Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

by Klaus Schwab

Governance leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution means exploring new, more agile, adaptive and anticipatory governance approaches.

The ultimate purpose of the Center is to catalyze a network of similar institutions and activities in all regions around the world to provide national, multistakeholder, co-ownership of the issues presented by new technologies.

Values leadership Systems leadership is more than investing in better technology leadership and new models of governance. To generate the momentum and illuminate the importance of working together, leaders also need to address the Fourth Industrial Revolution from a values-based perspective.

The discussion of values can be complicated, but the existence of different perspectives, incentives and cultural contexts does not mean a lack of common ground. No matter our agendas, the importance of preserving the planet for future generations, the value of human life, the international principles of human rights, and a sincere concern for global commons issues can serve as starting points for recognizing that the true ends of technological development are ultimately and always the planet and its people.

To put it simply, the way forward in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is through a renaissance that is human-centered.

we defined human-centered as empowering individuals and communities, providing them with meaning and ...

this means attending to the impact of technology on our broader environmental and social systems, and ensuring that emerging technologies support the Sustainable Development Goals as well as economic institutions ...

Being human-centered also requires protecting and enhancing the rights of citizens within and across countries, particularly those with...

driving a human-centered agenda means enhancing the ability of individuals to construct meaning in their lives on a daily basis.

Formulating a values-based approach to technology means recognizing the political nature of technologies, putting societal values forward as priorities, and thinking deeply about how an organization contributes to the values that become part of the technologies we produce and use to mediate social and economic exchange.

Everyone has the responsibility to contribute to systems leadership. But the varied roles of stakeholders create different opportunities for governments, businesses and individuals to invest in specific strategies.

Strategy 1: Adopt agile governance approaches The most urgent task facing governments is to open the space for new approaches to technology governance.

Agile governance is an essential strategy to adapt how policies are generated, deliberated, enacted and enforced to create better governance outcomes in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Governments must work hard to overcome a number of risks or even contradictions in seeking to become more agile.

the unique responsibilities placed on governments mean that agile governance should not sacrifice rigor, effectiveness and representativeness for speed alone.

Agile governance can also support more sustainable policies in the long term, enabling the constant monitoring and more frequent “upgrading” of policies, as well as supporting the enforcement of policies, sharing the workload with the private sector and civil society to maintain relevant checks and balances.

But what does agile governance actually look like? Models of governance adapted for the Fourth Industrial Revolution that governments should explore, catalyze or pilot include:

Creating policy labs—protected spaces within government with an explicit mandate to experiment with new methods of policy development by using agile principles, such as the UK Cabinet Office’s Policy Lab219

Encouraging collaborations between governments and businesses to create “developtory sandboxes” and “experimental testbeds” to develop regulations using iterative, cross-sectoral and flexible approaches, as discussed by Geoff Mulgan

Supporting crowdsourcing policy and regulatory content to create more inclusive and participatory rule-making processes, as in the example of CrowdLaw, a platform designed to enable the public to propose legislation, draft bills, monitor implementation and supply data to support new laws or amending existing ones

Promoting the development of ecosystems of private regulators, competing in markets to deliver quality governance in line with overarching social goals, as proposed by Gillian Hadfield in Rules for a Flat World 222

Developing, popularizing and requiring the adoption of principles of innovation to guide researchers, entrepreneurs and commercial organizations receiving public funding, from the idea of Responsible Innovation223 developed by Richard Owen and others, to the Principles for Sustainable Innovation proposed by Hilary Sutcliffe

Promoting the integration of public engagement, scenario-based foresight approaches and social science and humanistic scholarship into science and research efforts, as proposed by David H. Guston’s Anticipatory Governance model

Supporting the role of global coordinating bodies to provide oversight, spur public debate and evaluate the ethical, legal, social and economic impacts of emerging technologies,

Fostering new approaches to technology assessment that combine far greater public deliberation and participation, with acknowledgment and reflection of the values, incentives and politics influencing decision-making in both research and commercialization, as proposed by Rodemeyer, Sarewitz and Wilsdon

Incorporating the principles espoused by the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software and Society (2014–2016) in “A Call for Agile Governance Principles,” which are meant to “improve efficiency, public services and public welfare, better equipping government agencies to respond to change”

Strategy 2: Work across boundaries The second strategy that governments must urgently pursue is an essential complement to the pursuit of agile governance—investing in working in new ways across traditional sectoral, institutional and geographical boundaries.

Neither the deployment nor the impact of the technologies described in Section 2 is limited to any one domain or jurisdiction. As discussed extensively in The Fourth Industrial Revolution, this means that the existence of disciplinary and institutional boundaries—whether between research areas, ministries or organizational departments—can reduce, rather than enhance, the efficiency and effectiveness of response by governments. Silos can be broken.

One new model of cross-sector collaboration seeks to overcome these limits in the humanitarian space by proposing public-private data-sharing agreements that “break glass in case of emergency.”

Strategies for stakeholders: What should businesses do? Strategy 1: Learn by doing and invest in people The most important strategy for business leaders is to experiment. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is still in its early stages, and the potential of new technologies is far from fully understood.

Businesses need a minimum viable appreciation of new technologies to see the bigger picture and opportunities that may lie at the periphery. Businesses must lean in and be curious, take time to learn about progress in different fields and be willing to trial new technologies. Only by directly experimenting with technologies can organizations see for themselves what they can do.

Experimenting brings perspective, revealing not only what technologies can do but also what they cannot: some technological solutions are widely hyped but may not be worth greater investment. Experimenting can provide some idea of when and at what scale the technology is appropriate.

Strategy 2: Adopt and engage in new governance approaches Businesses must closely examine the ways in which their internal leadership and external collaboration link to the use of new technologies and shape how they are conceived, sourced, developed, deployed, integrated and maintained.

Beyond their own organizational structures, businesses must be willing to engage in concerted, intentional action to nurture new norms around managing and developing technologies, such as the kind of multistakeholder governance efforts described above.

Businesses must put together robust cyber-risk strategies to protect assets, develop competencies and build trust among their stakeholders and customers.

Strategy 3: Develop and implement technologies with opportunities in mind Finally, and fundamentally, businesses must reframe how they think about technological development. Going far beyond R&D and product development, they must try to envision the future in which these technologies, either as resource or product, play a role—and think critically about how their organizational cultures could impact others through the process of development, acquisition or deployment of these technologies.

Adopting this strategy will enable businesses to go a long way toward building trust with consumers and regulators.

Strategies for stakeholders: What should individuals do? Strategy 1: Explore, experiment and envision Individuals, like businesses, need to be willing to familiarize themselves with new technologies.

Making sure to learn about what is happening behind the interface and service delivery aspects of digital technologies is crucial for individuals to build and share experiences that can be fed back to businesses and policy-makers representing community stakeholder perspectives, desires and values.

Exploring and experimenting with technologies also means thinking about the kind of future we want to create, and we must all remember that the future belongs to the upcoming generations.

Strategy 2: Be political Individuals are, ultimately, the people who will live in the future that technologies help to create.

When individuals develop their own aspirational vision of the future, they can respond politically to how technologies are being developed and adopted—deciding whether to take a position and voice their feelings.

During the last 50 years, we have become increasingly aware of the mutually transformative relationship between our societies and the technologies they produce.

The first two industrial revolutions and two world wars showed us that technologies are far more than just a set of machinery, tools or systems linked to production and consumption.

Technologies are powerful actors that shape social perspectives and our values. They require our attention precisely because we build our economies, societies and world views through them. They shape how we interpret the world, how we se...

The issues we are facing at the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as the impact of automation, the ethical implications of AI and the social ramifications of genetic engineering, have been a part of social consciousness since at least the 1960s, when nuclear, genetic and space technologies ...

Short-term expectations exceeded the capabilities of the time but, thanks to the maturity of digital capabilities through the third Industrial Revolution, they have recently emerged as realities that are fast becoming part of da...

Luckily, academic research and foresight practice have developed analytical tools and helpful sociological perspectives over the last 50 years to better understand how technolog...

Indeed, sensitivity to how technologies instigate widespread social transformation and how values are embedded in the technologies we create has helped us discern the signals of the o...

Acting appropriately in this complex space requires a new perspective on technology that appreciates the many facets of technological change and seeks to apply the insights from this perspective at the personal and organizational levels.