Policy Gap in Science and Technology Policy Analyses: Promoting Innovation in Conflict with Technology Risk

This paper is a critical view to two mainstream approaches to technology regulation and their sufficiency in providing functional models for policy-making in this field. On the one hand, the literature on innovation and its special attention to the role of new technologies and how to regulate them is putting forward different perspectives. On the other hand, the extensive discussion on managing the risk of new technologies through government regulation represents another major approach to technology regulation. The present critical appraisal shall reveal that both of them are confronting serious shortcomings in providing functional policy models and in guiding the real decisions of policy makers; this is mainly because of their restrictive assumptions. While policy makers need models to help them in assessing the risks and benefits of technologies simultaneously, the innovation models are merely focused on the beneficial aspects of technology as opposited to the risk models that are mainly conceraed with the risk of new human products. Then, the discussion leads to the epistemological difficulties inherent in developing such models that pave the way for suggesting a new model at the end of the paper.