Challenge

© Xavier Cervera/Panos

There's great potential to create well-being through technological innovation.

We should foster rather than stifle inventiveness - both in technologies and in how we do things. 

Yet there are risks associated with our ability to develop new technologies, particularly as new technologies link in complex systems with unpredictable and emergent properties.

Potential impacts include: unintended side-effects, such as in the case of toxic impacts of PCBs; rebound effects - where efficiency can actually lead to increases in consumption, for example; misplaced beliefs that behavioural or institutional change can wait as miracle technologies will be found to solve problems; the discounting of old learning and knowledge; reduction of employment opportunities - for example through advances in computing and robotics; and inequalities where new technologies are only readily available to the wealthy.

Interventions that could reduce these risks are typically resisted as threats to innovation, and thus to economic growth. National policies on innovation tend to focus on ways to attract early-stage funding like venture and angel capital, and corporate investment. Much technology research is funded by military interests.

The challenge is therefore to identify ways of better fostering and steering innovation while integrating effective checks and balances.

Research questions

• How can new technologies enhance well-being?
• How can we innovate towards this goal?
• How can we reduce the risk of dangerous or unexpected side-effects?

Use of the research

We need a broad societal discussion about how to focus innovation with appropriate safeguards towards useful ends. We'll use the research to stimulate a debate among non-governmental organisations, policy-makers and opinion-formers - with the aim of harnessing human inventiveness for the common good.