EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

New vistas for technology and risk assessment? The OECD Programme on Emerging Systemic Risks and beyond

Tomas Hellström

Technology in Society, 2009, vol. 31, issue 3, 325-331

Abstract: This paper presents a framework for understanding risk from the perspective of technological innovation and change. Special focus is put on systemic technological change, which tends to affect several dimensions of society at the same time. By drawing on innovation theory, and exemplifying by reference to the OECD futures project on Emerging Systemic Risk, the article elaborates a framework for technology assessment where the central elements are ubiquitous technological change and risk. Several key dimensions for technology assessment of this kind are identified, including increased mobility of people and goods, magnitude and concentration of humans, the speed and depth of change in the risk landscape, public to private shifts in the ‘ownership’ of risk, and the role played by expectations and perception to risk. The article ends with suggesting a number of new norms for risk and technology assessment coupled with new risk methodologies for further investigation.

Keywords: Innovation; Technology assessment; Systemic risk; OECD; Technological systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X09000578
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:teinso:v:31:y:2009:i:3:p:325-331

DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2009.06.002

Access Statistics for this article

Technology in Society is currently edited by Charla Griffy-Brown

More articles in Technology in Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:teinso:v:31:y:2009:i:3:p:325-331