The relationship between science and society has changed within the past decades. The production of scientific knowledge should be integrated directly into economic and political decision-making processes. With the development of a "knowledge-based industry" and the emergence of state-supported, strategically and pragmatically oriented societal precautionary research, new types of knowledge arise, which, on the one hand, no longer fit into the classical trinity of basic research, applied research, and commercialization in their form of organization; on the other hand, scientifically acquired empirical knowledge is transformed by these developments into verified knowledge for decision-making.
Changes within science can best be studied on the basis of newly emerging fields of research. They affect institutional and epistemic characteristics. With regard to institutional aspects, the adoption of research programs which include scientific as well as non-scientific formulations of problems, is an important indicator for completely new forms of knowledge production. Other than in conventional programs of applied research, it is to be expected that the formulation of problems can be relatively directly translated into strategies of scientific research, inasmuch as they orient themselves on established forms of organization in the core area of science. It is, therefore, decisive, to which extent specific topics and problem formulations are oriented on existing disciplines and fields of research, and to which extent they require completely new links between various fields of science.
A pivotal dimension of new forms of the production of knowledge is the integration of non-scientific knowledge. In this case. it isn't necessarily a question of the participation of non-scientists, but of political and economic expert knowledge, which primarily concerns questions of feasibility and of the practical effort connected with it.