New publication: "Future Topics of Innovation and Technology Analysis", Volume 2 [11.08.14]

The project "Identification of new topics for the innovation and technology analysis of the BMBF (ITA Monitoring)" started in 2008 and was funded by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Its task was to identify those issues which should be investigated in the future by technology studies. Against the background of limited financial resources, the tasks turns out to be particularly difficult as the relevance of issues identified must be comparatively judged on. Even if appropriate relevance criteria are at hand, a comparison, e.g. of medical technology applications with storage technologies for electricity, remains difficult.

Therefore, in the context of this project, there was a detailed debate on the methodical approach, which was included in the first volume ("Future Topics of Innovation and Technology Analysis: Methods and Selected Results"). Starting out from these results, now in the second volume the introductory chapter (Part I) pursues the questions if the "parallel discovery" of relevant and new topics is basically possible and how the methodical design of a research project would have to look like to meet such a demand. Then, in Part II, three of these "discoveries" are presented: 1) "Right to the garbage". Reducing food losses as an approach at improving the situation of the world's food supply, 2) service robots in nursing contexts, and 3) social preconditions for attempts at technologically enhancing human capabilities.

In these short studies, apart from trans-disciplinary descriptions of the state of the art, also recommendations for problem-related, methodically sound research to be performed in these areas have been elaborated.

Bibliographic references:

Decker, M.; Fleischer, T.; Schippl, J.; Weinberger, N. (ed.)
Zukünftige Themen der Innovations- und Technikanalyse: Lessons Learned und ausgewählte Ergebnisse. Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing 2014
(KIT Scientific Reports 7668)
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5445/KSP/1000040806