This presentation discusses some experience in undertaking Delphi for technology foresight at the international level. Although Delphi is an effective method, there have been a number of difficulties. Among others, major impediments were created due to wide-ranging socio-economic backgrounds of the APEC member economies, difficulties in recruitment of experts for the panel and keeping them in the panel throughout the exercise, and English as a second language. Although it was not easy to obtain significant results because of them, Delphi was an effective method to identify S&T issues for the APEC region. It was also able to draw some general trends, threats and opportunities of science and technology in the region. More efforts for developing TF methodologies for multinational exercise should be made, which does not decrease the value of multinational cooperation in technology foresight.
¶ As knowledge becomes an important asset in socio-economic activities, awareness of S&T has been increased rapidly. More rational system is required for resource allocation. However, management of and policy-making for S&T activities are relatively new concept in many coun-tries. Improving decision-making, technology foresight draws a great deal of attention recently. Learning from Japanese experience, TF activities at the national level has been widely spread during 1990s. Particularly following Japanese Delphi, Korea, German and others are regularly undertaking their own Delphi to produce decision information. In addition, there have been in-ternational efforts to increase such activities at the multi-country level. Early 1990s, a NGO for TF activities, named the International Association of Technology Assessment and Forecasting Institutions (IATAFI) was made with the support of the United Nations. The IATAFI have had the international conference biannually. There was a meeting held by OECD to seek a possibil-ity of the international cooperation in TF. It concluded that international cooperation might be too early.
¶ Two years ago, the APEC Center for Technology Foresight was established by the initiative of Thailand. Major goals of the Center are to produce and disseminate information through TF activities in the regional context; to run the training program increasing awareness and to net-work experts among member economies. Since it establishment, the Center has carried out TF exercise at the multi-country level. Major methodologies were scenarios and Delphi.
¶ However, Delphi study has to mobilize a large number of experts, and therefore its man-agement cost is high. Particularly, when the exercise is made at the multi-country level, the moderator has to make efforts in keeping experts in the panel several times as much as in case of domestic exercise. The APEC Center carried out Delphi twice; one for "water supply and management" and the other for "technology for learning and culture." However, there emerged a serious question if Delphi method is appropriate for the international operation.
¶ Thus, in this presentation, I would like to discuss what was gained from the exercises and what are the limitations. In so doing, I would like to discuss general views about needs of tech-nology foresight at both the individual and multi-country levels. Then, some detailed discus-sion about the APEC Delphi will be made. As a consequence, it seems that the Delphi study at the multi-country level has a large room to be improved.
¶ S & T activities are basically knowledge-creating activities. However, costs of knowledge production, including transmission and dissemination, are rising. In turn, it implies that the in-vestment in S & T activities involves greater risk and uncertainty. To minimize risk and uncer-tainty of knowledge-creating activities, it is necessary for the policy-maker and/or decision-maker to look into the longer-term future of environments surrounding science and technology, in a scientific way.
¶ In general, technology foresight is undertaken to gain better understanding of the future en-vironment and magnitude of the changes needed, so as to make and implement appropriate policies. It can be said therefore that the fundamental of the foresight activity is in assessment of threats and opportunities, in a systematic way, leading to strategic formulation and planning to meet the needs of the future. The foresight could provide rich decision information for S T policy formulation of both the private and the public. In summary, it can be pointed out that the foresight could assist decision-making in the following ways;
¶ In practice, Delphi is one of methods, which is frequently employed for a long-range tech-nology forecasting for massive S T topics at a one time. Delphi is a well-known method, par-ticularly in case that (1) there exist no historical data, (2) the impact of external factors is more important than the factors that governed the previous development of technology, and (3) ethi-cal and moral considerations may dominate the economic and technical considerations that usually govern the development of technology. Delphi method was developed by Rand, and Ja-pan has a long tradition in practice. It is pointed out that Delphi is basically developed as a communication tool among the experts, and therefore its uses is not limited to the technology forecasting. (personal talk with Professor Linstone).
¶ As S&T environments are changing rapidly, cooperation between countries at the regional and/or global levels is inevitable not only because any country has sufficient resources for con-tinuing economic growth, but also because the framework of a single nation is too narrow and too small for major undertakings. Therefore, cooperation between countries is necessary for better achievement and better quality of life. Without harmony and cooperation, we cannot as-sume coexistence and promising future together with. Cooperation built on the basis of science and technology is particularly emphasized, faced with the age that knowledge is the most valu-able assets at the levels of the individual and nation.
¶ Needs for the technology foresight by the APEC may come from country-specific problems as well as the regional contexts. There would be a number of issues to be met either by a single country or by the countries altogether in the region.
¶ First of all, what is expected to gain through the regional cooperation in technology foresight could be identification of technological opportunities. This is related to determine "what to forecast." Technological opportunities can be regional or country-specific ones. It can be done by an exploratory technology forecast, showing "where to go." This is a necessary step before the value assessment of the forecast and strategic planning are delivered to meet the country-specific and/or the regional issues. Through the international foresight for a common purpose, it would be extremely difficult to meet a country-specific issues related to "how to go." It is because the levels of technological progress of the member economies are widely ranging from the underdeveloped to the developed. It implies that location of each member on the path of technological progress is different with different endowment of S&T resources.
¶ If Delphi method is employed, member economies could be better off. Since Delphi study requires more participants from member economies, TF results?including the whole procedures?can be disseminated easily and widely. Those experts could convey the TF results to their own S&T community, increasing awareness. On the other hand, an advantage of Delphi is to connect experts indirectly via the moderator and provide a communication tool.
¶ It is also expected that member economies would be better off by networking of experts and other S&T resources through the TF exercise. It is more likely that more information can be exchanged at the private level, rather than at the public level. The effect of such knowledge transmission and learning effect may not be easily measurable, but it will promote S&T activities of member economies; particularly of developing ones. Martin (1996) observes that the benefits of foresight exercises at the government level are on the creation of effective network between R & D units, universities, industries and government research institute. Similarly, The cooperation of member economies may more effectively mobilize S&T resources by linking them in the region.
¶ Through the regional cooperation, thus, the followings are expected;
¶ The APEC Center have carried out two Delphi studies so far; one for water supply and management and the other for technology for learning and culture. Similar procedures were taken in both cases. The major procedure of APEC Delphi can be divided as follows; identification of topics, design of the questionnaire, two round Delphi surveys and final report. In both cases, the Center invited experts from member economies and had workshop in order to identify relevant topics?Hua Hin, Thailand for the first exercise and Vancouver, Canada for the second. The number of experts participating in the workshop was roughly 10-20 persons. During the workshop, Delphi survey was explained, since most of them were not familiar to Delphi exercise. In the workshop, scenarios were developed for the same issue. And then, Delphi topics were developed and identified. Such an attempt worked out very nicely in identifying Delphi topics, since developing scenarios provided a guidance to look into the longer-term future. Those topics selected in the workshop were further elaborated later with assistance of various experts through the net communications, and additional topics were added in this process.
¶ On the other hand, the center made a good deal of efforts to recruit experts for the panel. The center contacted the focal points in each member economy, who are usually the government officer of the foreign affair ministries. At the same time, those experts participating at the workshop were additional connection to locate relevant experts. Recruitment of experts in that way did not work very well. It is because the focal points had a little knowledge about science and technology and did not have good information about the local S&T network. Since only a few experts were invited to the workshop, who had become to have best knowledge about APEC Delphi at the local context, increasing local connections of experts and recruiting experts into the panel were quite limited. However, the center was able to have more than a hundred experts in the first round and 130 in terms of first responses of the survey.
| Water Supply and Management | Technology for Learning and Culture | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Round | Second Round | First Round | Second Round | |
| Australia | 3 | 3 | 24 | 4 |
| Brunei Darussalam | 0 | 0 | - | - |
| Canada | 4 | 4 | 33 | 8 |
| Chile | 2 | 2 | - | - |
| China | 2 | 2 | 6 | 0 |
| Hong Kong, China | 22 | 15 | 54 | 8 |
| Indonesia | 1 | 0 | 21 | 3 |
| Japan | 8 | 4 | 9 | 2 |
| Korea | 4 | 3 | 38 | 9 |
| Malaysia | 15 | 8 | 24 | 3 |
| Mexico | 2 | 2 | - | - |
| New Zealand | 0 | 0 | - | - |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 | 0 | - | - |
| Philippines | 6 | 2 | 59 | 5 |
| Singapore | 1 | 1 | 18 | 3 |
| Chinese Taipei | 19 | 7 | 33 | 4 |
| Thailand | 28 | 17 | 69 | 11 |
| USA | 1 | 0 | 9 | 0 |
| Vietnam | - | - | 3 | 0 |
| Total | 119 | 70 | 134 | 60 |
¶ The center worked out efficiently to carry out the survey using conventional mailing system as well as computer network. Since the APEC region is geographically diversified and the mailing systems in some economies were slow, it took too much time to collect the first responses. This definitely was losing the attention of participating experts, which consequently led to lower rate of response in the second survey. There would be also possibility that the form of questionnaire and/or topics could not attract their attention. Obviously, many of participants in the survey were not familiar to such exercise. And topics might be too difficult to understand. Ambiguity of interpretation of topics was unavoidable, since English was a second language to most participants.
¶ The questionnaire included survey parameter, such as degree of expertise, degree of importance, forecast year of realization in the APEC region and own economy, need for APEC-wide cooperation, and constraints to realization, etc. One of most important parameter in usual Delphi exercise, like Japanese Delphi, is the forecast year of realization. Two things can be pointed out here. First, the guideline of the survey said that estimating the year of realization in APEC region implied that the event or topic may be realized by that time in majority of APEC economies. This is ambiguous unavoidably. It is mainly due to the variety of APEC economies, ranging from underdeveloped to developed ones. In such case, it is obvious that homogeneity of the sample is necessary. Otherwise, other survey parameter could be developed in place of forecast year of realization. This parameter might be meaningless. What was worse is that the survey parameter for year of realization in own economy was included. As discussed before, the number of experts in the Delphi might be just enough for parameters related to the APEC region, but not for them to own economies.
¶ Some lessons can be derived by summarizing gains in the following:
¶ Limitations can summarized as follows:
¶ With rapidly changing S&T environments, the APEC region is now faced with new challenges calling for regional cooperation built on science and technology. Awareness of technology foresight is considerably increased in the region, now that science and technology is a key element in the knowledge-based economy.
¶ Some developed countries are actively engaged in technology foresight, from which valuable lessons are drawn. But international cooperation is still under test. From our experience, Delphi study, as a methodology, has a significant room of further development for its implementing at the multi-country level.
¶ Delphi requires a good deal of resources. In the survey, massive experts have to be mobilized. Language is also a major impediment. Such facts increase the management costs and ambiguity for the experts to understand the technological issues. On the other hand, an advantage is that it is easier to widely disseminate the TF results through the participants. It also provides a communication opportunity to experts of the member economies. Some member economies participated actively, which is an encouraging signal. As a result, further development and refinement of appropriate Delphi for the multi-country TF exercise have to be made.
¶ In the final note, the OECD meeting according to Martin (1996) concluded that, although "... there is a considerable scope for international collaboration in foresight to share methodologi-cal experiences and results as well as experiences how best to embed foresight in wider discus-sions of science and technology policy, bilateral arrangement is more appropriate at this stage in development of technology foresight than multinational foresight exercises." The reason is that multinational cooperation might not help tackle a country-specific problem which has dif-ferent needs and hence strategies. In addition, it argued that, "if technology foresight were to result in countries choosing similar priorities in technology and R&D, it may create problems of conservatism and more seriously of increased international competition," i.e., convergence of expectation formulation across the countries..
¶ However, it may be argued that a multinational collaboration of technology foresight does not have to focus a country-specific problem dealing with exploratory opportunities. Diversifi-cation of foresight activities might avoid the convergence of expectation formulation and hence concentration of resources investment, and consequently the increase in competition. But if more information is available in a systematic way, diversification of S&T efforts will be pro-moted. That is, without extensive information, information collection and strategy formulation will be limited, and consequently more countries will make more efforts for the limited areas, perhaps leading to a convergence. Extensive information will provide various niches to some countries, which may not be niches to other countries. On the other hand, as far as the compara-tive advantage works in a Ricardian world, it might not be possible that every country concen-trates on the identical areas of technology with more resource allocation. Although expectation formulation of the business enterprises converges and hence increase investment too much, say, in the area of information technologies, the information technology is already too broad for re-sources to be concentrated in view of business activities, since the limit of its application is not known. As pointed out by Jantsch (1967), innovation effect of a technology is unlimited, if the society has unlimited potential of innovation activities. Thus, it can be said that disadvantages can never outweigh benefits of foresight in multi-national level. What is important is to pro-mote S&T activities in this region, and hence economic growth, which eventually brings about mutual benefits.