And now, here is the technology forecast: Time and again, Japan has shown an ability to exploit new technology before anyone else. Britain is about to adopt the Japanese model for picking promising areas for research - battery storage systems

By William Bonin in a quick
Changing the world, it is difficult to predict whether people will listen to music on CDs, digital tapes or other systems next year, let alone predict which technologies will shape the global economy in decades.
However, this is what William valdgrave is about to try.
In his white paper published in May, the Minister of Science announced a number of shameless crystal ball gaze plans.
The event, known as the Technology Outlook program, is based on the idea of developing a technical list that promises the UK's greatest social and economic benefits over the next five to twenty years.
Waldegrave hopes that governments, industry and academia can work together to take advantage of these opportunities.
For his plan, the minister of science needs to convince business people and scientists to play their role.
But with the government in debt, the task may be much more difficult than he initially thought.
The programme will be a difficult task. Walde-
The grave technology office will seek advice from thousands of scientists and businessmen.
They will be asked to identify areas of research that may produce new products, as well as markets with high demand for new products.
OST hopes that by the end of next year, there may be more than a dozen key technical areas in the reply.
It would be an expensive expense to spend more than £ 1.
But identifying these technologies is only part of a very broad purpose.
As the white paper says: "The purpose is to achieve key cultural change: better communication, interaction and mutual understanding between the scientific community, industry and government --ment.
Waldgrave saw these three.
His core goal is to create wealth-science.
Technology Foresight is the means by which he chooses to forget this partnership.
The technology was first used in this way by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in the 1970 s.
Some American companies had used it before that, but MITI added two new elements.
Instead of having the panel make predictions, it gets input from thousands of people through questionnaires.
Instead of focusing on a narrow field of research, it involves the whole field of science.
Japan called the exercise a "delay" and repeated it every five years.
According to Ben Martin of the Science Policy Research Department at the University of Sussex and the author of the OST outlook Technology Review, Delphi is one of the policies that have helped Japan's economy succeed in recent years.
He said the Japanese have been doing this for more than 20 years.
"They will not continue to do something for them that is not of any benefit.
"The UK project will be carried out in a way similar to Delphi and has a clear Japanese feel about it.
The slogan of the new project is consultation, consensus and cooperation, not the secret and competition of many studies in the UK.
OST has looked into how to do this exercise in detail.
But the key to the success of the project is how the government will use the final list, which is still a rough question.
In Japan, the technical field highlighted by Delphi exercise has become the target of specialized, pre-competitive research.
MITI usually spends half the money on projects and interested companies.
The participating companies shared the results, and then the competition turned the research to marketable products.
The advanced battery power storage system project is a typical example.
Since 1980, the project and its follow-up projects aim to develop new technologies for batteries that produce 1 MW or more of electricity.
The annual budget for the project is 1. 082 billion yen (£ 7 million ).
Most of the money came from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, but most of the research was conducted in laboratories of 11 cooperative companies, including Hitachi and Toshiba.
MITI reserves control over patents arising from research it funds and sells licenses to Japanese companies so that new technologies become widely available.
Companies that continue to develop commercial applications retain their own patents.
Last year, two companies in the advanced battery project began research and development of cheaper and more efficient batteries.
The research aimed at bringing products to market was not supported by MITI.
In the UK, it is still unclear whether the government intends to fund projects similar to Japan's advanced batteryresearch project.
But companies interested in the UK think it should.
Keith Mansford said: "Otherwise, the company will realize that it may just be pushing responsibility to the industry-the government has told the industry what to do, it is now funded by the industry.
Martin agreed: "Elsewhere, the government has also provided some kind of incentive in carrying out forward-looking activities.
"On December 1991, at a meeting of the cabinet science subcommittee chaired by the prime minister, the Foresight plan was initially motivated.
It decided that there was room for a modest increase in funding in the pre-competitive study of new technologies and set up a civil service group to look at how the money could be used.
The group has decided to support "universal" technologies that have many potential applications in many different industries and companies.
This definition avoids the government's aversion to "proximity" to funds.
Market research may only make a profit for one company.
In the view of civil servants, the most predictable scheme is to identify general technology.
In the past year, the government has turned the concept into a workaholic.
It commissioned Martin to review the outlook programmes around the world and to conduct pilot work and detailed plans for the implementation of the UK programme.
While the path forward for technology foresight now looks clear, not everything goes as planned.
Since ministers first discussed the toughest issue of increasing spending, the government has fallen into heavy debt.
In December 1991, the total amount of government borrowing was only 10 pounds. 5 billion.
There are now 5 billion.
According to OST, any new funding for developing technology must come from the existing scientific budget.
In other words, this modest enhancement is a mistake in the entire foreseeable work and is now gone.
Ambitious plans on how to use the final list of technology foresight programs have now been scaled down.
Officially, the results of the study will be used by the OST to decide how to share the scientific budget with the research committee to make "information" spending decisions in other government departments, and encourage the industry to take advantage of vision more than it is now.
OST hopes that after the key technologies have been identified, Japan-
Style cooperation between the government and the industry-like advanced battery projects-will follow.
This still does not answer the question of where the funds for such projects come from.
In the past, the Ministry of Trade and Industry has funded this type of program.
But after the white paper was published, then-minister of technology Edward Leigh announced that they would withdraw funds from projects that develop new technologies.
The main victims of this decision are advanced technology programmes that support research in areas such as manufacturing technology, which are likely to be highlighted by the outlook programme.
The only thing that makes money is the science budget.
But it will upset scientists who are worried that the foundation will sacrifice in the pursuit of wealth creation.
So when Waldgrave tried to build a partnership with industry and academia, the technology outlook project gave him an awkward choice. Fund Japanese-
By conducting style collaborations through research committees, upsetting scientists, or refusing to fund collaborations, the case industry is unlikely to play a role in such collaborations.
In any case, the disappearance of the worst increase in funding may have less impact on waldegrave's ability to build a new partnership.
* The consulting oracle Technology Outlook program will be managed by a steering committee appointed by the Office of Science and Technology that divides science and technology into nine to ten areas, such as biotechnology and materials.
For each area, the Commission will appoint about six experts who will recruit other panelists.
Each group is designed to represent different interests in its field, from young Laboratory scientists to professors and marketing managers.
The group will then draft a questionnaire for their area to raise questions about the "feasibility" and "attractiveness" of the new technology.
The feasibility includes not only whether it is technically possible to develop, but also whether British researchers are strong in this area.
Attractiveness depends on the level of demand for products and the ability of UK companies to make products.
Steve Bone of Cambridge Consulting last year launched a pilot project for OST focusing on information storage and retrieval-how computers access data.
For example, the questionnaire included "development of logic circuit devices with a switching speed of 1 second or less ".
Asked how many years it will take to develop these devices, how well the UK is prepared to develop them, and whether the key constraints of development are social, technological, economic, ecological or political.
In the process of full foresight, questionnaires will be widely distributed.
These responses will be summarized and responded together with the results commissioned to conduct research on the possible size of the relevant emerging markets.
Respondents will then be asked to change their views based on the views of others.
This process can be repeated four times.
In the end, consensus should be reached.
Finally, each selected technology will be graded according to the criteria, such as the possibility of successful use of these technologies in the UK, and the ability of companies to protect inventions through patents or copyrights.
The higher the score, the more valuable the technology is.
Critics of the plans argue that other countries have attracted experts on key technologies in the future, and they tend to be similar.
These lists are unlikely to be wrong, so why not use them and save time and money for the British to exercise themselves?
First of all, OST said that the UK list may be different, because technology will only be included if the UK has scientific knowledge in this field and there is industry to use it.
Secondly, the process of making a list is as important as the list itself.
It is valuable to have scientists, business people and ministers talk about the possibilities of the future.
If the three parties agree on the road ahead, the chances of success will increase.