Policy Scan and Technology Strategy Design methodology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a methodology for aligning technological development with social policies and expectations, especially in complex, uncertain domains like smart mobility and autonomous driving.

Contribution

It presents a novel Policy Scan and Technology Strategy Design methodology tailored for ill-defined problems at the intersection of technology and society.

Findings

Developed conceptual tools for integrating technology and policy.

Applied methodology to autonomous driving and smart mobility.

Addressed complex social-technical challenges with new strategic approaches.

Abstract

Increasingly accelerating technology advancement affects and disrupts almost all aspects of human society and civilization at large as we know it. Actually, this has been true since the technology started at the dawn of human society, yet the mere speed and magnitude of modern technology development brings about the situation where societies and economies have to adapt to the changing technological landscape as much as technologies have to integrate into the social fabric. The way to to achieve such integration in a changing and unpredictable world is to support the close interaction between the world of societal expectations and the world of technology. Policy Scan and Technology Strategy design methodology presented in this paper was developed precisely for the purpose of addressing specific types of 'ill-defined' problems in terms of observing, analyzing and integrating technology developments and availabilities with policy requirements, social governance and societal expectations. The methodology consists of conceptual tools and methods for developing concrete actions and products for guiding technology adoption for social change. It is geared towards increasingly complex and uncertain situations where existing analysis and problem solving methods often fail due to many non-linearities inherent in the social and technology worlds and, especially, at their area of their inter intersection. The development of the methodology followed the grounded theory construction process which requires a close relation to a specific context of an application domain, determined by actual interaction between the worlds of societal problems and technology. The chosen application domain of this research is the intersection of smart mobility problematics and opportunities, the rising autonomous driving technology, data privacy, provenance and security challenges, policies and legislation.