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Dr. Arash Hajikhani VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland |
"Tracing the Trajectory: Evolution and Impact of Sustainable Development Activities in Science, Technology, Innovation, and Business"
Bio: Dr. Arash Hajikhani is a Research Team Leader in the Foresight and data economy area at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Adjunct Professor at LUT University (Finland). Dr. Hajikhani's research focuses on innovation and technology management with a particular focus on quantitative and data-driven methods for measuring and assessing Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) systems. His prior research has been funded by the European Commission via H2020, Foundation for Economic Education, Research Foundation of Lappeenranta University of Technology. He worked as Visiting Scholar at The Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research facilitates, Stanford University and The Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. He has practical knowledge and ten years of working experience in utilizing data analytics methods such as text analytics, network analysis and machine learning to transform big data into valuable insight that benefits the decision-making processes. He has been working and publishing on various aspects of utilizing novel and large data sources to design informative metrics on economical, societal, and technological shifts. His work in promoting automated and algorithmic use of data for spotting technological change and innovation systems has been published in top-tier journals such as Scientometrics, Journal of Business Research, Association for Computing Machinery and Journal of Cleaner Production as well as open-source code repositories.
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Dr. Laura Piscicelli Utrecht University |
"How does a circular economy contribute to sustainability?"
Bio: Laura Piscicelli is Assistant Professor in the Innovation Studies group at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University (the Netherlands). Priorto this, she was a Research Fellow in Strategy, Innovation & Business Models at Bayes Business School – City, University of London (UK) and a postdoc at University ofTwente (the Netherlands). She obtained her PhD at Nottingham Trent University (UK), with a thesis on the role of consumer values in the acceptance, adoption and diffusionof peer-to-peer sharing platforms. Laura's research interests include the circular economy, digital innovation, sustainable business and consumption. She serves as Editorial Board member for the journal Sustainable Production and Consumption. Currently, Laura is involved in the INTRANSIT project (Innovation Policy for Industrial Transformation, Sustainability and Digitalization) funded by the Research Council of Norway and the ESCH-R project (Evidence-based Strategies to create Circular Hospitals: Applying the 10-Rs framework to healthcare) funded by NWO.
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Dr. Giovanni Cerulli CNR-IRCrES
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"Data-driven decision making: potential and limitations"
Bio: Giovanni Cerulli is research director at CNR-IRCrES, Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth, National Research Council of Italy, Unit of Rome. Hisresearch interest is in applied econometrics, with a special focus on causal inference, program evaluation, and machine learning applied to various fields of socio-economicscience. Giovanni has developed original causal inference models, such as dose-response and treatment models with social interaction providing Stata implementation. Hehas developed around twenty Stata commands for casual inference and machine learning working also on Stata/Python/R integration for this purpose. Giovanni is author ofthe book Econometric Evaluation of Socio-Economic Programs: Theory and Applications (Springer, 2015; second edition 2022), and of the book Fundamentals ofSupervised Machine Learning: with Applications in Python, R, and Stata (Springer, 2023). He has published his papers in several high-quality scientific journals, and iscurrently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics.
Sustainability in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policy: between complexity and uncertainty
In the twenty-first century, we face extreme global challenges such as climate change, population growth, and widespread pollution, as well as major change brought about by technological advances (Steward, 2012). As a result, scientific advice has long been regarded as an important part of the overall evidence that policymakers consider. Simultaneously, policymakers are attempting to make sense of scientific evidence that is definitely complex and multifaceted.
Since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda at the UN General Assembly in 2015, the world has been striving to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The adoption of the 2030 Agenda was a turning point, preparing the ground for a shared global vision of sustainability. The potential of science, technology, and innovation (STI), as envisioned in the 2030 Agenda, is critical for achieving the SDGs (“STI for SDGs”), enabling societies to shift pathways toward more inclusive patterns of development, and to strengthen knowledge-sharing and collaboration. STI features strongly among the SDGs as vital route to structural change, economic diversification, and productivity growth (Hajikhani, 2022). However, progress is too slow, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic appears to have slowed or even reversed progress. The current transition to a more sustainable economy and society necessitates more significant research and innovation policy support than ever before (Weber & Rohracher, 2012; Piscicelli, 2018; Senise et al., 2021).
Given the growing emphasis on sustainability, this directionality should result in more inclusive and diversified sorts of science and innovation. As a result, the following questions arise:
- How do organizations play a role in the change to the sustainability?
- How is scientific knowledge embedded in STI policy can foster the sustainability?
- How does policymaker use scientific information to drive changes to sustainability?
- How do scientists anticipate policy change towards sustainability transformations?
- What methods are used to anticipate or predict sustainability policy impacts?
- How can we map and analyse the STI orientation in terms of SGCs and SDGs? Which methods should we employ to accomplish this?
The proposed conference theme aims to promote broad and in-depth discussion of STI’s role in the sustainability mission, which is critical in promoting sustainable development and achieving the SDGs. Indeed, science, technology and innovation can play a critical role in fostering access to knowledge, increasing productivity, industrialization, economic growth. Focusing on science, technology, and innovation also allows for follow-up with various countries and Research Funding Organizations on their sustainability efforts, as well as analysis of their policies and potential policy beneficiaries. The Conference should also address the issue of mission measurements, as well as the existing gap between missions and social challenges, policy objectives, policy instruments, and research projects, including an understanding of issues such as the role of traditional and new actors or public funding.
Finally, the theme proposed is the core issue and priority for all international communities and organizations in the world.
References:
Hajikhani, A., Suominen, A. Mapping the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in science, technology and innovation: application of machine learning in SDG-oriented artefact detection. Scientometrics (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04358-x
Piscicelli, L., Ludden, G. D., & Cooper, T. (2018). What makes a sustainable business model successful? An empirical comparison of two peer-to-peer goods-sharing platforms. Journal of cleaner production, 172, 4580-4591.
Senise, R.S., Yogui, R., Cirne, L.F. (2021). Role of Science, Technology, and Innovation Towards SDGS. In: Leal Filho, W., Marisa Azul, A., Brandli, L., Lange Salvia, A., Wall, T. (eds) Partnerships for the Goals. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95963-4_90
Steward F (2012) Transformative innovation policy to meet the challenge of climate change: socio-technical networks aligned with consumption and end-use as new transition arenas for a low-carbon society or green economy. Technol. Anal. Strateg. Manag. 24 (4), 3331–3343
Weber, K. M., & Rohracher, H. (2012): Legitimizing research, technology and innovation policies for transformative change: Combining insights from innovation systems and multi-level perspective in a comprehensive ‘failures’ framework. Research Policy, 41(6), 1037-1047