On the 8. October 2018, the 3rd edition of the established “Nanotechnology Environmental Health and Safety – Risks, Regulation, and Management” was officially launched in Washington DC, USA, containing a preface by AcumenIST Steffi Friedrichs.
![Development in biotechnology patent applications, 1990-2012 (number of IP5 patent families by inventor’s country and priority date; see also: NOTE and SOURCE below) [Source (adapted): Steffi Friedrichs, OECD STI Working Papers, 2018/06]](https://acumenist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20180327_Fig2-1-Development-in-biotechnology-patent-applications-1990-to-2012-360x240.jpg)
On the 8. October 2018, Dr Steffi Friedrichs, Founder & Director of AcumenIST, was the invited NanoEarth Industry Speaker at Virginia Tech.
In a presentation entitled “The ‘Rise and Fall’ of Technologies (on the Example of Biotech and Nanotech)”, Steffi highlighted the difference between the two technologies and outline the potential pitfalls (for both the public and the private sector) in reducing the expected trajectory of any technology’s development to a mere copy of a previous experience.
AcumenIST Steffi Friedrichs delivered a Policy Brief during the closing session of the international gene editing conference “CRISPRing – A New Beginning for the Genetic Improvement of Plants and Microbes” , which was held on the 3.-5. September 2018 in Budapest, Hungary.
This in-depth “Trend-Analysis of Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and Converging Technologies (BNCT)” analyses policies pertaining to nanotechnology and biotechnology over the past 30 to 40 years: it specifically studies and identifies their character (i.e. the questions (a) “Does a policy aim to push a technology (‘technology-push’) or to pull research towards a specific application (‘application-pull’)?” and (b) “Is a policy focused on one technology field only or is it applicable to a wide range of technologies?”).
This report brings together the latest available patenting and bibliometric activity data on biotechnology, nanotechnology and related emerging and converging technologies.
The authors, on behalf of the OECD and its expert working groups, re-confirmed indicators and measurement methodology for the multidisciplinary and partially overlapping technologies with a view to establishing uniquely accurate and relevant datasets.
The report provides a summary of trends and developments in biotechnology and nanotechnology over the last 20 to 25 years, based on the longitudinal analyses of patents.
In addition, an experimental indicator, which aims to identify trends and developments of research areas of biotechnology and nanotechnology, was introduced: publication titles of the two technology fields were analysed using a text-mining approach, and an overlay map of the most often use keyword co-occurrences was created, in order to visualise the developments over time in each research area.
Gene editing techniques are a major advance that could have major benefits across the domains of human health, sustainability and the economy that go beyond incremental advances of past biotechnologies. There are, however, significant policy challenges at the national and international level related to the governance of gene editing. These issues were addressed at a Workshop held in Ottawa, Canada, on September 29-30, 2016.
The OECD’s work on “Evaluating the Impact of Convergence – Towards a Guidance Framework for Future Policy Assessment” was presented at this year’s European Forum for Studies of Policies for Research and Innovation, held on the 7.-9. June 2019 in Vienna. The paper describes the background motivation of the OECD Read more…
![Development in nanotechnology patent applications, 1990-2012 (number of IP5 patent families by inventor’s country and priority date; see also: NOTE and SOURCE below) [Source (adapted): Steffi Friedrichs, OECD STI Working Papers, 2018/06]](https://acumenist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/20180327_Fig2-1-Development-in-nanotechnology-patent-applications-1990-to-2012-360x240.jpg)
Agreement on a harmonised application of clear statistical definitions of technologies is pertinent to the delineation of technology fields both with regard to each other and within the context of wider economic developments.
This document represents a review of hitherto used statistical definitions of biotechnology and nanotechnology, and provides recommendations for the application of these definitions for statistical purposes.
On the 2. – 3. November 2017, The US National Science Foundation in collaboration with The University of California held a workshop on “Global Perspectives in Convergence Education”. The intent of the workshop was to involve representatives from the many stakeholder communities from around the globe in discussions on convergence education as Read more…
