Executive summary

Science, technology and innovation (STI) activities face several disruptive drivers of change. These include the ongoing slowdown in productivity growth, despite widespread technological change rapidly ageing populations the impacts of climate change, and the resulting need for mitigation and adaptation and globalisation and the growing role of emerging economies. These drivers create opportunities and challenges for STI. They shape societal and policy expectations regarding the purposes of STI, and they affect the ways STI activities are carried out. Many of these drivers give rise to “grand societal challenges”, for example, around healthy ageing, clean energy and food security. Challenges like these are also encapsulated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which feature increasingly prominently in STI policy agendas.