Mapping the production, diffusion and drivers of future technologies

我们建议绘制和跟踪英国的技术变化状况，了解其驱动因素和影响，并通过我们与行业和政策制定者的合作和接触，帮助提高英国的生产率记录。我们专注于前沿或“未来”技术的作用，如人工智能、机器人、清洁技术、区块链和量子。这些技术对英国生产率的贡献将取决于它们的生产和使用(扩散)的两个渠道，我们将寻求从理论和经验上对这些决定因素进行建模。我们将为英国“未来技术生产”和“未来技术使用”领域的经济活动建立量化证据。第一，通过描述--将包括部门和地理因素；第二，通过建立证据，证明金融或技能摩擦在多大程度上限制了投资。因此，我们正在应对PIN研讨会提出的两项挑战：了解和改善创新扩散；了解和提高区域和地方生产力。我们方法的一项创新是，我们将使用一系列以技术为导向的公司的新兴数据库，这些数据库与基于文本的活动信息相联系，以建立对未来技术部门的全面经验图景。我们还将利用这些数据库以新的方式跟踪技术的传播情况，并计划进行一次调查，以更多地揭示传播的障碍，特别是对中小企业而言。我们将与在新技术、相关数据和技术方面拥有专业知识的领先行业和政策利益攸关方合作。我们的经验实践将以一个概念框架为指导，该框架将对金融市场和劳动力市场的摩擦对创新、扩散和经济增长的影响进行建模。我们的项目成果将由四个主要部分组成：1.未来的行业数据和测量网络：我们将与我们的项目合作者一起，主办两个主要的研究会议，研究未来技术的学者以及来自政策和商业的相关利益相关者(例如Nesta和Be The Business)。其中第一项将寻求将主要利益攸关方聚集在一起并制定研究议程；第二项将涉及介绍我们的研究结果并制定持续的研究议程。我们还将举行不太正式的中级工作会议。报告：18个月后，我们的核心交付成果将是一份报告，其中包含(I)相关文献的回顾，经验和理论；(Ii)关于英国未来技术部门规模、地理、结构和表现的新描述性统计数据(与传统的基于SIC的估计进行比较和对比)；(Iii)一个概念性框架，为未来技术的生产和采用提供信息-通过建立一个最低限度的模型，该理论将旨在使用我们收集或整合的新数据来指导经验练习；以及(4)利用新的公司一级数据库和一项调查，尽可能包括对资金/技能供应的外部衡量，对未来技术的生产和采用建立经验模型。与项目团队的新合著者一起进行未来学术研究的议程：扩展理论工作，使用我们的新数据测试其预测，并确定需要额外数据的领域。我们预计，该项目将导致至少两篇学术论文的发表，其中一篇很可能更侧重于ftp公司，另一篇则侧重于工联会部门，并提供因果关系识别的途径。数据：在我们正在使用的数据是购买的地方，我们将寻求为希望在我们的分析基础上建立基础的研究人员提供资源和指导。根据标准的学术惯例，我们会在适当的情况下，以匿名方式将我们自己生成的调查数据通过英国KKDS分享给感兴趣的各方。

We propose to map and track the state of technological change in the UK, understand its drivers, impacts and help to improve the UK's productivity record via our collaboration and engagement with industry and policymakers. We focus on the role of frontier or 'future' technologies, such as AI, robotics, clean tech, blockchain and quantum. The contribution of these technologies to UK productivity will depend on the twin channels of their production and use (diffusion), the determinants of which we will seek to model theoretically and empirically. We will build up quantitative evidence on economic activity in the UK's 'future-technology-producing' and 'future-technology-using' sectors. First, through description - which will include both sectoral and geographical elements; and second through building evidence on the extent to which financial or skills frictions constrain investment. We are therefore addressing two of the challenges set out by the PIN workshop: understanding and improving innovation diffusion; and understanding and improving regional and local productivities. An innovation in our approach is that we will use a range of emerging databases on technology-oriented firms linked to text-based information on their activities to build a comprehensive empirical picture of the future technology sectors. We will also use these databases to track the diffusion of technologies in novel ways, and plan to conduct a survey to shed more light on the barriers to diffusion, for SMEs in particular. We will work together with leading industry and policy stakeholders with expertise on new technologies, relevant data and techniques. Our empirical exercises will be guided by a conceptual framework that will model the effect of frictions in the financial market and the labor market on innovation, diffusion and economic growth. Our project deliverables will consistent of four main components: 1. Future sector data and measurement network: Together with our project collaborators, we will host two major research meetings involving academics studying future technologies and relevant stakeholders from policy and business (e.g. NESTA and Be the Business). The first of these would seek to bring together the key stakeholders and set the agenda for research; and the second would involve presentations of our findings and developing an ongoing research agenda. We would also hold intermediate less formal working sessions.2. Report: Our core deliverable after 18 months will be a report containing (i) a review of the relevant literature, empirical and theoretical; (ii) new descriptive statistics of the size, geography, structure and performance of the future technology sector in the UK (comparing and contrasting with traditional SIC based estimates); (iii) a conceptual framework to inform the drivers of the production and adoption of future technologies - by building a minimalistic model, the theory will aim to guide the empirical exercises using new data we collect or consolidate; and (iv) empirical modelling of production and adoption of future technology using new firm level databases and a survey, including external (to the firm) measures of the supply of finance/skills where possible.3. Agenda for future academic research with new co-authorships from the project team: extending theoretical work and testing its predictions using our new data, and identifying areas where additional data are required. We envisage that the project will lead to the development of at least 2 academic papers, most likely one more focused on the FTP firms, and one on the FTU sectors, with paths to causal identification.4. Data: Where the data we are using are purchased, we will seek to provide resources and guidance for researchers wishing to build on our analysis. According to standard academic practice, we would share our own generated survey data on an anonymised basis to interested parties, via the UKDS as appropriate.