A Milestone Birthday of Professor Miles

Ian Douglas Miles, DSocSci, Professor of Technological Innovation and Social Change at MIoIR, University of Manchester (UK), and Head of HSE ISSEK Research Laboratory for Economics of Innovation, is known as a classical author of books / publications on futures studies, STI policy, service economy and Knowledge Intensive Business Services. He is a cheerful and warmhearted person, who has put tremendous effort into research to make life easier for the society and continues to generously share his knowledge and experience with everyone. We are happy to congratulate our colleague on his birthday!

Exploring in depth the nature of global challenges, Professor Miles suggests that the search for solutions should not be limited to the technological sphere alone. The cutting-edge R&D may both benefit and threaten the society, so it’s important to take into account challenges to the environment and social aspects of technology development.

We’d like to recall some of Professor Miles’ commentaries about his personal way and research career.

On starting his academic career

“My progress was straightforward, if unusual. My father bought us a comic to read, whose lead story was about the epic adventures of space explorers, which fascinated me considerably; so I read through the astronomy section of our local public library. Next on was extraterrestrials and UFOs, and I progressed through those books and other fields (like anomalies and occultism) to wind up in psychology. This seemed like a more plausible line of work than being a cosmonaut — and did not mean having to join the military, so it was psychology for me! But at University, psychology seemed to be too much to do with rats, and I was still very interested in future technologies — so I wound up working on social and economic aspects of innovation.”

On the beginning of work at HSE

“We have had a collaboration with people at the HSE for quite a few years now. We began by talking informally, we’ve had a number of exchanges, mutual visits, discussing topics which are very much at the heart of my interests and the interests of other colleagues in Manchester as well: foresight studies, innovation research, innovation policy and evaluation issues. We had developed a habit of collaborating over quite a few years. And my reasons for coming here are several: first of all, the people that I’ve met were clearly very, very active, they had a very substantial amount of research that they were conducting, they had very good sources of data and they were doing very clever things with the work. So, I was naturally interested in collaborating with them.”

On the most expected technological breakthroughs

 

On how foresight helps to form a common vision of the future



Read more:

Miles I. D., Saritas O., Sokolov A. Foresight for Science Technology and Innovation. Netherlands : Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2016. doi

and other publications by Professor Miles.