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This special issue explores the vulnerabilities of national innovation systems (NIS) which were exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent policy responses. New technologies and solutions were needed such as new drugs, medical equipment, and treatments, and new innovative institutions, organizations, and capabilities were needed to respond quickly, develop, and offset the acute demand. While some policy responses were effective, others fell short or were completely absent. The phenomenon provided a unique opportunity to uncover how governments and industry sought to mitigate the negative impacts and to prepare for future crises by building more resilient NIS. The five articles included in this special issue identify some of the vulnerabilities of NIS, suggesting that greater research on the resilience of NIS is needed if we were to weather future crises more effectively. Subsequent policy implications for innovation systems are drawn to address the vulnerabilities highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science, Technology & Society (STS) graduate programs primarily train graduate students to work in tenure track academic jobs. However, there are not enough tenure track academic jobs to match the supply of STS graduate students, nor does every STS graduate student want to become an academic. As a start to addressing these challenges, we hosted workshops before the 2017 Society for the Annual Meeting of the Society Studies of Science and the 2018 ST Global conference. In those workshops, panelists with PhDs in STS and related fields and working in non-academic faculty careers such as government agencies, non-profit foundations, and industry emphasized that students must showcase how their skills are useful to non-academic organizations. The panelists offered a wealth of stories on how their STS perspective supported their careers, yet most had faced implicit and explicit mentoring from STS faculty that ran counter to their career aspirations. The conversations centered on reframing research and conveying to potential employers how their STS training would support their future careers. A takeaway point that resonated with many participants was the need for STS graduate programs to rethink how they market themselves, recruit students, and critically reflect upon the measures of success. By implicitly steering graduate students solely towards an academic career, STS graduate training will miss an opportunity to make a positive impact on society.

Despite calls to address global challenges through community engagement, engineers are not formally prepared to engage with communities. Little research has been done on means to address this "engagement gap" in engineering education. We examine the efficacy of an intensive, two-day Community Engagement Workshop for engineers, designed to help engineers better look beyond technology, listen to and learn from people, and empower communities. We assessed the efficacy of the workshop in a non-experimental pre-post design using a questionnaire and a concept map. Questionnaire results indicate participants came away better able to ask questions more broadly inclusive of non-technological dimensions of engineering projects. Concept map results indicate participants have a greater understanding of ways social factors shape complex material systems after completing the programme. Based on the workshop's strengths and weaknesses, we discuss the potential of expanding and supplementing the programme to help engineers account for social aspects central to engineered systems.

Broader impacts (BI) policies generate debate on the purpose of science, measuring the impact of research, and is an important topic for the science policy community. However, BI policies often fail to determine if R&D funding helps marginalized communities. This paper introduces a new framework, the Inclusion-Immediacy Criterion, that assesses who benefits from research impacts as divided into three groups: (1) advantaged groups; (2) the general population; and (3) marginalized groups. The study analyzes National Science Foundation (NSF) project outcome reports and finds that advantaged groups are the most likely to benefit from NSF-funded research. The study also shows that certain areas of NSF research, such as Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, more efficiently generate impacts for marginalized groups compared to other directorates. This paper further argues that persistent inequalities in BIs limit the potential of R&D to increase prosperity and well-being, two of NSF's mandated goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]