PARIS, 28 Oct. - (ANA) - The OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 explores how science, technology and innovation can be harnessed to drive transformative change across economies and societies. 

 

It looks at how geopolitics are reshaping international scientific co-operation, and how science systems themselves must adapt to new pressures and help governments stay agile in uncertain times.

 

 

 

 

Global challenges, rising economic security concerns, and disruptive emerging and converging technologies signify a new context for STI policy. Ensuring that STI policy remains fit-for-purpose in this new and rapidly changing environment requires fundamental structural reforms that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of policy interventions, as well as continued attention to enhancing the evidence base. The OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 analyses the shifting landscape and its implications for STI systems, providing recommendations across seven chapters that lay out STI policy reforms needed to drive ambitious change.

 

 

 

 

Ambitious policy agendas, together with growing resource constraints, highlight the importance of enhancing STI policy efficiencies. With annual government allocations for R&D falling by 1.9% in 2024 in the OECD area, STI policies need to intentionally leverage synergies and mitigate trade-offs between different policy priorities so that STI support to national competitiveness, for example, can also contribute to sustainability transitions. Governments also need to balance and exploit synergies between their direct and indirect (e.g., tax incentives) support measures for R&D, since both can help accelerate transformative change in complementary ways. Co-ordination between STI and non-STI policy areas should also be strengthened.

 

 

 

 

Copy link to Making research security proportionate, precise and shaped with partners

Rising geopolitical tensions and strategic competition in emerging technologies are contributing to a growing securitisation of STI that is reconfiguring international STI collaborations. Public research systems are increasingly affected as governments seek to simultaneously: promote advanced capabilities and strategic autonomy in critical technology fields; protect sensitive knowledge through research security measures; and project national interests through selective partnerships and science diplomacy. Protecting sensitive research or academic collaborations can be done in ways that do not compromise research quality, undermine innovation and fragment co-operation on shared global challenges. To do so, research security policies must be proportionate, precise and developed in close partnership with scientists, businesses and other parts of government.

 

 

 

 

Innovation activities typically cluster among leading firms, sectors, and regions due to economies of scale and knowledge spillovers. Such clustering can lead to concentration of economic and societal benefits in limited geographic areas. To broaden the impact, STI policies need to place greater emphasis on policies and investments to promote diffusion and to translate innovations into economy-wide productivity gains and societal benefits. Widening participation in innovation is a key lever for expanding its benefits, since it can enhance both the quality and societal relevance of technological development. Frontier-oriented STI policies should also consider how diffusion and adoption policies can be integrated into development efforts pushing at the technological boundary.

 

 

 

 

Structural reforms are also needed to enable national science system to better respond to the changing policy context and enhance their contributions to major societal challenges. Key to such reforms is enabling and valuing multidisciplinary research that can generate solutions to complex socio-economic challenges that cut across disciplines and sectors. Reforms are also needed to develop a variety of transparent career-paths that recognise and enable mobility between academia and other sectors. Research infrastructures need more flexible support and governance mechanisms to enable them to operate together to address shared goals and promote transformative change. Academic research also needs to embrace greater direct engagement with society through improved communication measures and citizen science programmes. To ensure these structural reforms take root, performance assessment and incentive structures need to better recognise the variety of contributions to, and outputs from, science that are necessary to promote innovation. At the same time, governments should continue to ensure the freedom and autonomy of research, advance open science, and promote public trust in science.

 

 

 

 

Promoting multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral research becomes even more important as the convergence of technologies drives forward innovation. Four important technology areas – synthetic biology, neurotechnology, quantum technologies and earth observation from space – illustrate these processes. For example, artificial intelligence is enabling protein design to create molecules with novel properties with the potential to enable personalised therapies, while its convergence with immersive technologies offers opportunities to treat mental illness. Convergence is a process of integration involving different disciplines and communities. Governments can enhance convergence by supporting “convergence spaces”, which are physical, digital and technological infrastructures and platforms that can foster deep forms of interdisciplinary research, engineering and innovation.

 

 

 

 

Adopting an industrial ecosystem perspective that goes beyond sectoral boundaries to consider both upstream and downstream industries can contribute to designing more effective industrial policies. It can also help governments to identify the full range of relevant stakeholders, including firms, start-ups, workers, investors, suppliers and trade partners, to design policies that better reflect the true complexity of the industrial landscape. Using the approach, however, entails developing a robust data infrastructure that brings together granular data from multiple sources to capture the ecosystem’s complexity.

 

 

 

 

Copy link to Boosting policy agility through strategic intelligence and experimentation

To drive change in a shifting landscape, STI policymaking must be increasingly anticipatory and agile under conditions of high uncertainty. Practices such as strategic foresight, technology assessment, and policy evaluation can provide timely insights through anticipatory and real-time evidence production, while policy experimentation can enable testing of new ideas and critical evaluation of policy impacts. Together, these approaches support evidence-based policymaking and boost policy agility. Fostering their use among policymakers requires embedding them in national programmes and frameworks, increasing flexibility and adaptability within bureaucratic structures, and investing in training programmes for public sector officials. Ensuring there is a clear pathway for scaling up interventions that prove successful or phase down those that fail is also key.

 

 

 

 

These policy reforms will strengthen national innovation systems, helping them drive change that responds to the shifting policy landscape and tackles future challenges.   - (ANA) - 

 

AB/ANA/28 October 2025 - - -