Park Seong-won, the Head of Innovative Growth Group, has introduced global emerging issues that might become great problems/opportunities: (1) anthropause, a global reduction in modern human activityl (2) social bubble, which refers to a having a small, clearly defined group; (3) zoom town, offline extension of the social bubble; (4) spatial computing, defined as human interaction with a machine in a 3D space around you; (5) splinternet; (6) bio-surveillance regime; (7) whole-genome synthesis; and (8) return of circular economy.
Emerging issues mean issues (discoveries, events, or phenomenon) that have not been influential or important in the past but might be influential in the future. As pointed out by Park, the emerging issues analysis is intended to find potential social problems in advance and to make various efforts to address such problems without leading to major accidents.
He also alleged that it is necessary to identify who and for what emerging issues are raised, and continuously monitor whether unintended negative consequences are caused by policy response and new conflicts arise, preventing a solution from becoming another challenge. In other words, Conventional studies on emerging issues have focused on discovering potentially influential issues, however nowadays it is required to specify intentions of those who make and spread with continuous monitoring.
“This study covers the need for study on emerging issues, characteristics of issues sources, conventional researches, emerging issues being discussed recently, and policy responses for those issues,” explains Park. “We will try to discover issues that will ‘emerge’ due to social contradictions and conflicts in future research.”
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