Manchester Institute of Innovation Research ANNUAL REPORT 

The fourth concluded project was SANDERA, which examined the evolving relations
between Security and Defence Research and the ERA (Andrew James was PI, leader of this
multi-country study – see SANDERA 2011). The project grappled with the blurring of issues
and actors across defence and security research, the evolution of relations between these
fields and the main lines of work supported within the ERA, elaborating scenarios of very
different plausible outcomes – with no change from the current status quo being highly
unlikely.
Research Highlight: iKnow
iKnow was a research and horizon scanning project sponsored by the European Commission with
the goal of advancing knowledge and tools that can help establish more proactive European
research policy, that can anticipate and take into account emerging issues liable to impact on STI.
The project took the opportunity of this research theme to develop more systematic methods for
identification and appraisal of wild cards and weak signals (WI-WE). Foresight analysis has long
recognised the importance of these phenomena, but systematic ways of dealing with them have
been largely absent.
iKnow has achieved, in addition to a great deal of output on STI issues, advance in foresight
methods. Its website - http://wiwe.iknowfutures.eu/ - not only contains documentation on a large
number of WI-WE but also provides tools, access to resources, instruments for Delphi surveys, that
can be applied in other studies. Already two projects have adopted these tools in their own work, so
that the website is becoming a portal applied in other projects. One is a further European study, and
the other is horizon-scanning for the Centre for Workforce Intelligence (CfWI), a large initiative
designed to inform health and social care workforce planning in the UK (see
http://www.cfwi.org.uk/).
iKnow officially concluded with the submission of a series of glossy reports, in the wake of a
successful conference in Brussels at the end of 2011. A proposal for a successor project is currently
under preparation; if successful, this will advance the used of social networking in development of
foresight appraisals. iKnow had a tremendous media and internet appeal, being one of the most
“clicked” foresight projects and having had special features in prestigious Newspapers such as FT
Germany and “Die Zeit”.
In each of these two cases – and indeed in the case of iKnow, too – further publications and
journal articles are being prepared for 2012. A fifth project exploring the future of Public
Research Institutes, how they might develop within and contribute to the ERA (with Kate
Barker as PI for Manchester) resulted already in a journal publication in 2011 (Cox et al,
2011). In the European context, Rafael Popper is building on previous work mapping and
surveying European (and world) Foresight activities with the European Foresight Platform
(see EFP 2011 and www.mappingforesight.eu). Luke Georghiou has been appointed to the
European Forum on Forward Looking Activities, a high level advisory body to the European
Commission which will draw upon foresight and other findings to identify key issues of
significance for research and innovation policy or wider domains.
The year also saw the publication by the UK government of earlier work by the Horizon
Scanning Centre, to which Luke Georghiou had contributed, on Technology and Innovation
Futures http://www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/horizon-scanning-centre/technologyand-innovation-futures
. This work, originally conducted for Her Majesty’s Treasury, was
extensively cited in a recent major policy speech by the UK Science Minister David Willetts.
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