures, strategic investment decisions will only take place every couple of decades.

performance and sustainability impacts of infrastructures over their long life time. Changes in context conditions outside the considered range may entail very costly adaptation measures (see e g. 17),

a more elaborate and open approach to strategic planning seems very timely. 2. 2. Foresight supporting infrastructure planning Foresight methods have been developed over the past decades to explicitly address substantial uncertainties in technology development.

Land use transportation scenario planning projects have been carried out since the late 1980s in the US 37. In particular metropolitan transportation has moved from a supply-side focus siting facilities to meet projected demands toward a more 1152 E. Störmer et al./

and system alternatives for an infrastructure system in the time horizon of 25 years which is congruent with the expected average lifetime of central infrastructure components.

board minutes and stakeholder interviews, they identify the strength and weaknesses of the prevailing technical and organizational setup to address claims from customers, public, regulatory bodies and the affected environment 62.

we introduce a second visual representation of the data (see Fig. 3). As a first dimension,

a coincidence of social and sustainability assessments is given if points are located in the diagonal area pointing to the upper right corner.

The assets built up during these decades amount to approximately 100 Billion euros 68. Today however, there is a high need for repair and renewal.

The sanitation system has limited flexibility to adapt to changing context conditions as its key technical components have a very long life time (e g. sewer system last 80 years,

These cases were run between late 2006 and early 2008. In the next section, we present the process

to 2. 5 full time equivalents each. The plant operating organizations are associations of communities,

and thus lack employees to guarantee 24 hour availability. Therefore, the idea of an organizational integration of the associations had been raised.

Environmental impact ranked only second in their priorities. In contrast, the industry's stakeholders favor besides low tariffs, additionally low levels of bureaucracy as well as voice and participation in the associations decision board. 4. 4. Exploring the trade-off landscape The virtual future stakeholder groups

a transitory organization would be necessary to implement a stepwise decision process taking place over one or two decades.

options and timing aspects of a conjointly favorable course of action could be elaborated. At the same time, open issues associated with the merger option could be identified

and outlook In this present paper we developed and applied an explorative oriented approach to strategic decision making in infrastructure planning.

We argued that due to the long life times of key technical components of these sectors

The affiliations of the core team members in the decision making bodies guaranteed the persistence of the argumentative structure in later stages of the planning process.

< Back - Next >

Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011