Trend monitoring for linking science and strategy

Abstract

Rapid changes in Science & Technology (S&T) along with breakthroughs in products and services concern a great deal of policy and strategy makers and lead to an ever increasing number of Foresight and other types of forward-looking work. At the outset, the purpose of these efforts is to investigate emerging S&T areas, set priorities and inform policies and strategies. However, there is still no clear evidence on the mutual linkage between science and strategy, which may be attributed to Foresight and S&T policy making activities. The present paper attempts to test the hypothesis that both science and strategy affect each other and this linkage can be investigated quantitatively. The evidence for the mutual attribution of science and strategy is built on a quantitative trend monitoring process drawing on semantic analysis of large amount of textual data and text mining tools. Based on the proposed methodology the similarities between science and strategy documents along with the overlaps between them across a certain period of time are calculated using the case of the Agriculture and Food sector, and thus the linkages between science and strategy are investigated.