Examining Multi-actor Ecosystems Rise and Governance of Emerging Technologies - EMERGENC

Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management

Organisation / Company Polytechnic University of Bari Department Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management Is the Hosting related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Emerging technologies are increasingly central to societal transformation, economic competitiveness, and policy agendas, yet they pose considerable governance and management challenges as their prospective socio-economic impact remains uncertain and ambiguous, and distributed across multiple actors in innovation ecosystems. While considerable progress has been made in defining and detecting emerging technologies, less is known about the inter-organisational processes through which they are shaped over time.

This project aims to address this gap by examining how the range of organisational actors involved in the emergence of a technology (including firms, universities, public research organisations, governmental agencies, and non-governmental organisations) interact during different phases of emergence to develop the technology and reduce its uncertainty and ambiguity. Drawing on institutional theory, network theory and the innovation ecosystem framework, the project will therefore shed light on how inter-organisational collaboration patterns evolve during technological emergence and how these dynamics shape the directionality of technologies.

The project will integrate multiple large-scale data sources to map the different dimensions of technological activity across case studies from different application domains. Established data, such as scientific publications and patent data, will be integrated with emerging data sources, such as text corpora from websites, policy documents, press releases, and social media. Network modelling techniques will be adopted to study inter-organisational networks, and AI-based techniques will be applied to annotate and extract patterns from the range of data sources.

The project will contribute to a deeper understanding of how institutional diversity and collaboration patterns influence emerging technology, while the integration between structured data with less structured and rapidly evolving web-based sources will allow for methodological advancement in the study of emerging technologies, hence improving the timeliness of strategic intelligence.

The project will rely on extended network of collaborators at various leading research organisations including SPRU at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), the Georgia Institute of Technology (United States), and the VTT Technical Research Centre (Finland).

• to have a PhD by the call deadline.
• to have up to 8 years of research experience after PhD.
• to be citizens of an EU State or of an Associated Country.
• not to have resided or carried out their main activity in Italy for more than 12 months in the 36 months before the call deadline.