Innovation, unlike invention, is the creation of new — or the reconfiguration of existing — products and processes, and almost always involves numerous players. Increasingly, innovation emerges in the context of complex constellations of public and private organisations, institutions, markets and regulation, all of which can impact on its direction and rate of change. It is this dynamic and systemic interplay of complex interventions that informs RAND Europe's understanding of innovation. This interplay also defines our approach to understanding how innovation and technology policy can best serve the needs of different kinds of organisations, economies and societies.
Our work cuts across public and private sectors. Whether it's finding an evidence base for R&D models in pharmaceuticals or identifying emerging e-health business models, we apply our own innovative thinking to new challenges. Our focus ranges from knowledge exchange and translational research in food and agriculture to regulatory issues regarding innovation and finally, to perceptions of security and privacy issues related to ICTs.
The Internet has transformed our daily lives and revolutionised the way we do business, and it promises to fuel economies and improve well-being in the future. But Europe has been slower than the US, Korea or Japan to capture the full benefits of the Internet economy. Investing in new technologies and applications has considerable economic potential for Europe, but only if some tough choices are made and barriers to EU international competitiveness can be overcome.
Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) work like digital fire brigades, responding to and mitigating cyber security incidents. The European Network and Information Security Agency asked RAND Europe and partner time.lex to explore the legal, regulatory, and operational aspects of information exchange between CERTS in Europe. Their study found that uncertainty over data protection regimes, amongst others, are an important factor influencing cross-border information exchange.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) help to empower citizens and transform economic life. An important policy challenge is to identify and harness the benefits while mitigating the risks created by the new technologies. At the World Bank's request, RAND Europe helped develop a framework for thinking about ICT use in MENA. The report builds on an earlier research which benchmarked indicators for the knowledge economy in the region, analysing associations between indicators of ICT diffusion and development.
Despite considerable investment in basic science, wheat production has remained relatively static in both quantity and quality. To help ensure the best use is made of these investments, RAND Europe examined how translational research and knowledge exchange can be enhanced. Important barriers to the translation of research into practice include price volatility and the complexity of the wheat value chain, but providing platforms for face-to-face contact and collaborative working can enable knowledge exchange.
Normally, technology transfer involves developed countries forging ahead with innovation while others adopt technologies in their wake. This is an exploratory study of health technologies explicitly developed for developing countries being transferred from South to North. While it concludes that many of the factors key to successful transfer are highly contextual, it will be of interest to policymakers who find their concerns beginning to overlap (such as in relation to cost).
The independent telecommunication regulator of the Netherlands, OPTA, commissioned RAND Europe to explore convergence in the market for digital information and communication. The research report assesses the consequences for telecommunication regulators and regulation and explores specific issues, such as spectrum policy and net neutrality with the ultimate goal of drawing useful lessons from approaches applied in United States of America, United Kingdom and South Korea.
The European Commission's Digital Agenda highlights a need to develop a pan-European 'cloud strategy', but several challenges threaten to undermine the EC's policy objectives. RAND Europe explored the security, privacy and trust challenges that cloud computing poses; conducted case studies and a workshop to review the real-world applicability of these issues; and formulated recommendations around the principles of accountability, transparency, governance and implementation.
Should intellectual property regimes in developing countries be strengthened and harmonised across the globe? An examination of literature and research concerning the role of intellectual property policies in the development of poor and industrialising countries considers economic and social development along five key dimensions to reveal that a country's intellectual property regime is systematically related to its broader state of development.
The use of radio frequency identification in the healthcare setting holds the potential for improved patient safety and reduced costs. RAND Europe studied individual cases to identify the potential and real costs and benefits of RFID deployment in European healthcare, as well as the critical success and failure factors of RFID implementation programmes in practice. An initial set of reports provide a framework for conducting cost-benefit analyses in the future and to stimulate the effective monitoring and capturing of cost-benefit data in care delivery settings. A final report presents three scenarios for 2020, to describe futures in which the technology and health care sectors develop in different ways.
A series of studies by RAND Europe explore requirements for delivering a secure eGovernment environment for mobile European citizens, based on the lessons learned from existing services and initiatives and identified challenges in the national and pan-European environments. Also examined are the benefits that Pan-European eGovernment Services (PEGS) can provide and how best to implement them.
To understand the privacy, liberty, and security trade-offs individuals are willing to make, and so policy makers can be better informed about citizens' true preferences in this domain, RAND Europe undertook an innovative stated-preference discrete-choice modelling study. The research included three real-life case studies where these factors come into play: applying for a passport, traveling on the national rail network, and attending a major public event such as the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
This report reviews the technology trends underlying the future Internet Society. It assesses the possible future socio-economic impacts of a connected world; as well as the changing business models that are likely to emerge in the next 5 to 10 years. The ultimate objective of the study is to make future policy recommendations for the successor programme to the current ICT strategy of the European Commission. Possible future impacts were analysed through trend analysis, surveys, scenario based workshops and econometric modelling.
This briefing discusses the possible role and limitations of innovation procurement as an innovation policy instrument. The motivation for the briefing is the increasing interest of policy makers in procurement as an innovation policy measure, while the gap between the policy and economics literature is becoming bigger and bigger. Despite the undoubted potential of innovation procurement, we argue in this briefing that it is important to be aware of when and how to use it: Innovation procurement is only likely to promote innovation efficiently if used in the right circumstances and in the right way.
Radio Frequency ID (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. It shows potential to improve patient safety, reduce medical errors, save costs, and overall contribute to the quality of care delivered to patients. The objective of this study is to identify policy and research options for the European Commission (EC) to ensure large-scale, effective, and secure implementation of RFID in healthcare and the pharmaceutical market.
Digital repositories can help Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to capture, identify, store and retrieve such intellectual assets as data-sets, course material and research papers. The leadership of these institutions, however, has been concerned about the awareness of and commitment to repositories and their sustainability in the future. This research brief informs universities and other HEIs about the different motivations for using and investing in digital repositories and highlights potential ways of addressing the challenges of embedding these repositories in institutional strategy and daily operation.
The digital revolution has fundamentally modified the way research is conducted, but also the way in which its results are circulated, reviewed, accessed and preserved. Libraries can no longer rely on stacking a print copy of a publication on one of their archive shelves. RAND Europe's report,
Digital preservation: The uncertain future of saving the past, examines how research findings will be communicated in the future to help librarians and archivists preserve history.
As part of British Telecommunication's annual Hot Topic series, RAND Europe was asked to conduct a research study investigating the reponsibilities and opportunities facing global ICT companies. The RAND Europe report assesses the ICT sector's responsibilities and identifies the kinds of actions that can be taken through a 'multi-stakeholder governance' approach to respond adequately to the challenges.
RAND Europe recently completed a study, commissioned by DG Information Society & Media of the European Commission, assessing the security challenges involved in the use and deployment of so-called 'disruptive technologies.' These technologies were: Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Trusted Computing, Wireless Microwave Access (WiMAX), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Methods used in the study included expert review, case study examination and evaluation at an expert workshop. Findings showed that some challenges were common to all technologies, most notably those surrounding the business case for their implementation, while others were technology-specific. The study was the latest in a series conducted for the European Commission in the area of Network and Information Security.
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