Developing foresight

Dr Simon Schultz, Senior Lecturer (Bioengineering) discusses the future of academic collaboration with industry.

 “Earlier this year, I stood in front of an audience of corporate R&D directors and suggested that in the future their brains could be eaten by cannibals ... on Hampstead Heath. Career suicide? No, exactly the opposite, in fact. I was speaking at Imperial’s 2032: Tech Foresight conference – a unique experiment to bring academics and industry together to explore the unintended effects that the research I’m doing in my lab right now might have in the future (and, I hasten to add, the cannibals were a worst-case societal modelling scenario, not an expected outcome).

I am director of the Neural Coding Laboratory in Bioengineering, where my research on the brain circuitry underlying perception and cognition doesn’t at first seem like work which would grab the attention of corporate research funders. Yet it is increasingly important that industry and universities work more closely with each other; and not just with a focus on today’s core business activities.

Whilst there is growing insecurity about the research funding available through more traditional channels, the amount of corporate research funding available is on the increase, as is the recognition that universities are vitally important to industry. It is clear that in the near future, industry’s contributions will be ever more important to the research done at academic institutions like Imperial – not only in the form of research funding, but also in the less tangible benefits that a close relationship with the outside world can bring to a university.

Take the Tech Foresight conference as an example: academics and business people coming together to consider where we might be in 20 years’ time, through interactive sessions which culminated in the creation of a timeline to the future and in three scenarios, focused on technological developments and the societal conditions that could affect the way we adopt these new technologies.

The hazards of looking into the future and trying to say something meaningful can be easily imagined – its rewards were a surprise though. The benefits for the corporate attendees were clear; a glimpse of the kind of research happening at Imperial that could truly overturn the world in which they do business. We discussed technologies which could, in the future, pose all kinds of opportunities – and dilemmas – for industry; for instance, brain computer interfaces are likely to offer many improved ways for workers to interact with information. However, might they also offer more dubious temptations; by allowing businesses to monitor – and dictate – an employee’s work ethic, for example?

For my part, it was also fascinating to first look back and consider how things have changed since I wrote my doctoral thesis in the area of computational neuroscience and to then look forward and imagine what my current PhD students will be working on when they reach my stage in their careers. We made no explicit predictions, but there was real value in taking that time to stop and consider the consequences of my research and to reflect on what kinds of new research might be possible in the future, given developments in technology to come. Moreover, it was thought provoking to discover, through speaking on the day with other academic ‘Foresighters’, that some of the changes I see in my field of research – the decline of the role of ‘big pharma’ and the rise of smaller neurotechnology companies, for example – are trends felt by people across the board.

The need to look to the future – not to predict where we will be in 20 years but to consider a broad range of possible scenarios – is one which we all feel; academics, business people, universities, society. H.G. Wells, an alumnus of the Royal College of Science (now part of Imperial), wrote an essay in 1932, in which he called for experts who would consider the consequences of the changes going on in the world around them. He titled it Wanted: Professors of Foresight! and I think he might have been onto something.”

Next year’s conference will be held on 5 July 2013 and the hunt is on for ‘Professors of Foresight’. If you are interested in learning more please email Eleanor Harding: e.harding@imperial.ac.uk.