Page 413 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS2320 Bruno André R. C. et al.
government with unprecedented speed (Schwab, 2016). In this working paper,
we propose a new method for measuring where countries stand in terms of
future fields of knowledge using real-time data, and thus offer government
leaders and supporting stakeholders a tool for anticipating what may come
next.
The purpose of this paper is to present the methodology that allowed us
to have a better understanding of today’s strong and weak signals in the next
wave of technological disruption by testing a new way to capture and analyse
real-time data associated with five key future fields of knowledge: Artificial
Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Biotechnology, and Future Skills.
When we talk about the future of societies, technological change cannot
be considered in isolation. This report focuses on “key technologies for the
future”, which are technologies we believe will help overcome most of the
challenges associated with globalization, sustainability, demographic shifts
and urbanization. The European Commission calls these technologies “Key
Enabling Technologies” (KETs) (European Commission, Februrary, 2018).
Harnessing the opportunity offered by these technologies will require
investment in five key dimensions, which we call the five knowledge
dimensions:
• Education
• Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) and Science
• Technology
• Economy
• Enabling Environment

2. Methodology
The present methodology is based on recent developments in the
community of impact evaluation practitioners, scientists and policymakers
regarding the use of alternative metrics for impact assessment. The availability
1
of webometrics has enabled the increasing use of publicly available
information for assessing the societal impact of an object of evaluation.
The European Commission has recently set an Expert Group on
Altmetrics with the purpose of discussing and providing evidence on
alternative metrics for impact assessment (applied to the impact of science
and innovation) and of formulating recommendations for their future
utilization. The group’s final report “Next-generation metrics – Responsible
metrics and evaluation for open science” (2017), (European Commission, 2017)
lays the groundwork for the use of alternative metrics as complementary to
traditional metrics in impact evaluation. Within this context, our team has had

1 Examples of webometrics include: simplistic counts and content analysis of web pages,
counts and analyses of outgoing links from web pages or “outlinks,” and links pointing to web
pages, called “inlinks” (Björneborn L. and Ingwersen P., 2001).
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