The 2017 STI conference addresses the new issues and challenges that have appeared in Science, Technology and Innovation indicators. We are witnessing sharp changes in the recent years: new areas of knowledge are appearing, new types of objects need to be taken into account, new methodologies and visualisations have been proposed, a combination of different policy interests emerging from a large variety of social actors modify the demands addressed to indicators. Most of these challenges relate to profound changes in the way science, technology and innovation relate to society; indicators — necessarily— reflect these changes, taking into account the needs and strategies of the many different actors involved.
The conference will be the opportunity to showcase results from the intense work done in recent years on the way science, technology and innovation indicators are used in relating social actors to science and technology. The range of relations between science and society has been expanded into a dizzying array of forms that include a large variety of knowledge producing activities such as: open science and open innovation, collaborative projects that include social actors, crowdsourcing in large digital platforms, the inclusion of local and “indigenous” knowledge in development programmes, closer connections between users and producers of scientific and technological devices, a growing digitalisation, a shifting balance between productive and ‘access to market’ activities, new developments such as the sharing economy, crowdfunding, responsible innovation, technology ‘makers’ and ‘do-it-yourself’ movements… They drive to new governance issues, but also to new requirements for indicator designers and multiple experiments that the conference should discuss.
CfP: April 19th 2017
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