Strategic Research Council

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Strategic Research Council is a new council in the Academy of Finland. Its purpose is to fund strategic research in Finland to promote the applicability of scientific knowledge in the society. Its first call is open until 29th April 2015. [2][3] There are three new research programmes to fulfil this aim:

• Disruptive Technologies and Changing Institutions
• A Climate-Neutral and Resource-Scarce Finland
• Equality in Society

Question

What key aspects should be included in a successful application?

The application must clearly answer these questions (these should be translated into English). For each topic, answers must be provided to A and B and additionally to C or D or both.

1. Disruptive Technologies and Changing Institutions
   • A. Mitkä ovat tietyn konkreettisen teknologiamurroksen ilmentymät ja potentiaalinen hyöty Suomelle?
   • B. Millaista inhimillisen toiminnan, instituutioiden ja toimintatapojen muutosta kyseisen teknologiamurroksen hyödyntäminen edellyttää?
   • C. Millä tavalla julkiset toimenpiteet parhaiten tukevat muutosprosessia siten, että muutos etenee hallitusti ja prosessin lopputuloksena Suomen edellytykset hyödyntää teknologiamurroksia ovat mahdollisimman hyvät?
   • D. Millä keinoilla huolehditaan siitä, että yrityksillä, työntekijöillä, julkisella sektorilla ja kuluttajilla on käytössään sellaiset inhimilliset voimavarat ja osaaminen, jotka edistävät kykyä sopeutua teknologiamurrosten mahdollistamiin muutoksiin ja niihin liittyviin riskeihin?
2. A Climate-Neutral and Resource-Scarce Finland
   • A. Miten voidaan tehostaa resurssien käyttöä ja tukea siirtymistä kiertotalouteen, joka tuo osaamisperustaista kasvua Suomeen ja vientiä?
   • B. Mitkä ovat ilmastoneutraalin ja resurssiniukan yhteiskunnan edellytykset?
   • C. Millä tavalla julkiset toimenpiteet parhaiten tukevat kokonaisvaltaista muutosprosessia siten, että muutos etenee hallitusti kohti ilmastoneutraalia ja resurssiniukkaa yhteiskuntaa?
   • D. Millä keinoilla huolehditaan siitä, että yrityksillä, työntekijöillä, julkisella sektorilla ja kuluttajilla on käytössään ne inhimilliset voimavarat ja osaaminen, jotka parhaiten edistävät ilmastonmuutokseen sopeutumista ja siirtymistä kohti ilmastoneutraalia ja resurssiniukkaa yhteiskuntaa?
3. Equality in Society
   • A. Mitkä ovat eriarvoisuutta tuottavat mekanismit nyky-Suomessa?
   • B. Miten tasa-arvoa voidaan edistää peruspalveluiden ja etuusjärjestelmien uudistamisen yhteydessä?
   • C. Millä tavalla julkiset toimenpiteet parhaiten tukevat innovatiivista kokeilutoimintaa, kokeiluista oppimista ja instituutioiden muutosta siten, että muutos etenee hallitusti ja lopputuloksena on kokonaisuutena onnistunut peruspalveluiden ja etuusjärjestelmien uudistaminen?
   • D. Miten parhaiten huolehditaan siitä, että yksilö-, ryhmä- ja instituutiotasolla on käytettävissä ne kyvykkyydet ja inhimilliset voimavarat, jotka mahdollistavat sopeutumisen peruspalvelu- ja etuusjärjestelmän uudistukseen tasa-arvoisesti?

In the call, the guiding questions B, C and D are effectively the same in all three research programs. Freely translated, they are the following.

• B. What are the practices and institutions that are prerequisites for an improving society? How do they provide better capabilities to utilise the issue (technological change, resource-scarce society, or equality in society)?
• C. How can public actions best support the process of improvement in such a way that the change is controlled and as a result Finland has the best capabilities possible to utilise the issue (technological change, resource-scarce society, or equality in society)?
• D. How do we ensure that the necessary capabilities, human resources, and knowledge exist among institutions, companies, employees, citizens, public sector, consumers, and other groups so that the necessary adaptation to these changes can occur?

Answer

• There should be a systematic method for providing scientific information for the use of decision making. Open policy practice is such a systematic method.
• The application should cover several disciplines such as health, the environment, economy, or communication technology at large (not only narrow expert fields within them).
• The application should also have strong spearhead areas of research, but they should have wide applicability in the long run and at least some important practical uses within the time period of the project.
• The application should convincingly show that the applicants are already very strong in their own field AND in strategic research.
• The project should utilise existing databases (both open and closed) in a clever and effective way.
• The project should have a clear need for two-way communication. The need and the solution should be explained in the communication plan. Vague expressions such as "we want to hear what people have to say about things and we offer them a possibility to express themselves" are discouraged.

B. Prerequisites for the change

These points specifically aim to answer the question B about practices and institutions that are prerequisites for the changing society.

The society must be

• open
• supportive and capable of hearing the grass-root level
• constantly improving with small steps
• systematically using small-scale testing and piloting and rejecting poor ideas
• motivating people with respect and purpose rather than money.
• What THL can provide: Through several real-life case studies, THL has gained good practical experience about what practices work and what don't, and where the problems lie when opening up the society.

C. Managing the change

These points specifically aim to answer the question C about public actions to manage and support the changing society.

• Evaluation and management in open policy practice provide a solid foundation to this work. A key thing is the explication of objectives, and continuous comparison of actions and outputs against these objectives.
• A key thing in management is a wide overview over the whole field but in such a way that the overview is consistent with thousands of details. So, the question is how to produce such a consistent overview. We suggest that open assessments should be used to organise open data into a systematic, criticisable description of the state of the country. Some examples of such approach exist from both policy-making and policy support
• Managing the change requires that any obstacles of useful progress are removed but also that poor ideas are effectively removed from the agenda. So, it is critical to be able to distinguish good and poor ideas. Science is not very effective in choosing the better one of two good alternatives; instead, it is more powerful in rejecting ideas that are not consistent with observations. Therefore, science should be actively used (typically in the form of assessments) to estimate what impacts the actions considered could or could not have. Ineffective actions can be rejected. Uncertain actions should be piloted in a small scale to obtain observations and understanding, and then poor actions can be rejected. Thus, the role of experts is to reject poor ideas, and the role of decision makers is to choose among the remaining good ones.
• What THL can provide: THL maintains and develops the web-workspace Opasnet that is used for impact assessments in decision support. Opasnet is a unique platform for both open data and open models. It has ready-made connections to some major databases such as Statistics Finland or the Finnish Parliament. In addition, it has a modelling tool based on commonly used open source R software but with enhanced functionality for creating case-specific assessment models from generic modules. THL also has expertise on all methods mentioned above.

D. Capabilities for adaptation

These points specifically aim to answer the question D about capabilities of all actors to adapt to the changing society.

• Shared understanding is a critical thing when stakeholders are involved. People think that they have a right to be heard and their opinions and concerns to be acknowledged. Shared understanding offers an approach to do this systematically. We also have technical tools (such as Opasnet) to facilitate this.
• Often conflicts in a society occur because some group thinks they were not heard and they cannot influence their own case. Therefore, it is important to provide tools to assess all kinds of impacts of decision options, not only those that are important to the decision maker. Open assessment as a method is specifically designed to assess the same situation from several different perspectives at the same time in a coherent manner. This is important when building trust and shared understanding in the society.
• It takes typically less than 60 seconds to find out who was playing a particular role in a particular movie. This is possible because the data is well organised. Similarly, it would be and it should be possible to find reliable answers to policy questions in 60 s, such as whether a social and health care legislation is against the constitution or not.
• What THL can provide: THL has expertise and practical knowledge of implementing structured discussions, which is a method to organise facts and opinions from multiple (possibly conflicting) sources. THL also has expertise in open assessments.

Disruptive technologies

These points specifically aim to answer the questions about the research programme on disruptive technologies.

• Open data is changing the world. Now we need societal applications to get the benefit. An important application is to make more impact assessments to support decision making. There are promising topics especially in municipality level, where a single municipality hardly has resources to do assessments even on topics that are important and directly relevant for them. National databases make it possible to create an assessment tool that can be used for answering local questions. Examples include health impact assessments on municipality (or even postal code area) level about radon exposures in buildings and related cancer risks. This work is ongoing as a collaboration between THL and STUK. Another example is a national registry of mercury concentrations in fish. This can be developed to produce personal health guidance based on local mercury data and individual fish intake patterns. Both these tools are under construction and will be published as open source online applications.

Resource-scarce Finland

These points specifically aim to answer the questions about the research programme on resource-Scarce Finland.

• Energy need and energy consumption is a major issue in resource-scarce society. THL has produced an online assessment tool for estimating energy need of buildings in a city, and related health impacts. This tool can be linked with an energy balance tool that assesses the whole chain of energy production and use in a particular area. So far the tools have been applied in single cities, but they were designed in a way that the results of several cities can be linked together, thus producing an overview of energy supply and need on e.g. national level. Such an overview is based on actual data used on local level for local questions, and the same data can then be used for national assessments. This makes it possible to have a unique understanding about the plans and objectives of each player in the energy field and to design national solutions that are synergistic to the local objectives. Also, such tools can be used to identify discrepancies in the energy policy: e.g. every individual player may plan to increase a certain fuel without realising that if that happens, the availability and price of that particular fuel may become unfavourable. Similar problems may occur on the energy supply side: individual solar panel owners may want to sell their power to the national grid, but there is a potential threat that the temporal supply and demand of electricity do not match if this is not planned well on a large scale.

Equality in society

These points specifically aim to answer the questions about the research programme on equality in society.

• The social and health organisation in Finland is in major turbulence. There in an urgent need to assess impacts of different organisational and financial solutions. Currently there is a problem that assessments done to support policies are separate processes looking at individual questions. When the organisational plan changes, the assessments become useless and the work starts (if there are still resources and time) from zero. This situation could be improved by doing open assessments of the overall social and health care system. If there was a good quantitative model of the system at large, it could be used to assess impacts of several different solutions of financing, combined with several solutions on organisation.
• The SISU (simulated Finland) is an open source model assessing microeconomic impacts of the current social security system and predicting impacts of possible changes in the system. Despite its openness, the model is not easy to use by anyone else except its developers, and therefore such assessments are not systematically done. There is a great opportunity in developing SISU (or other single-user social and health models) into a real open platform that is easy to use by interested authorities in municipalities or even citizens.