Disruptive technology has become an important driving force for economic and social development and military revolution. Strengthening disruptive technological innovation is particularly important in realizing development transformation and future strategic initiative in China. The Chinese Academy of Engineering has set up a major advisory project “Strategic Research on Disruptive Technologies in Engineering Science and Technology.” This project is aimed to plan the development of disruptive technologies in engineering science and technology in China. The paper systematically introduces the research objectives, contents, and methods of this project, and summarizes the progresses in disruptive technology concept study, forecasting and identifying methods, tracking and early warning of worldwide disruptive technologies, and identification and evaluation of major disruptive technology directions. Meanwhile, the paper also summarizes the experiences and deficiencies in project implementation. All the research contents of the project provide a useful reference for the national strategic research on disruptive technology.
The concept of disruptive technology has been widely used since it was introduced. And there is no uniform definition due to different research perspectives. Since disruptive technology has transformative effects of defining times and reconstructing patterns, it plays increasingly significant role in national strategy. Understanding disruptive technology from the national perspective has a practical guiding significance in the development of disruptive technology. After explorations on the concept of disruptive technology from different perspectives, this paper points out that developing disruptive technology from the national perspective opens up a new technology trajectory based on new principles, combinations, and applications of science and technologies. It is a strategic innovative technology that will reorganize value network of the traditional industries, decisively affect the upgrading of social technology systems, or reconstruct present national foundations, capabilities, and structure. Furthermore, a deconstruction framework of disruptive technology is proposed from the perspectives of source, structure, span, scale, level, and path. On this basis, to develop disruptive technology, this paper proposed to focus on the combination of frontier research and practical use, the process, the balance between reality and future, innovative management modes, and strategic research.
At present, technological innovation has entered an unprecedentedly intensive and active period worldwide, while some major disruptive technologies are constantly emerging. These disruptive technologies have accelerated the iteration of new industries and formats, are profoundly influencing the balance among national powers, and will contribute in reshaping the world economic structure and the international competition pattern. To seize this opportunity given by the times, countries are now actively engaged in early identification and nurture of disruptive technologies. In this paper, research reports on disruptive technologies in China and abroad are extensively followed, and research progress and methods of disruptive technologies are summarized, analyzed and evaluated. This paper also puts forward some suggestions to promote the scientific development of disruptive technology research in China, including establishment of specialized think tanks by concentrating superior resources, establishment of a scientific technology evaluation system, etc.
In recent years, China has made great progress in science and technology, but still falls behind in terms of key technologies. To promote original innovation in science and technology and fundamentally overcome its weakness in key technologies, China should focus on basic research. To explore how basic research creates disruptive technologies, this paper expounds the connotation of basic research, and categorizes basic research into four types according to its targets: basic research toward major scientific objectives, basic research driven by national demands, talent-based basic research for free exploration, and basic research aimed at practical application. Based on the analysis of the characteristics and development needs of various types of basic research, we put forward a development suggestion of providing differentiated and stable support to promote whole-chain disruptive technology innovation.
Through literature research and expert interviews, the existing or potential disruptive technologies in the field of mechanical and vehicle engineering were proposed: bionic intelligent technology, shaftless rim propulsion technology, intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle technology, ultra-loop train technology, and electromechanical systems (MEMS). The innovative and disruptive advantages of these five technologies were subsequently analyzed. Finally, the suggestions for the development of disruptive technologies in the field of mechanical and vehicle were proposed.
The chemical, metallurgical and material industries re-process natural resources to produce materials, chemicals, and secondary energies necessary for human life, thereby providing an important material basis for social development and economic construction. This paper reviews the recognized disruptive technologies in the history of chemical, metallurgical, and material industries, and analyzes the impact of such technologies on people’s daily lives, the progress of human society, and the disruption of traditional technologies. According to vision driving, problem orientation, and the world technology development trend, we forecast the future sustainable science development models, which are efficient, safe, energy-saving, and environment-friendly, in the chemical, metallurgical, and material industries, and predict the impacts of possible disruptive technologies on national economy and people’s livelihood. The slurry bed hydro-conversion technology, the metallurgical manufacturing process function expansion technology, grapheme, and other disruptive technologies are proposed. Finally, relevant policies and suggestions are put forward for the cultivation, development, and environment of disruptive technologies.
Every technological and energy revolution in history was accompanied by the emergence of disruptive technologies. Therefore, it is of great significance to study disruptive technologies for the future development of various fields. This paper analyzes the development directions and trends of railway, hydraulic and architectural engineering, and points out that the development direction of railway engineering is intelligent and higher-speed development; the development direction of hydraulic engineering is conforming to nature and human-nature integration; and the development direction of architectural engineering is to be precise, professional, mechanized, informationized, assembled, and eco-friendly. On this basis, this paper summarizes the disruptive technologies in these three fields. The disruptive technologies in the railway field include intelligent high-speed railway, low vacuum pipeline maglev railway; the disruptive technologies in the hydraulic field include the construction technology of basins with rich natural functions, and the multi-objective joint dispatching technology of water resources and hydropower projects; and the possible disruptive technologies in the architecture field include BIM-based intelligent building technology, industrial building technology, 3D printing technology, and green building technology. Finally, this paper puts forward some suggestions to provide reference for the research and development of railway, hydraulic, and architectural engineering.
Environmental monitoring technology is an important foundation for supporting and ensuring environmental management. Analyzing and predicting the development trend of disruptive technologies in environmental monitoring is helpful to accelerate China’s ecological civilization construction and environmental protection. This paper combines literature measurement and patent intelligence analysis methods to comprehensively analyze and evaluate the history and latest situation of disruptive technologies in environmental monitoring in China and abroad. According to the major demand for environmental monitoring technology by China’s environment protection development, this paper puts forward the multi-media environment and ecosystem sensing technology based on big data fusion, micro-intelligent environmental element sensing technology based on new materials and devices, fast online monitoring technology for environmental trace pollutants based on spectral mass spectrometry, and high-resolution remote sensing technology based on satellite remote sensing for regional/global ecological environment elements, so as to provide a decision-making basis for China’s environmental management and development planning of its environmental protection industry.
This study was the preliminary results of the “Research on Disruptive Technologies in the Agricultural Field” under the Consulting Research Project of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Our report mainly focused on those active fields in current and future technological innovations including agricultural biotechnology, agricultural information technology and nanomaterial technology. Specifically, five critical directions were investigated in the report, consisting of animal and plant breeding, agricultural biotech medicine and bio-fertilizer, agricultural biomass engineering, intelligent agricultural technology, and non-traditional planting space. Through the analysis of conferences, patents, interviews, and literatures, the development directions of disruptive technology in the agricultural field were suggested. Hopefully, our results can provide references for the development investment of the government and enterprises as well as research directions of scientists.
With the deep integration of modern information, materials and other technologies, the development of medical science and technology has been greatly promoted, and the way of disease diagnosis and treatment has undergone revolutionary changes. This paper mainly analyzes and evaluates five technical directions in tumor immunotherapy, gene editing technology, medical artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and stem cell and translational medicine. Combining literature, think tank reports and expert opinions, the paper explores the direction of medical science and technology development. Finally, the paper puts forward the policy proposals including increasing investment in basic medical research, optimizing the top-level design of medical science and technology strategy, and improving policy and regulatory systems.
Metamaterials are artificial materials that can achieve properties that do not occur naturally from their artificial functional units. The metamaterial technology has attracted much attention in many countries. It was listed as one of the six major disruptive technologies by the Department of Defense of the United States. In this paper, the development of metamaterial technology is briefly reviewed from the perspective of engineering application. A few major breakthroughs, such as invisible cloak, metamaterial electronic components, and mechanical metamaterials are summarized. Several promising applications that may lead to disruptive technologies, such as superlens, metamaterial all-optical switching, and the merging of metamaterials and conventional materials, are predicted. Strategic suggestions on the development of metamaterial technology are proposed.
Supercapacitors integrate advantages of both common capacitors and chemical batteries, and have significant advantages such as high power density, fast charging & discharging speed, and long cycle life. The key to developing supercapacitors is electrode materials, among which the most ideal one is graphene due to its excellent properties in mechanical, electrical, thermal and other aspects. Based on statistical analysis of academic papers and patents related to graphene-based supercapacitors, this paper discusses the development status and direction of graphene-based supercapacitors and briefly describes its domestic industrial development. The difficulties and challenges faced by the future development of graphene-based supercapacitors are discussed and the future development direction and suggestions are proposed.
Gene editing technology can precisely manipulate specific sites of the biological genome to achieve DNA fragment deletion, DNA insertion, or single base mutations. This technology has broken the bottleneck of traditional agricultural breeding and has been widely used in animal and plant improvement and creating a variety of new animal and plant breeding germplasms. The CRISPR/Cas9 technology has become the mainstream technology in current applications owing to its unique advantages such as easy handling, high efficiency, multi-target, and versatility, and it will bring revolutionary changes to agriculture. To improve China’s agricultural breeding in the future seed industry, we should improve the efficiency and accuracy of this technology, and draw up related laws and rules.
Quantum communication is an important branch of quantum information, where the two most important applications are quantum key distribution (QKD) and quantum teleportation. QKD can provide unconditionally secure key distribution methods between two remotely separated parties, and its information theoretical security is guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. QKD has received much attention due to its unconditional security. Through extensive research on QKD, this paper systematically introduces the main content of QKD, the status of theoretical security proof and real-life security proof, and mainly focuses on the decoy state method and measurement-device-independent QKD. Besides, this paper systematically investigates the problems faced by QKD in the case of severe channel attenuation, and introduces the mainstream solution to the problem, i.e., quantum repeaters or satellite relay. This paper points out that the QKD has been developed from the theoretical model to the actual system, and provides a useful guidance for the subsequent research on QKD.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims to simulate information storage and processing mechanisms and other intelligent behaviors of a human brain, so that the machine has a certain level of intelligence. With the rapid development of the new generation of information technology, such as the Internet, big data, cloud computing, and deep learning, researches and applications of AI have made and are making important progresses. In this paper, the historical integration and evolution of computer science, control science, brain-inspired intelligence, human brain intelligence, and other disciplines or fields closely related to AI are analyzed in depth; then it is pointed out that the research results on the structure and functional mechanism of brain from neuroscience, brain science and cognitive science provide some important inspirations for the construction of an intelligent computing model. Moreover, the drives and developments of AI are discussed from the aspects of logic model and system, neuron network model, visual nerve hierarchy mechanism, etc. Finally, the development trend of AI is prospected from the following five aspects: the computational theory of the Internet, the integration of AI calculus and computation, the model and mechanism of brain-inspired intelligence, the impetus of AI to neuroscience, and the algorithm design of feedback computation and the energy level of the control system.
Unmanned driving technology is considered as a highly disruptive technology in the field of vehicle engineering. By means of expert interviews, comparative analysis and literature research, this paper analyses the development trend and stage of unmanned driving technology, and evaluates its potential values and social impacts. It also proposes to promote the development of unmanned driving technology by strengthening the research on automobile wire control technology, energy power technology and driving cognitive technology.
The wheel-rail type transit is the mainstream in the current rail transit technology system. However, due to the limitations of air resistance, wheel-rail adhesion, and operating noise, it is difficult to achieve economically any significant increase in the operation speed at the current technological level. To meet the demand for a higher economical operating speed, apart from the use of the magnetic levitation technique to reduce wheel-rail friction and vibration, construction of a low vacuum operating environment to reduce air resistance and noise is an important development direction for higher speed rail transit technology in the future. This paper expounds the significance of developing a high speed maglev system based on low vacuum pipelines, studies its technical characteristics and current situation, analyzes scientific problems and key technologies of this system, and puts forward relevant policy suggestions including project-setting research at the national level, building up test lines, and construction of national laboratories.
Levitated optomechanics is the combination of optomechanics and quantum optics. It provides a new quantum method to control and measure micro-nano mechanical oscillator. This method has unprecedented observation accuracy, can approach or even break the standard quantum limit, and has broad development and application prospects. At present, the system has been used to measure the force, torque, displacement, acceleration and other physical parameters with high sensitivity at room temperature. In this paper, the research status of levitated optomechanics and its progress in precision sensing and measurement are reviewed. As a frontier technology developed in recent years, levitated optomechanics has gradually moved from basic research to application, especially in the field of inertial sensing and precision measurement. Finally, suggestions for developing the inertial sensing disruptive technology based on levitated optomechanics are put forward, which can provide reference for the development planning of inertial sensing and quantum precision measurement technology.
The National Research Council’s (NRC) report on Persistent Forecasting of Disruptive Technologies analyzes the key issues of disruptive technology forecasting and proposes an ideal persistent forecasting system model. On this basis, the paper summarizes the connotation and challenges of disruptive technology forecasting, presents the attributes of the ideal persistent forecasting system, and analyzes the system model and its functions. Finally, the enlightenment of the research on disruptive technology forecasting is proposed, thus to provide reference for relevant research work in China.
As the leader of disruptive innovation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DAPRA) is followed by more and more countries, governments, as well as large enterprises. They followed the DAPRA’s model to set up innovation management. However, almost no achievement comparable with the DAPRA was realized, and no consensus was reached on how to rebuild another noble DARPA. Viewing the experience of many copies of the DARPA, the explicit structure and operation mechanism are the bases of DARPA’s success, but not the core. This paper, from the perspective of evolutionary theory, analyses the history of the DARPA, and discusses its success factors in terms of growth environment, competitive situation, interest structure, value pursuit and so on. We conclude that DARPA’s success comes from long-term struggle with its development environment, and a strong belief, low selfish departmentalism, a pattern without restrictions from ideas and interests, and a perspective strategic vision are the very important support. From the model of the DARPA, we believe that building a special zone out of the system for innovation management is the key to speed up the disruptive technological innovation.