Data on the global composition of the position, navigation, and timing, quantum computing, and computer vision sectors provides direction for policymakers and value to the process of identifying targets for private sector outreach, understanding security threats that stem from technological competition, identifying foreign partners for a global technology management strategy, and assessing impacts related to changing entity structures.
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The research team analyzed the sectoral composition of three emerging technology sectors: position, navigation, and timing; quantum computing; and computer vision, chosen due to their level of emergence and security relevance. In particular they looked for patterns, trends, and lessons regarding how the trajectory of these sectors can provide practical lessons on to deploy export and investment controls as part of a comprehensive technology management strategy.
“Following the U.S. Export Control Reform Act (ECRA), the focus on properly balancing economic competitiveness, national security, and technological advancement has become a priority for policymakers. The data, analysis, and findings in this report shed light on how these factors can be managed for three critical technologies. Our team hopes that the report contributes to dialogue for each of the three technologies as well as the issue of global technology policy-making at large,” says Lindsay Rand, CISSM researcher and lead author of the report.
Current approaches to emerging technology policy-making can benefit from the report’s hard data on foreign availability, private sector trends, and comparative analysis, as well as help forecast future sectoral development and how outreach resources should be used. Report findings on the differences between the three technology areas informs how a strategic trade control approach can be applied to each of them, taking into account the variations in global dispersion and market trends.
"A lesson from our study is that data from the sectoral composition of different technology sectors demonstrates the dangers of overestimating perceived threats to technological dominance and overuse of controls that can damage competitiveness,” says co-author Andrea Viski, Director of the Strategic Trade Research Institute.
“For example, many existing PNT technologies are already commercially available, but there are new research approaches in a nascent stage, such as cold atom, nuclear magnetic resonance, and other atom interferometry approaches to navigation, under the umbrella of quantum navigation approaches. These emerging PNT platforms have many dual-use applications, and their early stage of development makes it more possible to control dispersion.”