Futuríveis
terça-feira, novembro 07, 2006
The Atlas of Ideas
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We used to know where new scientific ideas would come from: the top universities and research laboratories of large companies based in Europe and the US. While production was dispersed among global networks of suppliers, it was assumed that more knowledge-intensive tasks would stay at home.
All that is changing fast. As globalisation moves up a gear, ideas are emerging in unexpected places and flowing around the world as easily as money and commodities, carried by mobile diasporas of knowledge workers.
This shift is most visible in countries such as China, India and South Korea, which are fast becoming world-class centres for research, particularly in emerging fields such as stem cell biology and nanotechnology.
Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. India now produces 260,000 engineers a year and its number of engineering colleges is due to double to 1,000 by 2010. According to Thomson ISI, Asia's share of the world’s scientific papers rose from 16 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2004. At the same time, there is a growing flow of multinational R&D to the new knowledge centres of Shanghai, Beijing, Hyderabad and Bangalore.
These shifts in global knowledge production are likely to be every bit as significant as the shifts in manufacturing that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The big question is how we should respond. Some view Asia’s growing scientific strengths with alarm, fearing it will mean the loss of highly-skilled jobs in Europe and the US. But innovation is not a zero-sum game: more in Asia does not mean less in Europe or the US.
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Demos | Projects | The Atlas of Ideas | Overview
We used to know where new scientific ideas would come from: the top universities and research laboratories of large companies based in Europe and the US. While production was dispersed among global networks of suppliers, it was assumed that more knowledge-intensive tasks would stay at home.
All that is changing fast. As globalisation moves up a gear, ideas are emerging in unexpected places and flowing around the world as easily as money and commodities, carried by mobile diasporas of knowledge workers.
This shift is most visible in countries such as China, India and South Korea, which are fast becoming world-class centres for research, particularly in emerging fields such as stem cell biology and nanotechnology.
Since 1999, China’s spending on R&D has increased by more than 20 per cent each year. India now produces 260,000 engineers a year and its number of engineering colleges is due to double to 1,000 by 2010. According to Thomson ISI, Asia's share of the world’s scientific papers rose from 16 per cent in 1990 to 25 per cent in 2004. At the same time, there is a growing flow of multinational R&D to the new knowledge centres of Shanghai, Beijing, Hyderabad and Bangalore.
These shifts in global knowledge production are likely to be every bit as significant as the shifts in manufacturing that occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s. The big question is how we should respond. Some view Asia’s growing scientific strengths with alarm, fearing it will mean the loss of highly-skilled jobs in Europe and the US. But innovation is not a zero-sum game: more in Asia does not mean less in Europe or the US.
...
Demos | Projects | The Atlas of Ideas | Overview
posted by CMT, 11:23 da tarde
