The Radical Innovation Breakthrough Inquirer for the European Commission: “This report provides insights on 100 emerging developments that may exert a strong impact on global value creation and offer important solutions to societal needs. We identified this set of emerging developments through a carefully designed procedure that combined machine learning algorithms and human evaluation. After successive waves of selection and refinement, the resulting 100 emerging topics were subjected to several assessment procedures, including expert consultation and analysis of related patents and publications.
Having analysed the potential importance of each of these innovations for Europe, their current maturity and the relative strength of Europe in related R&D, we can make some general policy recommendations that follow.
However, it is important to note that our recommendations are based on the extremes of the distributions, and thus not all RIBs are named under the recommendations. Yet, the totality of the set of Radical Innovation Breakthrough (RIBs) and Radical Societal Breakthrough (RSBs) descriptions and their recent progress directions constitute an important collection of intelligence material that can inform strategic planning in research an innovation policy, industry and enterprise policy, and local development policy….(More)”.
Joshua Benton at Nieman Labs: “The New York Times wants more of its journalists to have those basic data skills, and now it’s releasing the curriculum they’ve built in-house out into the world, where it can be of use to reporters, newsrooms, and lots of other people too.
Even with some of the best data and graphics journalists in the business, we identified a challenge: data knowledge wasn’t spread widely among desks in our newsroom and wasn’t filtering into news desks’ daily reporting.
Yet fluency with numbers and data has become more important than ever. While journalists once were fond of joking that they got into the field because of an aversion to math, numbers now comprise the foundation for beats as wide-ranging as education, the stock market, the Census, and criminal justice. More data is released than ever before — there are nearly 250,000 datasets on data.govalone — and increasingly, government, politicians, and companies try to twist those numbers to back their own agendas…
We wanted to help our reporters better understand the numbers they get from sources and government, and give them the tools to analyze those numbers. We wanted to increase collaboration between traditional and non-traditional journalists…And with more competition than ever, we wanted to empower our reporters to find stories lurking in the hundreds of thousands of databases maintained by governments, academics, and think tanks. We wanted to give our reporters the tools and support necessary to incorporate data into their everyday beat reporting, not just in big and ambitious projects.
….You can access the Times’ training materials here. Some of what you’ll find:
An outline of the data skills the course aims to teach. It’s all run on Google Docs and Google Sheets; class starts with the uber-basics (mean! median! sum!), crosses the bridge of pivot tables, and then heads into data cleaning and more advanced formulas.
The full day-by-day outline of the Times’ three-week course, which of course you’re free to use or reshape to your newsroom’s needs.
It’s not just about cells, columns, and rows — the course also includes more journalism-based information around ethical questions, how to use data effectively inside a story’s narrative, and how best to work with colleagues in the graphic department.
Cheat sheets! If you don’t have time to dig too deeply, they’ll give a quick hit of information: one, two, three, four, five.
Data sets that you use to work through the beginner, intermediate, and advanced stages of the training, including such journalism classics as census data, campaign finance data, and BLS data.But don’t be a dummy and try to write real news stories off these spreadsheets; the Times cautions in bold: “NOTE: We have altered many of these datasets for instructional purposes, so please download the data from the original source if you want to use it in your reporting.”
Paper by Noam Kolt: “Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility (U) consumers gain and the data (D) they supply — “return on data” (ROD) — remains largely unexplored. Expressed as a ratio, ROD = U / D. While lawmakers strongly advocate protecting consumer privacy, they tend to overlook ROD. Are the benefits of the services enjoyed by consumers, such as social networking and predictive search, commensurate with the value of the data extracted from them? How can consumers compare competing data-for-services deals?
Currently, the legal frameworks regulating these transactions, including privacy law, aim primarily to protect personal data. They treat data protection as a standalone issue, distinct from the benefits which consumers receive. This article suggests that privacy concerns should not be viewed in isolation, but as part of ROD. Just as companies can quantify return on investment (ROI) to optimize investment decisions, consumers should be able to assess ROD in order to better spend and invest personal data. Making data-for-services transactions more transparent will enable consumers to evaluate the merits of these deals, negotiate their terms and make more informed decisions. Pivoting from the privacy paradigm to ROD will both incentivize data-driven service providers to offer consumers higher ROD, as well as create opportunities for new market entrants….(More)”.
US Federal Data Strategy: “For the purposes of the Federal Data Strategy, a “Use Case” is a data practice or method that leverages data to support an articulable federal agency mission or public interest outcome. The Federal Data Strategy sought use cases from the public that solve problems or demonstrate solutions that can help inform the four strategy areas: Enterprise Data Governance; Use, Access, and Augmentation; Decision-making and Accountability; and Commercialization, Innovation, and Public Use. The Federal Data Strategy team was in part informed by these submissions, which are posted below…..(More)”.
The Royal Society: “How can technologies help organisations and individuals protect data in practice and, at the same time, unlock opportunities for data access and use?
The Royal Society’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies project has been investigating this question and has launched a report (PDF) setting out the current use, development and limits of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) in data analysis.
The data we generate every day holds a lot of value and potentially also contains sensitive information that individuals or organisations might not wish to share with everyone. The protection of personal or sensitive data featured prominently in the social and ethical tensions identified in our British Academy and Royal Society report Data management and use: Governance in the 21st century. For example, how can organisations best use data for public good whilst protecting sensitive information about individuals? Under other circumstances, how can they share data with groups with competing interests whilst protecting commercially or otherwise sensitive information?
Realising the full potential of large-scale data analysis may be constrained by important legal, reputational, political, business and competition concerns. Certain risks can potentially be mitigated and managed with a set of emerging technologies and approaches often collectively referred to as ‘Privacy Enhancing Technologies’ (PETs).
This disruptive set of technologies, combined with changes in wider policy and business frameworks, could enable the sharing and use of data in a privacy-preserving manner. They also have the potential to reshape the data economy and to change the trust relationships between citizens, governments and companies.
This report provides a high-level overview of five current and promising PETs of a diverse nature, with their respective readiness levels and illustrative case studies from a range of sectors, with a view to inform in particular applied data science research and the digital strategies of government departments and businesses. This report also includes recommendations on how the UK could fully realise the potential of PETs and to allow their use on a greater scale.
The project was informed by a series of conversations and evidence gathering events, involving a range of stakeholders across academia, government and the private sector (also see the project terms of reference and Working Group)….(More)”.
Paper by Tamar Ziff and Maria Fernanda Pérez Argüello: “Across the Americas, corruption scandals have eroded citizens’ trust in their governing officials and institutions, leading elected leaders to promise they will root out graft. Against this backdrop of a growing citizen backlash against corruption, the Peruvian government designated “Democratic Governance against Corruption” as the central theme of the 2018 Summit of the Americas—the triennial meeting of heads of state from countries in the Americas. The Summit produced a Lima Declaration with 57 concrete actions to strengthen the fight against corruption in the Americas, including one–Commitment 17–specifically dedicated to promoting the use of new technologies to promote transparency and government accountability.
A new report by the Inter-American Dialogue’s Peter D. Bell Rule of Law program and the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council aims to advance Commitment 17 by examining the promise of tech solutions to assist the fight against corruption, specifically in public procurement. The report provides examples of a number of such solutions, as well as identifying obstacles to their more widespread adoption and proposing appropriate policy responses….(More)”
Privy Council Office (Canada): “…This document is intended to be both an accessible introduction to the topic, as well as a reference for those involved in the design, delivery, procurement or appraisal of impact measurement strategies for Impact Canada projects. Drawing on best practices, Measuring Impact by Design was written to guide its readers to think differently about measuring impact than we have traditionally done within the federal public service.
In its role leading Impact Canada as a whole-of-government effort, the IIU works with an ever-expanding network of partners to deliver a range of innovative, outcomes-based program approaches. We are aware that program spending is an investment that we are making on behalf of, and directly for Canadians, and we need to place a greater emphasis on understanding what differences these investments make in improving the lives of citizens. That means we need a better understanding of what works, for whom, and in what contexts; and we need a better understanding of what kinds of investments are likely to maximize the social, economic and environmental returns we seek.
“We are aware that program spending is an investment that we are making on behalf of, and directly for Canadians, and we need to place a greater emphasis on understanding what differences these investments make in improving the lives of citizens.”
Good impact measurement practices are fundamental to these understandings and it is incumbent upon us to be rigorous in our efforts. We recognize that we are still building our capacity in government deliver on these approaches. It is why we built flexibility within Impact Canada authorities to use grants and contributions to fund research organizations with expertise in the kinds of techniques outlined in this guide. We encourage our partner departments to consider taking up these flexibilities.
Measuring Impact by Design is one of a number of supports that the IIU provides to deliver on its commitment to improve measurement practices for Impact Canada. We look forward to continued collaboration with our partners in the delivery of these important outcomes-based approaches across the public sector….(More)”.
Geoff Mulgan et al at Nesta: “It builds on work Nesta has done in many fields – from health and culture to public services – to find more rounded and realistic ways of capturing the many dimensions of value created by public action. It is relevant to our work influencing governments and charities as well as to our own work as a funder, since our status as a charity commits us to creating public benefit.
Our aim in this work is to make value more transparent and more open to interrogation, whether that concerns libraries, bicycle lanes, museums, primary health services or training programmes for the unemployed. We recognise that value may come from government action; it can also be created by others, in civil society and business. And we recognise that value can often be complex, whether in terms of who benefits, or how it relates to values, as well as more technical issues such as what discount rates to apply.
But unless value is attended to explicitly, we risk ending up with unhappy results….(More)”.
Paper by Mariana Mazzucato and Rainer Kattel: “Public value is value that is created collectively for a public purpose. This requires understanding of how public institutions can engage citizens in defining purpose (participatory structures), nurture organisational capabilities and capacity to shape new opportunities (organisational competencies); dynamically assess the value created (dynamic evaluation); and ensure that societal value is distributed equitably (inclusive growth).Rainer KattelMariana Mazzucato and Public value is value that is created collectively for a public purpose. This requires understanding of how public institutions can engage citizens in defining purpose (participatory structures), nurture organisational capabilities and capacity to shape new opportunities (organisational competencies); dynamically assess the value created (dynamic evaluation); and ensure that societal value is distributed equitably (inclusive growth).
Purpose-driven capitalism requires more than just words and gestures of goodwill. It requires purpose to be put at the centre of how companies and governments are run and how they interact with civil society.
Keynes claimed that practitioners who thought they were just getting the ‘job done’ were slaves of defunct economic theory.1 Purposeful capitalism, if it is to happen on the ground for real, requires a rethinking of value in economic theory and how it has shaped actions.
Today’s dominant economics framework restricts its understanding of value to a theory of exchange; only that which has a price is valuable. ‘Collective’ effort is missed since it is only individual decisions that matter: even wages are seen as outcomes of an individual’s choice (maximisation of utility) between leisure versus work. ‘Social value’ itself is limited to looking at economic ‘welfare’ principles; that is, aggregate outcomes from individual behaviours…(More)”
Blair Sheppard and Ceri-Ann Droog at Strategy and Business: “For the last 70 years the world has done remarkably well. According to the World Bank, the number of people living in extreme poverty today is less than it was in 1820, even though the world population is seven times as large. This is a truly remarkable achievement, and it goes hand in hand with equally remarkable overall advances in wealth, scientific progress, human longevity, and quality of life.
But the organizations that created these triumphs — the most prominent businesses, governments, and multilateral institutions of the post–World War II era — have failed to keep their implicit promises. As a result, today’s leading organizations face a global crisis of legitimacy. For the first time in decades, their influence, and even their right to exist, are being questioned.
Businesses are also being held accountable in new ways for the welfare, prosperity, and health of the communities around them and of the general public. Our own global firm, PwC, is among these businesses. The accusations facing any individual enterprise may or may not be justified, but the broader attitudes underlying them must be taken seriously.
The causes of this crisis of legitimacy have to do with five basic challenges affecting every part of the world:
Asymmetry: Wealth disparity and the erosion of the middle class
Disruption: Abrupt technological changes and their destructive effects
Age: Demographic pressures as the average life span of human beings increases and the birth rate falls
Populism: Growing populism and rejection of the status quo, with associated nationalism and global fracturing
Trust: Declining confidence in the prevailing institutions that make our systems work.
(We use the acronym ADAPT to list these challenges because it evokes the inherent change in our time and the need for institutions to respond with new attitudes and behaviors.)
A few other challenges, such as climate change and human rights issues, may occur to you as equally important. They are not included in this list because they are not at the forefront of this particular crisis of legitimacy in the same way. But they are affected by it; if leading businesses and global institutions lose their perceived value, it will be harder to address every other issue affecting the world today.
Ignoring the crisis of legitimacy is not an option — not even for business leaders who feel their primary responsibility is to their shareholders. If we postpone solutions too long, we could go past the point of no return: The cost of solving these problems will be too high. Brexit could be a test case. The costs and difficulties of withdrawal could be echoed in other political breakdowns around the world. And if you don’t believe that widespread economic and political disruption is possible right now, then consider the other revolutions and abrupt, dramatic changes in sovereignty that have occurred in the last 250 years, often with technological shifts and widespread dissatisfaction as key factors….(More)”.
