Digital Open Strategic Autonomy

The principal researcher of this proposal is currently serving as an Embassy Science Fellow in the UK. There, the project aims to unravel the differences and similarities between Dutch and UK approaches to technology strategy, particularly in the realms of economic resilience and digital autonomy. Across various levels in society, the urgent need arises to delve into the intricacies of digital open strategic autonomy (DOSA).

Amidst a rapidly evolving technological landscape impacting economic security, the project focuses on dissecting six crucial layers: raw materials, hard infrastructure, physical infrastructure, soft infrastructure, data, and applications/services. By scrutinizing and clustering policy initiatives from both NL and UK perspectives in these six layers, the research contributes valuable insights to the ongoing conversation about the societal, organizational, and individual implications of digital technologies.

Facing challenges stemming from the dynamic nature of digital innovation policies and the nuanced concept of DOSA, the project’s innovative character lies in its data-driven approach. The proposal and contribution of the data-scientists involves scraping and analyzing official documents from Dutch and UK government websites, clustering them based on the six layers, and visualizing dependencies. This process aims to uncover differences, similarities, and motivations behind policies, ultimately providing a conceptual framework and highlighting the dependencies between such. The overarching goals activites and milestones include data scraping, offering descriptive statistics, visualizing layer dependencies, and comparing findings between the NL and the UK.