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Industries and businesses are becoming increasingly digital, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend. Regulators around the world are also experimenting with data-driven tools to apply and enforce rules in a more agile and targeted way. This report maps out several efforts undertaken jointly by the OECD and Italian regulators to develop and use artificial intelligence and machine learning tools in regulatory inspections and enforcement. It provides unique insights into the background processes and structures required for digital tools to perform predictive modelling, risk analysis and classification. It also highlights the challenges such tools bring, both in specific regulatory areas and to the broader goals of regulatory systems.

How can governments support the private sector’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? This book investigates the contribution of firms to the SDGs, particularly through their core business, taking into account inter-sectoral linkages and global value chains, using novel techniques and data sources. Despite the fact that the private sector has the potential to contribute to a wide range of SDGs, and that many firms find it economically viable to develop sustainable products and services, firms still face significant hurdles in their sustainability transition. Based on this new evidence, this book provides some recommendations on the design of industrial policies to enhance the contribution of businesses to the SDGs.

R&D tax incentives have become a widely used policy tool to promote business R&D. How do they shape firms’ incentives to invest in R&D? This paper contributes a methodology to construct forward-looking effective tax rates for an R&D investment that reflect the value of expenditure-based R&D tax incentives. The new OECD estimates cover 48 countries and consider the case of large profitable firms, accounting for the bulk of R&D in most economies. The results provide new insights into the generosity of R&D tax incentives from the perspective of firms that decide on whether or where to invest in R&D (extensive margin) and the level (intensive margin) of R&D investment. The generosity of the favourable tax treatment of R&D is shown to vary at the intensive and extensive margins, highlighting differences in countries’ strategies to support R&D through the tax system.

This paper addresses the current and emerging uses and impacts of robots, the mid-term future of robotics and the role of policy. Progress in robotics will help to make life easier, richer and healthier. Wider robot use will help raise labour productivity. As science and engineering progress, robots will become more central to crisis response, from helping combat infectious diseases to maintaining critical infrastructure. Governments can accelerate and orient the development and uptake of socially valuable robots, for instance by: supporting cross-disciplinary R&D, facilitating research commercialisation, helping small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) understand the opportunities for investment in robots, supporting platforms that highlight robot solutions in healthcare and other sectors, embedding robotics engineering in high school curricula, tailoring training for workers with vocational-level mechanical skills, supporting data development useful to robotics, ensuring flexible regulation conducive to innovation, strengthening digital connectivity, and raising awareness of the importance of robotics.

This paper examines space technology transfers and their commercialisation, focussing on transfers from publicly funded space programmes to different sectors of the economy. It notably compares practices from Europe, North America and Asia for the first time. It identifies the conditions for enabling successful space technology transfers, as well as the most common channels for commercialisation. The paper also reviews methodological issues in measuring and assessing the benefits of transfers, and provides recommendations to develop improved and internationally comparable evidence. The analysis benefits from original content and endorsement from some of the most active space agencies in OECD countries and beyond.

This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the policy instruments adopted by the Netherlands to reach carbon neutrality in its manufacturing sector by 2050. The analysis illustrates the strength of combining a strong commitment to raising carbon prices with ambitious technology support, uncovers the pervasiveness of competitiveness provisions, and highlights the trade-off between short-term emissions cuts and longer-term technology shift. The Netherlands’ carbon levy sets an ambitious price trajectory to 2030, but is tempered by extensive preferential treatment to energy-intensive users, yielding a highly unequal carbon price across firms and sectors. The country’s technology support focuses on the cost-effective deployment of low-carbon options, which ensures least-cost decarbonisation in the short run but favours relatively mature technologies. The paper offers recommendations for policy adjustments to reach the country’s carbon neutrality objective, including the gradual removal of exemptions, enhanced support for emerging technologies and greater visibility over future infrastructure plans.

This report assesses the potential for mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) to contribute to the sustainable transition in Japan, and examines the challenges and opportunities that MOIPs would present. As part of a series of MOIP national case studies, the report finds that the ongoing ambitious and top-down MOIPs led by the center-of-government build upon a long history of proactive and goal-oriented policy intervention. MOIPs in Japan are the latest step of decades of efforts to reduce the fragmentation and lack of holistic coordination of Japan’s science, technology and innovation policy in order to proactively address societal challenges. Available evaluations of these policies demonstrate very encouraging results in that regards. The study concludes with recommendations to pursue these efforts, including by mainstreaming these policy initiatives across the government structure and complementing them with more bottom-up challenge-based initiatives.

This report assesses the potential for mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) to contribute to the sustainable transition in Norway, and examines the challenges and opportunities that MOIPs would present. As part of a series of MOIP national case studies, the report finds that MOIPs could contribute significantly to alleviating some of the long-standing limitations of Norway’s innovation system, acknowledging the country’s strong advantages for mission-orientation and its innovative policy experimentations, such as the Pilot-E scheme and the CLIMIT programme. It proposes two options for Norway’s future MOIP approach, with corresponding recommendations. Under a ‘scaling-up’ option, Norway would develop a system to manage the implementation of cross-agency schemes in relevant challenge areas. A ‘levelling-up’ option would involve the programming of a pilot mission in the four-year investment plan of the next edition of Norway’s Long Term Plan, with support from high-level policy and political actors.

Genomic and biobank collaborative platforms hold significant promise for the development of new discoveries and therapies. This paper explores the complex technical, legal and business challenges arising from genomics and biobanks, and brings together ideas and best practices from major national and international platforms, and from a diverse range of experts. The global sharing of biological samples and genomic data has been critical for accelerating our understanding of the biology and spread of COVID-19, and for the development of vaccines and diagnostics. Although some of the policy challenges in the field are well known, they have been reconfigured by the digitalisation of health innovation combined with the increasing complexity and volume of data, the push for global collaboration, and the growing awareness of ethical, legal, and social implications.