Innovation for a Sustainable Agriculture & Food System

On May 23-24, 2023, Re-Imagine Europa organised the Global Conference on Sustainability in Agriculture & Food Systems: Innovation, Indicators and Implementation together with partners ALLEA (European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities), European Food Forum, European Sustainable Agriculture through Genome Editing (EU-SAGE), and the Institute of Agroecology, supported by the conference’s main sponsor Organisation for Economic Read more…

AcumenIST regulatory Approaches

Regulatory Approaches to Genome Editing in Agriculture

The organisers of the ‘OECD Conference on Genome Editing: Applications in Agriculture – Implications for Health, Environment and Regulation’ published ‘An overview of regulatory approaches to genome editing in agriculture’. The article summarises the OECD Conference session on ‘Regulatory Aspects of Genome Editing’,  during which government representatives from six different Read more…

Meeting Report and full Proceedings of the OECD Conference on Genome Editing

The long-awaited ‘Meeting Report of the OECD Conference on “Genome Editing: Applications in Agriculture—Implications for Health, Environment and Regulation”’ of the seminal OECD Conference, held on the 28. – 29. June 2018 has now been published (Transgenic Research, August 2019, Volume 28, Issue 3–4, pp 419–463; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-019-00154-1). The Conference brought together policy makers, Read more…

Policy Considerations Regarding Genome Editing

‘Policy Considerations Regarding Genome Editing’ (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2019.05.005) have now been published in the latest ‘online now’-edition of Trends in Biotechnology. Summarising the policy discussions during the seminal OECD Conference, held on the 28. – 29. June 2018, this scientific article highlights the manifold arguments for and against more stringent regulations of genome Read more…

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]

The Rise & Fall of Technologies

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.

Illustration of the orthogonality between the concepts of “basic” versus “applied” and “technology-push” versus “application-pull”.

STI Policy Trends in Comparison: Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and ICT

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?”).

Share of biotechnology patents by sub-areas, 1990-2012; (IP5 patent families)

Statistics & Indicators of Biotechnology and Nanotechnology

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.