The OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 reviews key trends in science, technology and innovation (STI) policy in OECD countries and major partner economies. This edition comes at a time of accelerating technological change, intensifying geopolitical tensions and urgent demands for transformative responses to economic and societal challenges.
The Outlook shows the importance of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of STI policies as they aim to tackle broad goals and multiple priorities in a context of growing resource constraints. STI policies should leverage synergies among goals, deploying complementary policy measures, promoting cross-government cooperation, and fostering public-private funding models.
A central theme of this edition is how countries can reconfigure scientific cooperation in an increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape, ensuring the openness that drives scientific advances while simultaneously protecting economic security concerns. Another is how science systems themselves must adapt – with new institutional arrangements, skills and incentives, if they are to contribute effectively to transformative change through more multi-disciplinary approaches.
The Outlook also explores the growing convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing, which are reshaping innovation processes and demand novel types of policy support. It highlights the potential of more granular approaches that better appreciate industrial structures and assess the impact of policy interventions to mobilise diverse actors around shared missions. It also shows how governments can strengthen their capacity for foresight, policy experimentation and strategic intelligence to remain agile in the face of uncertainty.
Taken together, these insights underline that STI policy is at a turning point. The ability of governments to mobilise science, technology and innovation for transformative change, while navigating geopolitical pressures and rapid technological shifts, will be decisive in shaping the future.