Strategic Research Council

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Strategic Research Council is a new council in the Academy of Finland. Its purpose is to fund strategic research in Finland to promote the applicability of scientific knowledge in the society. Its first call is open until 29th April 2015. [4][5] There are three new research programmes to fulfil this aim:

• Disruptive Technologies and Changing Institutions
• A Climate-Neutral and Resource-Scarce Finland
• Equality in Society

Question

What key aspects should be included in a successful application?

The application must clearly answer these questions (these should be translated into English). For each topic, answers must be provided to A and B and additionally to C or D or both.

1. Disruptive Technologies and Changing Institutions
   • A. Mitkä ovat tietyn konkreettisen teknologiamurroksen ilmentymät ja potentiaalinen hyöty Suomelle?
   • B. Millaista inhimillisen toiminnan, instituutioiden ja toimintatapojen muutosta kyseisen teknologiamurroksen hyödyntäminen edellyttää?
   • C. Millä tavalla julkiset toimenpiteet parhaiten tukevat muutosprosessia siten, että muutos etenee hallitusti ja prosessin lopputuloksena Suomen edellytykset hyödyntää teknologiamurroksia ovat mahdollisimman hyvät?
   • D. Millä keinoilla huolehditaan siitä, että yrityksillä, työntekijöillä, julkisella sektorilla ja kuluttajilla on käytössään sellaiset inhimilliset voimavarat ja osaaminen, jotka edistävät kykyä sopeutua teknologiamurrosten mahdollistamiin muutoksiin ja niihin liittyviin riskeihin?
2. A Climate-Neutral and Resource-Scarce Finland
   • A. Miten voidaan tehostaa resurssien käyttöä ja tukea siirtymistä kiertotalouteen, joka tuo osaamisperustaista kasvua Suomeen ja vientiä?
   • B. Mitkä ovat ilmastoneutraalin ja resurssiniukan yhteiskunnan edellytykset?
   • C. Millä tavalla julkiset toimenpiteet parhaiten tukevat kokonaisvaltaista muutosprosessia siten, että muutos etenee hallitusti kohti ilmastoneutraalia ja resurssiniukkaa yhteiskuntaa?
   • D. Millä keinoilla huolehditaan siitä, että yrityksillä, työntekijöillä, julkisella sektorilla ja kuluttajilla on käytössään ne inhimilliset voimavarat ja osaaminen, jotka parhaiten edistävät ilmastonmuutokseen sopeutumista ja siirtymistä kohti ilmastoneutraalia ja resurssiniukkaa yhteiskuntaa?
3. Equality in Society
   • A. Mitkä ovat eriarvoisuutta tuottavat mekanismit nyky-Suomessa?
   • B. Miten tasa-arvoa voidaan edistää peruspalveluiden ja etuusjärjestelmien uudistamisen yhteydessä?
   • C. Millä tavalla julkiset toimenpiteet parhaiten tukevat innovatiivista kokeilutoimintaa, kokeiluista oppimista ja instituutioiden muutosta siten, että muutos etenee hallitusti ja lopputuloksena on kokonaisuutena onnistunut peruspalveluiden ja etuusjärjestelmien uudistaminen?
   • D. Miten parhaiten huolehditaan siitä, että yksilö-, ryhmä- ja instituutiotasolla on käytettävissä ne kyvykkyydet ja inhimilliset voimavarat, jotka mahdollistavat sopeutumisen peruspalvelu- ja etuusjärjestelmän uudistukseen tasa-arvoisesti?

In the call, the guiding questions B, C and D are effectively the same in all three research programs. Freely translated, they are the following.

• B. What are the practices and institutions that are prerequisites for an improving society? How do they provide better capabilities to utilise the issue (technological change, resource-scarce society, or equality in society)?
• C. How can public actions best support the process of improvement in such a way that the change is controlled and as a result Finland has the best capabilities possible to utilise the issue (technological change, resource-scarce society, or equality in society)?
• D. How do we ensure that the necessary capabilities, human resources, and knowledge exist among institutions, companies, employees, citizens, public sector, consumers, and other groups so that the necessary adaptation to these changes can occur?

Answer

Communication and information plan for Dec 2015 call

Producing shared understanding by utilising knowledge crystals

A key objective of strategic research is to support societal decision making. In this project this is done already from the beginning of the project by utilising a method called open policy practice. It was developed in THL in 2013 and it is based on long-term experience on decision support in environmental health. The most important principle of open policy practice is to develop shared understanding about a policy issue at hand. Shared understanding is a situation, where all participants have collaboratively described in writing what is known about the details of the issue, what are objectives of different stakeholders, where there are agreements and where there are disagreements and why. Participation is open and includes decision makers, experts, citizens, and other interested parties.

Shared understanding is reached by utilising systematic methods of collaborative work and participation. When there is disagreement about facts, resolution is found by using criticism and observations - the building blocks of science. The work is supported by modern internet tools such as open data bases, real-time collaborative editing software, wikis, and online computational models. These have been in active use in THL for years, and there is good expertise in such work.

In practice, each research question will have an own internet page on a collaborative web-workspace since the first day of the project. The answer to each question is iteratively built based on existing and new data, analyses, and discussions during the project. Anyone can participate in these discussions at any time, and the team members will moderate the discussions. The answers are updated regularly as new information arises, and the current best answer is available for users as open linked data at any given time. Web pages that are built in this way around relevant research questions are called knowledge crystals.

It is important to notice, that some of the research questions are designed in a way that they offer practical and direct guidance to relevant and timely policy issues. The project will actively seek collaboration and contributions from policy makers to develop relevant questions and to include policy perspective to the work. Knowledge crystals are a practical solution to the collaboration need on science-policy interface. This work is supported by more traditional methods of communication and collaboration, such as reports, policy briefs, stakeholder workshops, and press releases.

Answer for April 2015 call

• There should be a systematic method for providing scientific information for the use of decision making. Open policy practice is such a systematic method.
• The application should cover several disciplines such as health, the environment, economy, or communication technology at large (not only narrow expert fields within them).
• The application should also have strong spearhead areas of research, but they should have wide applicability in the long run and at least some important practical uses within the time period of the project.
• The application should convincingly show that the applicants are already very strong in their own field AND in strategic research.
• The project should utilise existing databases (both open and closed) in a clever and effective way.
• The project should have a clear need for two-way communication. The need and the solution should be explained in the communication plan. Vague expressions such as "we want to hear what people have to say about things and we offer them a possibility to express themselves" are discouraged.

B. Prerequisites for the change

These points specifically aim to answer the question B about practices and institutions that are prerequisites for the changing society.

The society must be

• open
• supportive and capable of hearing the grass-root level
• constantly improving with small steps
• systematically using small-scale testing and piloting and rejecting poor ideas
• motivating people with respect and purpose rather than money.
• systematically requiring impact assessments before the decision is made, and also evaluating the implementation and outcomes of the decision. The importance of impact assessment has been brought up in many areas.
• What THL can provide: THL is wide expertise in impact assessment, and especially in open assessment THL is the main developed and user of the method worldwide. Through several real-life case studies, THL has gained good practical experience about what practices work and what don't, and where the problems lie when opening up the society.

C. Managing the change

These points specifically aim to answer the question C about public actions to manage and support the changing society.

• Evaluation and management in open policy practice provide a solid foundation to this work. A key thing is the explication of objectives, and continuous comparison of actions and outputs against these objectives.
• A key thing in management is a wide overview over the whole field but in such a way that the overview is consistent with thousands of details. So, the question is how to produce such a consistent overview. We suggest that open assessments should be used to organise open data into a systematic, criticisable description of the state of the country. Some examples of such approach exist from both policy-making and policy support
• Managing the change requires that any obstacles of useful progress are removed but also that poor ideas are effectively removed from the agenda. So, it is critical to be able to distinguish good and poor ideas. Science is not very effective in choosing the better one of two good alternatives; instead, it is more powerful in rejecting ideas that are not consistent with observations. Therefore, science should be actively used (typically in the form of assessments) to estimate what impacts the actions considered could or could not have. Ineffective actions can be rejected. Uncertain actions should be piloted in a small scale to obtain observations and understanding, and then poor actions can be rejected. Thus, the role of experts is to reject poor ideas, and the role of decision makers is to choose among the remaining good ones.
• What THL can provide: THL maintains and develops the web-workspace Opasnet that is used for impact assessments in decision support. Opasnet is a unique platform for both open data and open models. It has ready-made connections to some major databases such as Statistics Finland or the Finnish Parliament. In addition, it has a modelling tool based on commonly used open source R software but with enhanced functionality for creating case-specific assessment models from generic modules. THL also has expertise on all methods mentioned above.

D. Capabilities for adaptation

These points specifically aim to answer the question D about capabilities of all actors to adapt to the changing society.

• Shared understanding is a critical thing when stakeholders are involved. People think that they have a right to be heard and their opinions and concerns to be acknowledged. Shared understanding offers an approach to do this systematically. We also have technical tools (such as Opasnet) to facilitate this.
• Often conflicts in a society occur because some group thinks they were not heard and they cannot influence their own case. Therefore, it is important to provide tools to assess all kinds of impacts of decision options, not only those that are important to the decision maker. Open assessment as a method is specifically designed to assess the same situation from several different perspectives at the same time in a coherent manner. This is important when building trust and shared understanding in the society.
• It takes typically less than 60 seconds to find out who was playing a particular role in a particular movie. This is possible because the data is well organised. Similarly, it would be and it should be possible to find reliable answers to policy questions in 60 s, such as whether a social and health care legislation is against the constitution or not.
• What THL can provide: THL has expertise and practical knowledge of implementing structured discussions, which is a method to organise facts and opinions from multiple (possibly conflicting) sources. THL also has expertise in open assessments.

Disruptive technologies

These points specifically aim to answer the questions about the research programme on disruptive technologies.

• Open data is changing the world. Now we need societal applications to get the benefit. An important application is to make more impact assessments to support decision making. There are promising topics especially in municipality level, where a single municipality hardly has resources to do assessments even on topics that are important and directly relevant for them. National databases make it possible to create an assessment tool that can be used for answering local questions. Examples include health impact assessments on municipality (or even postal code area) level about radon exposures in buildings and related cancer risks. This work is ongoing as a collaboration between THL and STUK. Another example is a national registry of mercury concentrations in fish. This can be developed to produce personal health guidance based on local mercury data and individual fish intake patterns. Both these tools are under construction and will be published as open source online applications.

Resource-scarce Finland

These points specifically aim to answer the questions about the research programme on resource-Scarce Finland.

• Energy need and energy consumption is a major issue in resource-scarce society. THL has produced an online assessment tool for estimating energy need of buildings in a city, and related health impacts. This tool can be linked with an energy balance tool that assesses the whole chain of energy production and use in a particular area. So far the tools have been applied in single cities, but they were designed in a way that the results of several cities can be linked together, thus producing an overview of energy supply and need on e.g. national level. Such an overview is based on actual data used on local level for local questions, and the same data can then be used for national assessments. This makes it possible to have a unique understanding about the plans and objectives of each player in the energy field and to design national solutions that are synergistic to the local objectives. Also, such tools can be used to identify discrepancies in the energy policy: e.g. every individual player may plan to increase a certain fuel without realising that if that happens, the availability and price of that particular fuel may become unfavourable. Similar problems may occur on the energy supply side: individual solar panel owners may want to sell their power to the national grid, but there is a potential threat that the temporal supply and demand of electricity do not match if this is not planned well on a large scale.

Equality in society

These points specifically aim to answer the questions about the research programme on equality in society.

• The social and health organisation in Finland is in major turbulence. There in an urgent need to assess impacts of different organisational and financial solutions. Currently there is a problem that assessments done to support policies are separate processes looking at individual questions. When the organisational plan changes, the assessments become useless and the work starts (if there are still resources and time) from zero. This situation could be improved by doing open assessments of the overall social and health care system. If there was a good quantitative model of the system at large, it could be used to assess impacts of several different solutions of financing, combined with several solutions on organisation.
• The SISU (simulated Finland) is an open source model assessing microeconomic impacts of the current social security system and predicting impacts of possible changes in the system. Despite its openness, the model is not easy to use by anyone else except its developers, and therefore such assessments are not systematically done. There is a great opportunity in developing SISU (or other single-user social and health models) into a real open platform that is easy to use by interested authorities in municipalities or even citizens.

Exporting knowledge practices

The project will produce knowledge practices, i.e. practices, methods, and tools to collect, organise, synthesise, and distribute information. The project has a clear objective to merge scientific and political knowledge practices in a novel, effective way. Can this be a successful export product? Yes.

Finland has produced many crucial information products that are now used worldwide even as de facto international standards: Linux operating system, SSH encryption algorithm, MySQL database, SMS text message. All these breakthroughs were developed in Finland and distributed freely for anyone to use. They changed the global market of their field. Or rather, they were game changers that forced everyone to rethink what an operating system or database means.

The export income did not come from selling a patented product. It came from selling expertise or knowledge services enabled by the innovation. This was made possible by the fact that there were expertise in Finland and capability to build commercial products based on the innovation. Free distribution of the main innovation was actually crucial in spreading the idea to worldwide use and in creating global demand.

Exactly this will be done in the project. We will develop a unique platform for decision knowledge support. It can be used by anyone, and any company, research institue, or parliament can set up an instance of their own for their own purposes or for distributing their own knowledge to others. If successful, this will produce wide global demand for expertise about the platform and practices.

To fulfil this potential the project has to start early on teaching and training people to become experts in the project. This is descrided in more detail in Darm.

The teaching is based on the course of the University of Eastern Finland Decision Analysis and Risk Management. The course has been running since 2011 and many of the methods applied have been tested in those courses.

Examples that could produce export cash flow include

• Producing learning material and training for open policy practice.
• Consulting for mandatory policy support projects such as environmental impact assessments.
• Facilitating public decision processing by e.g. organising and synthesising public discussions.
• Developing open models and selling consultancy services based on them.
• Applying foreign funding for research projects based on open assessment.

However, it should be remembered that the societal benefits of implementing open knowledge practices are larger than the incoming cash flow stimulated by them.

Rationale

Open policy practice as a research theme

This text was written as an answer to a survey by the Strategic Research Council in spring 2015. [6]

2. What is your strategic research theme proposal for 2016?

Open policy practice

3. To which horizontal and broad-based issues in society will research in this theme provide solutions?

Scientific information is not used in an optimal way in the making of societal decisions (i.e., policies). This is due to outdated practices in both research and policy making. These practices were developed before the internet era when secret information was seen as an important asset for an individual. Now it is better understood that open information is important for the society in general and for policy making in particular.

In an optimal situation there is a coherent, exhaustive, and robust description of all aspects that are important for a decision, so that a good option can be chosen and then the choice can be defended based on the description. The description contains all relevant scientific information and value judgements and it forms a shared understanding. Shared understanding is a situation where the description contains also explanations about where people agree, where they disagree, and why. When completed, anyone can agree that their knowledge and opinions about the issue are included in the description in an acceptable way; and even if the final conclusion is based on other people's views than their own, the reasons for this are clear and fair.

A few examples about research and development needs and the consequential benefits are listed here.

• In statistics, analysis methods for big data and my data help to develop robust estimates and predictions about impacts of policies.
• In social sciences, methods for stakeholder participation help to collect silent knowledge and new ideas.
• In decision analysis, methods for impact assessment help to build larger, more coherent, and more useful impact models.
• In political sciences, methods for defining and explicitly describing the objectives of policies help to evaluate policy support work and the policy options.
• In science policy, methods for open publishing and earning scientific merit when publishing data or participating in policy assessments (rather than earning merit only from scientific articles) help to encourage faster and more effective use of scientific information.
• In linguistics and ethics, methods for organising citizen's discussions into structured parts of impact assessments help to utilise disperse information and value judgements and motivate participants.

Thus, the question "how can we improve the collection, synthesis, and flow of information into a systematic, quantitative description to support policies" should be asked in many, if not all, fields of natural and social sciences.

In brief, there is a need and opportunity for development in almost all parts of the science-policy interface. This requires wide and systematic support, development, and testing of these new methods and practices. The largest benefits will occur when poor policy options are critically evaluated against the explicit objectives of the policy and rejected based on scientific criteria. In such evidence-based policy making, the policies are selected among reasonable options. The benefits of this will occur in all sectors of the society. However, policies related to some major areas such as climate change and genetically modified organisms seem to be especially far from evidence-based options. Therefore, such areas are likely to benefit most of this cultural change.

4. Who will benefit from and use the research results? What are the means with which to create interaction between the researchers and the end-users?

The society at large will benefit the most. The improved quality of policies will improve the quality of life, increase efficiency, and direct activities to meaningful purposes. The interaction of researchers and the end-users is improved by developing information structures and practices that are shared by all researchers, policy makers, and stakeholders. In fact, the whole research theme proposal is directed to developing such interaction and information flow. Shared practices promote shared platforms and shared rules of participation. The best rules known for information production are those of science, especially openness and criticism. How such a platform can be developed and what the detailed practices should be are the key questions asked in the research theme proposal.

5. What is the value of the solutions provided by the research for the Finnish economy or otherwise?

It is difficult to measure the value of this cultural change in monetary terms or any other precise metric. In any case, the government, the parliament, and the municipalities make decisions and implement policies worth more than 100 000 million euros per year in Finland. In addition, many policies have indirect (and intended) impacts on activities and efficiencies of the private sector and citizens. If ten per cent of decisions are poor and cost double than other decisions on average, and this research can help to avoid even every tenth of those, the benefits are in the order of milliards of euros. However, the actual benefits are likely to be greater. For example, the policy impacts and implications related to climate change are several milliards of euros per year in Finland. The problems in the policy development during the recent years seem to be related especially in the lack of a coherent, systematic, and robust understanding of this complex area. Such policy support that is envisioned here could prevent poor climate-policy-related investments worth hundreds of millions every year.

See also

• Product management of Opasnet should be written to support applications to the strategic research council.