Institute For The Future

Visit to the James Martin Institute

One of the places I visited when I was in England was the new James Martin Institute, a center for the study of science, civilization, and the future.

As a recent article from Cordis reports,

 

A new research centre has been established at Oxford University in the UK with the aim of tackling the greatest problems facing the world today.

The James Martin 21st Century School aims to achieve this goal in an 'innovative and imaginative way', by giving Oxford University scholars the resources and time to think imaginatively about the problems and opportunities that the future will bring....

The school will be funded with an indefinite annual endowment of GBP 3 million, provided by the digital technologies expert James Martin. Dr Martin says: 'Mankind faces huge challenges as the 21st century unfolds. It is essential that our leading thinkers commit time, energy and resources now to finding solutions to these risks and problems which could threaten the future of humanity itself.'

According to its website, the school structure comprises a hub and changeable spokes. The hub will consist of the school's director, a small administrative staff, and around ten James Martin Fellows from within and outside the university, supported through the James Martin fellowship scheme.

The spokes consist of research institutes, each undertaking leading edge research in their own subject area. With the exception of the James Martin institute for science and civilisation, which will play a key role in pulling all the work of the other spokes together, funding for the institutes has been granted for three years on the basis of project outlines with clearly defined objectives.

Examples of the institutes that will initially be funded are the institute for the future of the mind, led by Baroness Susan Greenfield, the Oxford institute of ageing, led by Dr Sarah Harper, and the environmental change institute led by Professor Diana Liverman.

The types of challenges that these academics will try to address include environmental problems such as climate change, extreme inequalities in wealth, world population growth and distribution, global food shortages, rapid technological change and various forms of outright warfare or internecine armed conflict.

 

A couple things make the Martin Institute particularly interesting.

First, it's located within the new Said Business School, rather than a more conventional humanities or social sciences department, or in one of the colleges. Partly this is a reflection of the fact that James Martin, the principal benefactor of the new institute, is an entrepreneur. Its institutional location also signals a real desire to do stuff, and bring together people from the academic, business, and policy worlds.

Second, several Martin faculty or associates have unusually diverse backgrounds in anthropology, environmental science, or science studies, which makes it more appropriate an institutional environment than you'd expect. I gave a talk there last week, and the crowd included people as different as Theodore Zeldin, a noted French historian and president of Oxford Muse, sociologist-turned-marketer Steve Woolgar, and Shell forecast veteran and GBN member Rafael Ramirez.

I think we're going to do some work with them this fall around our project on the future of science and technology.