This article discusses the current trends in science and technology (S&T) indicators in Pakistan which rely on the S&T/R&D expenditures, research organisations/institutes, qualified personnel, and publications and patents granted. It then identifies the need to integrate the innovation...

Over the coming decades, science will play a key role in society's response to emerging global 'grand challenges'. The agenda-setting, coordination and conduct of science, and the ways in which scientific knowledge is diffused and used, are therefore critical. Increasingly, such issues need to...

Government regulations to address technological risks are important for the successful development and application of nanotechnology, but there is an ongoing debate in the USA about who is responsible for the regulation of nanotechnology. In a mail survey of leading US nano-scientists, we...

In a recent essay in Science, we advocated lifting restrictions on federal funding for research involving parthenogenesis, restrictions that have been placed by a rider, the Dickey--Wicker Amendment (DWA), to every budget for the US Department of Labor, Health, and Human Services, and Education...

This paper explores the dynamics of the configuration of the national, the sectoral and the technological innovation systems and defines the configuration of these three innovation systems as the national, sectoral and technological innovation systems (NSTISs). Through comparing the Taiwanese...

A strong research and innovation policy discourse has emerged in recent years around the need to address 'grand challenges', particularly at EU level. This paper highlights the contributions that future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) might make to orienting innovation processes towards grand...

This paper proposes a way of including in official statistics consumers as user innovators who modify or develop products for their own use. The issue addressed is the role of the market in the definition of innovation in the OECD/Eurostat Oslo Manual and the exclusion by that definition of...

The contributions postdoctoral scholars make to scientific production are well-documented. Increasingly in the USA, serving as a postdoctoral scholar is an expected component of a scientist's career. A notable feature of the job market for postdoctoral scholars is that it is ad hoc. Social...

The nascent field of nanomedicine has evoked enormous interest among physical and biological scientists and has already attracted hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding. The great appeal of nanomedicine lies in its promise of using the unique properties of nanoscale materials to...

One urgent mission for European research is to focus on the grand challenges of our time. We discuss how this mission was incorporated into a Fraunhofer corporate programme that takes on global challenges by stimulating collaborative research projects across knowledge domains. Fraunhofer's...