EiC Interviews

Information for Regional Innovation Systems

Fred Phillips
University of New Mexico
United States

Research Career

- How long have you been in academia? What made you to choose this career?

Thanks for these interesting questions. After completing my PhD in 1978, I took a job in industry, returning to academia in 1988 or ’89. As a youngster, I had wanted a career that would help uncover big truths. The only paths that suited were investigative journalism or research science. After I met and was mentored by a prominent professor who planted me on the PhD track, the path narrowed to science. In college and grad school, then, I expected to become a professor. The industry career was an accident, but a beneficial one.

- What made you to choose your current area of specialization?

I had majored in mathematics and management science. When I returned to academia, my dean said, “You know, Fred, what you were doing at that company was really technology management.” This was true only if you torturously stretch the definition. The dean was conning me; he just needed someone to teach the tech management courses. However, I soon realized that I loved my new subject more than anything I’d studied previously.

- Can you tell us some of your greatest achievements so far?

I’ve vastly increased TF&SC’s impact factor, submission rate, and number of annual downloads. I think the ideas I’ve put forth in TF&SC editorials have been influential in shaping the field.

I launched and grew two excellent schools of technology management, one at Oregon Graduate Institute and another at SUNY-Korea.

At UT-Austin’s IC ² Institute in the 1990s, I “managed” the Institute’s Global Fellows program – “managed” in quote marks because all one can do with Nobel Laureates and Von Neumann Prize winners is gently coordinate them – and in 2019 when UT inexplicably discontinued the program and the Fellows asked me for advice, I spun the program off, into an independent NGO that we call TANDO (www.tando.org). It is an extraordinary think-and-do tank.

Again in the ‘90s I played an early role in Austin’s transformation to a high-tech economy. Later I contributed to the like transformation of Portland, San Diego and Songdo, maintaining a research and activism interest in tech-based regional economic development.

I’m proud to have become a prominent aikido ( 合気道 ) teacher, doing my part to spread the practice of this art in many countries.

I helped my wife raise two wonderful kids.

- What is your current research about? What are your current challenges?

My main research thrust right now has to do with the Sustainable Development Goals. My biggest challenge is to solidify the revenue model for TANDO.

- Which area of research you will focus on?

As I said, mainly the SDGs. However, other problems of technology management and policy often catch my research attention, and of course I must to an extent specialize in technology forecasting and assessment, as those are the themes of Technological Forecasting & Social Change.

- In your opinion, what are the most popular or future proof things in the next 5 years? What are the challenges in the next 5 years?

As the virus experts tell us there will be no return to normal, innovative thinking will be vitally important for shaping the post-pandemic “new normal,” whatever that may turn out to be. What will shape business, technology and daily life in a post-COVID world? Everything – from global trade patterns to social interactions – will change. These transformations open vast new arenas of research questions.

Other issues rising to the level of “existential risk” include climate change and the possibilities of nuclear or biological war, and collisions with rogue asteroids.

Less apocalyptic but still momentous problems are cyber-warfare, the rush to 5G, migration and refugees, the future of the Internet, human trafficking, gender and ethnic equity, and prison reform.

TANDO will seek technological, policy and organizational avenues for easing these problems, on behalf of governments and corporate clients.

- Any advice for young academics/researchers?

Your university will reward you almost solely on the basis of your publications. This is a trap, but you can only be trapped if you let yourself be trapped. Churning out large numbers of incremental and unimportant research results may lead to tenure, but will not lead to much personal satisfaction, and indeed may result in depressing career fatigue. Take a bigger perspective. Learn everything you can about how your university is managed, and how the industry you are researching works. Get interested in bigger research questions, perhaps questions that address the grand challenges of climate change, pandemic prevention and response, and so on.
Be in the right place at the right time. (This means, not always at your desk with nose buried in your computer.) More important, recognize when you are in the right place at the right time.
When you are offered a challenging new responsibility, never answer, “Who, me??” The right answer is always, “Yes sir/ma’am, I’ll do my best.”
Not every problem is susceptible to the methodology you used in your dissertation. Rather than pound a square peg into a round hole, learn additional analytical techniques. Then use the method that best fits the problem.
Don’t bother to make a career plan. The world is changing so fast that no long-term plan will be realized. “Man plans, and God laughs.” Instead, have a “career theme.” Know what kinds of opportunities will resonate with you, will fit you, and will make you happy. Then when they come along, take them.

TFSC EiC

- Can you tell us your "journey"/story to become an Editor-in-Chief (EiC)?

At a PICMET conference in the early ‘90s, I perused a display copy of Technological Forecasting & Social Change. I was immediately impressed, first with the nature and range of topics in its pages, and second, that unlike most academic journals, this one was not painful to read! Hal Linstone, the journal’s founding editor, introduced himself at the display table. I determined to publish a paper in TF&SC, and first did so in 1996. By then, I had moved to Portland, where Hal was living, and we got better acquainted. He had made me a board member, and later an Associate Editor. One day as we were having lunch together, Hal said, “Fred, I guess you’ll take it over when I give it up.” I was astonished, but as I wrote above, I had learned not to say “Who, me?” He persuaded Elsevier to approve me as his successor.

Hal retired to Palm Desert, California, and we reconnected when I moved to San Diego in 2006. He made me Senior Editor, and we worked on transition matters until Hal retired in 2011. I have been Editor-in-Chief since that date, trying to keep the journal useful and readable.

- Can you share with us some of your interesting experience/incidents/events as an EIC?

Being EIC has led to fascinating speaking invitations, with associated exotic travel. Too bad the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented travel to this conference!

TF&SC allows occasional opinion essays called From My Perspective. Readers understand that these are not research papers, but reflect the personal views of new and established scholar/practitioners. Sometimes, though rarely, a Perspective’s views are so controversial that we run a disclaimer above the essay’s title, emphasizing that its views are not those of the editors or publisher. I described one such instance at http://www.science20.com/machines_organizations_and_us_sociotechnical_systems/fringe_editor%E2%80%99s_dilemma_raises_questions_about_future_science . Currently, a distinguished scholar has submitted a Perspective that frankly criticizes the responses of certain governments to the pandemic. We will again run a disclaimer. In both cases, the essays drew angry letters from other scholars, even before publication.

Other memorable experiences are connected with author disputes, and even with author misbehavior. One dispute between authors who, in separate articles, took radically different views of the “integrated [climate] assessment models” called for every atom of my diplomatic abilities to cool things down.

When authors plagiarize or fail to disclose conflicts of interest, and this has happened sadly often, I first allow the author to voluntarily retract the paper. If s/he does not, I must involve Elsevier’s lawyers and force the retraction. These instances don’t call for diplomacy, but rather for an iron fist inside a kid glove. When an author represents a work as unbiased science and fails to disclose his/her association with a politically partisan foundation or “think-tank,” the work becomes suspect and subject to possible retraction.

Perhaps because TF&SC has been a congenial outlet for research on the long-wave business cycle, the Russian Academy of Sciences awarded me the Kondratieff Medal. This allowed me the fun of flying to Moscow, dressing in a tuxedo, and delivering a Laureate Address to the Academy.

- How do you foresee the directions for TFSC? What will be your ambition?

I would like for the journal to become as prominent in the USA as it is in Europe, Asia, and Latin America!

I would like to build a marketing staff who will promote the journal’s research results. I see other technology magazines as well as the mainstream press announcing as new, technology trends that have long been discussed in TF&SC. Our editors should become go-to sources for journalists.

And of course I dream of a permanently funded research center that pursues the topics that are of concern to the journal.