Fred Phillips

University of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Finance, International, Technology and Entrepreneurship (FITE)

Fellows of the TANDO Institute hold diverse and sometimes opposing opinions. How wonderful! The opinions expressed here by Fellows are their own, and are not necessarily an official stance of TANDO Institute.

My 2021 book Learning and Teaching Aikido (ISBN 978 981 123 057 8) generated questions from readers. Answering their questions spurred still more ideas that might have gone into the book. At first, I circulated the answers and ideas as “supplementary chapters,” by email and DM. Then the number of extra chapters grew and grew. Nothing for it but to...

The problems of over-capacity of zombie firms in China have attracted much attention. However, little is known theoretically, and even less empirically, about the boundaries and causes of zombie enterprises. This article extends a model to identify the characteristics of zombie firms in consideration of supply-side structural reform in China. We fo...

Climate change crises require urgent action and cannot be ignored. As extant technologies cannot solve these crises, no effort should be spared to give green innovations a fast track. Neither democracy nor autocracy appear to be able to do this; neither is an adequate mode of environmental governance. This essay proposes a hybrid mode: Careful auth...

The latest IPCC report forcefully states that immediate, decisive, and large-scale actions are needed to avert climate catastrophe. This essay presumes that democratic governments are best and most desirably positioned to take these actions. Yet in the countries most pivotal to global climate change, significant voting blocs are uninterested in env...

A sizeable literature treats “resilience” without defining it. Seeking to promote resilience from ubiquitous buzzword to managerially useful concept, we focus on situations in which human decision is paramount—organizational, community, and personal resilience—and exclude discussion of, e.g., resilience of fixed infrastructure and of unmanaged natu...

Researchers tend to rely on metaphors to gain initial comprehension of complex systems. However, literature offers little guidance for this strategy. This paper presents criteria for using metaphors responsibly in this arena by applying them to evaluate ecological metaphors related to innovation systems. We develop the idea of innovation ecotone as...

The latest IPCC report forcefully states that immediate, decisive, and large-scale actions are needed to avert climate catastrophe. This essay presumes that democratic governments are best and most desirably positioned to take these actions. Yet in the countries most pivotal to global climate, significant voting blocs are uninterested in environmen...

By reinforcing our past behavior or encouraging us to emulate our peers, social media and e-commerce algorithms channel our attention narrowly. This impedes our ability to perceive and connect diverse trends and phenomena, as our research requires. This essay focuses on one strategy-monitoring popular literature-for remaining unchanneled. The strat...

The paper demonstrates how ITRI (the Industrial Technology Research Institute), an internationally prominent non-profit R&D organization, designs a platform-based open innovation system to capitalize on its efforts toward creating economic and social value. We illustrate a holistic framework spanning idea generation to commercialization, and presen...

It is well known that technological change causes social change, and vice versa. Using system and historical perspectives, this article examines that truth at a finer level of specificity, namely, that social perceptions of interconnectedness influence the progress of science and technology, and that conversely, as 21st-century technology makes us...

In this study we identify the main determinants of perceived strength of intellectual property rights in four developed (Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and five emerging (China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand) Asian countries over the period 2003–2016. We use a panel model with additive unobserved individual-specific...

This essay shows why peace is an ongoing process; why change in social conventions as well as engineering practice are needed to make peace engineering succeed; and why social science expertise, especially in technology assessment, should inform engineering projects. The journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change is set forth as a forum for...

To create a sustainable future, technological innovators must become intentional about their designs, rather than design first and worry later. Though this idea appears straightforward, it requires fundamental changes in engineering education and in channels of product commercialization/valorization. This communication describes the Peace Engineeri...

In the context of global climate change and rapid urbanization, the low-carbon economy has become the fundamental means of achieving sustainable development. To find an effective solution to reduce carbon emissions, it is important to identify the dominant factors contributing to carbon emission intensity (CEI). Based on refined indicators and a dy...

Unlike the many surveys of economic development offices’ budgets and deal flow, the present survey uncovers the rationales for extending relocation incentives and the criteria city officials consider important for making an incentive offer. Using the STEEP approach (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political), we asked a panel of...

The chapter asks, is the future more complicated than it used to be? It seems more complex now because we are inundated with more information every day than ever before, and everything we deal with daily seems to have multiple, confusing aspects. Luckily, we have new tools for making sense of, and managing, this complexity. They are explained in th...

This chapter explores why we might want to know the future. The reasons span the psychological, the organizational, and other spheres of life. One of these spheres has to do with our (and our organizations’) values. The chapter further explores the relation of values to goals, vision, readiness, flexibility, speed, useful forecasting, and backcasti...

The chapter details the relationship between values on the one hand and concepts of the future on the other. Values guide the actions an individual or a company decides upon for pursuing goals and objectives. Goals and objectives, unlike values, can be adjusted.

This chapter introduces the book. It argues that the future is real, and that each individual needs to have a perspective on the future. It introduces several ways human cultures have conceived of time throughout the ages. It explains why uncertainty about the past actually increases our uncertainty about the future.

The chapter abruptly changes direction from quantitative analysis, focusing on the role of imagination in seeing—and creating—our futures. Introducing the idea of socially constructed reality, the chapter returns to the role of myth, showing how our deep-seated myths influence our choices of what technologies to develop. It outlines how companies u...

One way the present dictates the future is when a trend becomes effectively irreversible. The chapter lists a large number of trends that have reached this point of no return and explains why some of these “tipping points” are examples of technology substitution, while others are not.

The chapter explores the extent to which mathematical analysis helps us see the future. It looks at the challenge today’s “big data” presents to our mathematical abilities. Beginning with explanations of linear, logistic (s-shaped), and exponential growth, the chapter notes the limits to growth and where they apply. It introduces the “reaction curv...

The chapter goes into more detail about risk and uncertainty, arguing that we focus too much on the former and not enough on the latter. The chapter clarifies concepts we’ll need for subsequent chapters. These include decision trees, psychology, and social risk. The chapter also highlights decision making, which is tightly entwined with risk and un...

This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of the “future of the future,” or how our evolving view of the future will shape actual futures—and what current events might hobble our ability to foresee. It discusses corporate short-termism, democratizing technologies and wealth inequality, the nature of karma, and finally, happiness.

In this chapter, we return to psychological ideas, portraying the future as a tension between our expectations and unfolding realities. Discussed are the “singularity,” the expected end of Moore’s Law, technological transitions, and the changing role of brands.

This chapter explores whether “experts” can see the future better than ordinary persons. The chapter introduces the Leapfrog Theory of Scientific Advance, and that theory’s implications for the kinds of expertise that must be sought, and developed. It describes the accession of the knowledge economy, noting traditional capitalists’ resistance to th...

Turning what we think we know about the future into public policy is not easy. This chapter delves, if shallowly, into this contentious topic. Specific focuses of the chapter are technology assessment (with autonomous vehicles as a running example), the roles and limitations of free markets, and sustainability. The chapter discusses the disruptive...

The chapter highlights what the humanities and social sciences have to say about our perception of the future. It introduces ideas of meaning, epistemology, phenomenology, determinism, myth, and even Zen. It delves into the question of whether technology or culture is changing more quickly and shows, via the “Circle of Innovation,” how cultural cha...

This chapter deals with applying knowledge of the future to personal and organizational planning. It defines the terms “choice” and “alternative” and demonstrates the relation of forecasting to decision making. Introducing the idea of risk management, it lists ways of minimizing the downside consequences of risk. The chapter proceeds to give brief...

How do we agree and disagree about what the future holds? Business people, technologists, and scientists see different industries advancing, different technologies developing, and different risks emerging as the future plays out. That matters because many of these professionals—say, scientists–are in a position to develop the technologies that will...

This theoretical article presents evidence that companies choose to impose complexity on their customers, rather than comprehend system complexity internally. It argues that externalising complexity in this manner is fundamentally different from the externalisation of costs and risks as usually described in the literature, because its impact is on...

his theoretical essay presents evidence that companies choose to impose complexity on their customers, rather than comprehend system complexity internally. It argues that externalizing complexity in this manner is fundamentally different from the externalization of costs and risks as usually described in the literature, because its impact is on the...

A slide presentation of this material has been well received in several countries. Presenting it here in paragraph form should be helpful to additional authors. The editorial explains the current flow path for incoming submissions to Technological Forecasting & Social Change. It details five areas authors should attend to, in order that their manus...

Usted toma decisiones todos los días; para usted, su familia, su empresa, sus clubes y organizaciones benéficas, y en cuestiones políticas. Desea tomar estas decisiones de manera responsable, con integridad y buen humor, utilizando un conjunto de valores positivos y consistentes. Toma de decisiones con menos ansiedad y menos remordimientos: El Gere...

On Technological Forecasting & Social Change's 50th birthday, the journal's second and current Editor-in-Chief remarks on TF&SC's progress, the changes in the technological, cultural, and geopolitical environments in which the journal operates, TF&SC articles' changing topics and origins, and where future TF&SC volumes may lead.

This book closely examines the concept and theory of 'future' from a multidisciplinary perspective, focusing on the practice of forecasting, especially in its interaction with complexity. It highlights the relations between forecasting, decision-making and strategy, mixing technical arguments (but minimal mathematics) with ideas from psychology and...

The challenges to sustainability governance across multiple geographical/cultural contexts lead us to the “piecemeal engineering” idea advocated by the philosopher Karl Popper, which explicitly considers context. We argue for adopting the piecemeal engineering approach, augmented by adaptive policies and modern (online) collaboration platforms to m...

Sustainable development requires new planning methods that acknowledge many kinds of risks. There is a mismatch between the nature and imperatives of innovation on the one hand, and the prospects of reaching the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), on the other. This conceptual note clarifies the connections among innovation, risk, and sustaina...

Which kind of government intervention is needed to transform scientific and technological knowledge into innovative nascent entrepreneurship? We answer this question by drawing upon the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship and institutional theory. We empirically examined the moderating effect of government intervention on the relation be...

Purpose Using general systems theory, we present a series of simulations that shed light on the viability of business strategies in stable and turbulent business environments. Special attention is given to the impact of efficiency versus flexibility on firm performance, and on what the simulations reveal concerning successful strategies in each env...

We address the rise of the knowledge society, reviewing the major contributors to its conceptualization from Karl Marx onward. Synthesizing their ideas, we characterize the current state and direction of the knowledge society, its connection to related ideas of digital economy, e-government, and others, and detail implications for business and othe...

The entrepreneurial scene suffers from a sick venture capital industry, a number of imponderable illogics, and, maybe, misplaced adulation from students and the public. The paper details these problems, finds root causes, and prescribes action for higher education professionals and institutions.

Synergies among technological opportunities, market perspectives, and geographical endowments can be considered as indicators of systemness. Using information theory, we propose a measure of synergy among size-classes, zip-codes, and NACE-codes for 8.5 million American firms. The synergy at the national level is decomposed at the level of states an...

Many of the lessons learned with what passed for big data in the 1980s still apply today. The lessons have to do with deciding whether something is true or merely useful, the role of human creativity in posing questions, the treatment of hypotheses and the role of theory in data mining, skill development, and organizational dynamics. This essay det...

Kondratieff Laureate Lecture presented at the 10th International Kondratieff Conference “Academic Heritage of N. D. Kondratieff and the Present,” dedicated to the 125th Kondratieff anniversary.

I have been asked to give a very short talk, one that accords with the theme of the Globalistics conference. In doing so, I wish to make a three-point thesis. First, that innovation entails risk, and risk is inseparable from sustainability. Second, that the strong link between innovation and entrepreneurship implies entrepreneurship education and p...

Natural and anthropogenic disasters affect ever‐larger populations. Effective cooperation among aid agencies is key to post‐disaster recovery. Studies in evolutionary game theory suggest two motives for one agency to cooperate with another: the other agency's reputation and the perceived probability of working together again in the future. This mix...

Patents are business and financial assets which can enhance a company’s competitive position. Thus, patent analysis is important for defining business strategies and supporting decision-making in organizations. However, patent analysis can involve vast data sets and are difficult to analyze. The purpose of this study is to apply artificial immune s...

I will address the rise of the knowledge society, and how its progress affects patterns of spatial activity. The knowledge and digital transitions, and the backlashes against them, result in many kinds of spatial tensions, and in renewed migrations. I'll detail several of these, and venture a few predictions – or at least, directions for research.

By highlighting the efficiencies gained from regional specialization, the cluster concept has distracted economic development officials from their traditional role of diversifying regional and local economies. Clustering was a viable strategy for much of the 18 years following its original appearance in the literature. Now, two events cast doubt on...

Traditional models of innovation are predominantly linear, featuring only very limited feedback loops. This paper builds on a high-level cycle of feedback between technical innovation and social change. In this grand cycle, technological innovation brings about new products but also new ways of using products and services. These in turn change our...

Each day brings technological innovations in fields such as energy, biotechnology, and data security. Many of them will make a global impact, yet we do not know in what ways they will help or endanger us. Technology assessment (TA) attempts to foresee the social and human impacts of innovations. Globalization, information technology, and new manage...

![Figure][1] One or two replications of a study result cannot definitively support or reject a hypothesis. IMAGES: SEKULICN/[ISTOCKPHOTO.COM][2] In his Policy Forum “Aligning statistical and scientific reasoning” (3 June, p. [1180][3]), S. N. Goodman cautions against using P values to

Economic, political, and demographic changes, technological advances, two crashes of the economy, ethical scandals, and other developments in the business environment have strained the roles and enrollments of American universities' business schools. The b-schools have not responded adequately. Prevailing theories in many of the management discipli...

We examine whether the 'strategic inflection points' described by former Intel CEO Andy Grove correspond to mathematical inflection points in the product/technology life cycle. We find one sense in which they do and two senses in which they do not. This leads to a mapping of colloquial uses of inflection point, tipping point, volatility, chaos, and...

Globalization and information/communication technology, as well as new modes of assessment, have opened new prospects for the practice of technology assessment. These prospects hold the potential for realizing the technology assessment role that has long been recommended for UNESCO and other United Nations agencies. They may also solve the problem...

Since their first meeting in 1991, the authors have enjoyed a friendly dialog centered around topics of interest to the journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Now, five years after Phillips succeeded Linstone as Editor-in-Chief of the journal, we recap the driving ideas that have characterized the partnership.The ideas span areas of sys...

WTR articles to date have addressed raising innovation capacity in lagging regions. We now move to the question of sharing the benefits of specific innovations, noting that one way to do this is to focus on a particular technology as a demonstration project within a capacity-building project. The word “sharing” implies mechanisms that go beyond sim...

Earlier in addressing the issue of having models-talk-to-models through computers, we had introduced the concept of a model ontology. [1] We next applied this to economic models, which need to communicate information between economic processes; and we examined how the concept of perfect information in economic markets did not fit financial market r...

The German Mittelstand model of the triple helix has been important for facilitating the innovation of small medium enterprises (SMEs) in Germany. Fraunhofer Institutes have provided an innovation intermediary between university research and SME technology. We address the issue of adapting a Mittelstand triple helix from the German national culture...

The light-emitting diode (LED) sources have become the first efficiency recommendation and one of the top sustainability measures in building a sustainable economy and eco-friendly society. The emergence and rapid development of latecomers to low-carbon LED technology in Asia has shifted the oligopolistic structure that had been appropriated by the...

This paper analyzes the role of social capital in entrepreneurial RIS (Regional Innovation Systems). We disaggregate the features of mature entrepreneurial RIS into three dimensions of social capital: structural, relational, and cognitive. We apply these features of mature entrepreneurial RIS to the still-evolving entrepreneurial RIS from East Asia...

This chapter will use five cases to examine the role of government–industry–academic cooperation on the development of technology clusters, research parks, and metropolitan-area technopoleis like Austin or Silicon Valley. We find that triple helix cooperation is necessary in deliberate cluster initiatives (as opposed to spontaneously formed cluster...

The chapter offers observations on what makes a technopolis sustainable, and how a technopolis contributes to the sustainability of society outside the technopolis’ boundaries. Each technopolis project must attend to sustainability in the scientific/engineering arena, in the social arena, and in the arena of environment and the triple bottom line....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the question: What shall we measure? and offers preliminary answers. Data for innovation management and policy must be valid, reliable, relevant and actionable. Design and approach – The paper examines trends within finance, environment and institutions and society, all with regard to innovation an...

Disaster response requires cooperation among many aid agencies, some of which may never have worked together in the past. What enables such agencies to rapidly establish the trust and cooperative behavior necessary for effectively aiding victims of a disaster? Literature presents two main candidates for the enabling mechanism: Probability assessmen...

This paper positions the triple-Helix as a meso-level notion, an epicycle in a grander circle of technological change, institutional change, and psychological change. Because of the differing speeds of these several kinds of change, speed is proposed as a high-level system metric. This implies that what we commonly call bridging agencies or facilit...

Six years of UNESCO-World Technopolis Association workshops, held at various world cities and attended by government officials and scholars from nearly all the world’s countries, have resulted in a uniquely complete collection of reports on science park and science city projects in most of those countries. These reports, of which a selected few for...

The US financial meltdown has changed companies' situations not just fundamentally but pervasively. Institutions and channels of supply and communication have disappeared or become unreliable; we are literally managing in chaos, and traditional notions of strategy, planning, and implementation must be (temporarily, it is to be hoped) discarded. Thi...

As is well known, research on the challenge of having computers communicate with computers led eventually to the technology of the Internet, and the Internet changed the world. So too it may be possible that attaining the capability of models communicating with models will alter the world of policy making. A methodological problem occurs in this ap...

The author’s career in systems began in 1971 at General Motors Research Laboratories, where he was told to replicate the Club of Rome model, and continues now as he edits the Elsevier journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Highlights included years working with Ilya Prigogine; graduating from Abe Charnes’ Center for Cybernetic Studies a...

The author’s career in systems began in 1971 at General Motors Research Laboratories, where he was told to replicate the Club of Rome model, and continues now as he edits the Elsevier journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Highlights included years working with Ilya Prigogine; graduating from Abe Charnes’ Center for Cybernetic Studies a...

There is now a substantial literature (Phillips 2006; Westlund 2006; Rutten and Boekema 2007) on the rôle of social capital in regional technology economies. This paper will put this knowledge into a form that is useful for tech-nopolis planners, and will extend it to additional socio-cultural considerations for technopolis. This paper emphasizes t...

In this quasi-longitudinal study, 389 US respondents reported their current attitudes and recollections of their attitudes of five years earlier on the same questions. Respondents were separate samples of corporate executives and 'ordinary consumers'. A contribution of this study is the clear and separate measurement of (trends in) attitudes on pub...

This study uses the European Patent Office worldwide patent database and applies two-stage interactive data collection methods to reveal the evolving technological interdependence for China's emerging biofuel industry. Three findings are excerpted from our empirical results. First, due to dominant patterns of business ownership, China's biofuel tec...