Publications & Documents

Long-standing policy interest in the role of organisations specialised in research and experimental development (R&D) raises questions about how these organisations are classified under different institutional sectors and contribute to R&D statistics This paper reports on the findings of the pilot data collection conducted in 2022. The results show a diverse range of R&D specialist ecosystems as well as major reporting gaps. The ultimate aim of this exercise and its recommendations is to demonstrate how several OECD countries are able to provide meaningful statistical results using OECD guidance and promote the mainstreaming of reporting into future national and OECD R&D statistics.

This Digital Government Review of Türkiye explores how the Government of Türkiye can use digital technology and data to help the public sector become more responsive, resilient and proactive. It evaluates the efforts made so far by Türkiye in achieving digital government maturity by looking at governance, institutional capacities, digital skills, public service design and delivery, enabling building blocks and the strategic management and use of data. The review provides policy recommendations intended to help the Government of Türkiye fully benefit from digital technologies and data to realise the potential of the digital age in transforming the public sector and the services provided to the public.

Policy makers around the world recognise the importance of developing young people’s 21st century skills like problem solving, creative thinking, self-regulation and collaboration. Many countries also include these skills as part of the intended learning outcomes of their education systems. To shift intention into practice, educational assessments need to better measure what matters. Innovative assessments are needed that combine conceptual, technological and methodological advances in educational measurement. This report explores new approaches to measuring complex skills through a practical and applied assessment design lens, bringing together perspectives from leading experts to consider what we can learn from the learning sciences to define more authentic assessment experiences and expand the range of skills we are able to measure in both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary contexts of practice. The report also examines how technology can expand our possibilities for innovation, including the creation of more interactive and immersive problems and the generation of meaningful sources of potential evidence about students’ proficiency. Finally, the report explores how we can make sense of the rich data captured in interactive digital environments using new analytical approaches, and how we can ensure the valid interpretation and use of results from innovative assessments.

This report uses business consultations to investigate private-sector views on privacy and data protection rules for cross-border data flows. It aims to inform a more comprehensive understanding of challenges and ways forward for the policy agenda of ‘data free flow with trust’. While frameworks aimed at generating trust and facilitating data flows build on commonalities and elements of convergence, businesses identify challenges to fully operationalise them at the global level. In particular, businesses indicate the need for coherent principles and rules that are transparent and predictable, provide a practical balance between certainty and flexibility, and offer solutions that match business realities. Finally, the report highlights the need for greater international regulatory co-operation and leveraging the full range of options to uphold trust around privacy and data protection globally.

The rapid pace of technological change, coupled with a pressing need for solutions to address grand societal challenges and global crises, heightens the challenge for policy makers to develop science, technology and innovation policies at speed, in situations of high uncertainty and, in some cases, around potentially controversial technology fields. Technology assessment (TA) has a long history of providing decision-makers with timely strategic intelligence on emerging technologies. Current demands are pushing TA to evolve in order to fulfil diverse functions: to illuminate the societal, economic, environmental and other consequences of new technologies; to inform public opinion; and to guide research and development. Drawing on nine case studies, this report analyses the response of TA practices to these changing drivers and demands to support policies for new and emerging technologies. It also identifies a set of principles to guide good contemporary TA practice.

Despite the increasing adoption of income-based tax incentives for R&D and innovation in the OECD area and beyond, evidence on the availability, design, generosity and actual cost of these incentives remains scarce. This report helps fill this gap by documenting government efforts to provide preferential tax treatment of economic outputs of innovation activities. Drawing on the responses of national contact points to the OECD KNOWINTAX surveys carried out in 2020 and 2021, it presents new evidence on the cost (foregone tax revenues) and uptake of income-based-tax incentives by businesses in 2019, and tracks their distribution by firm size and industry and their evolution over the 2000-2019 period.

This report analyses the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in firms across 11 countries. Based on harmonised statistical code (AI diffuse) applied to official firm-level surveys, it finds that the use of AI is prevalent in ICT and Professional Services and more widespread across large – and to some extent across young – firms. AI users tend to be more productive, especially the largest ones. Complementary assets, including ICT skills, high-speed digital infrastructure, and the use of other digital technologies, which are significantly related to the use of AI, appear to play a critical role in the productivity advantages of AI users.

Sociotechnical systems in areas like energy, agrifood and mobility need to transform rapidly to become more sustainable and resilient. Science, technology and innovation (STI) have essential roles in these transformations, but governments must be more ambitious and act with greater urgency in their STI policies to meet these challenges. They should design policy portfolios that enable transformative innovation and new markets to emerge, challenge existing fossil-based systems, and create windows of opportunity for low-carbon technologies to break through. This calls for larger investments but also greater directionality in research and innovation, for example, through mission-oriented policies, to help direct and compress the innovation cycle for low-carbon technologies. International co-operation will be essential, but rising geopolitical tensions, including strategic competition in key emerging technologies, could make this difficult. OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2023 explores these and other key issues and trends that present STI with a new operating environment to which it must adapt.