The United Kingdom Technology Foresight Programme

Abstract

The increasingly competitive nature of the international economy, and the associated structural changes which have taken place, have led policymakers in industrialised countries towards a renewed emphasis upon innovation as an instrument of industrial policy. During the 1980s this was most apparent in the emergence of national and international schemes to support collaborative research in the so-called "new technologies": principally IT, telecommunications, new materials and biotechnology. Despite a prevailing non-interventionist stance among governments, these technologies were perceived as being too important to risk being left behind. The complex and fast moving nature of the under-pinning knowledge-base was used to justify both the collaborative dimension (through the need to combine skills and share costs and risks) and governmental support (to compensate for market failure, where private benefits were difficult to appropriate in full).