This “Trend-Analysis of Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for BNCTs” aims to analyse policies pertaining to nanotechnology and biotechnology over the past years with regard to their directionality and technology-specificity.

The analysis provides some evidence that technology-push policies are favoured for young technology fields, while application-pull policies tend to be applied to more mature fields. In technology-specific policies, the percentage of pure application-pull policies is much lower than that observed for general STI policies. Most individual STI policies are technology-specific in their title or description. Most general STI policies also mention a specific technology and are thus applicable to both the field of general STI and the field of the respective technology. In the case of biotechnology, nanotechnology and ICT, by contrast, at least one third of the policies are unique to the respective field, and only up to a quarter are shared with any other technology field.