Societies are being deeply transformed by the development and adoption of new technologies, often based on scientific breakthroughs. Understanding the emergence of new scientific and technology domains is a major collective priority.

The OECD's key biotechnology and nanotechnology indicators combine measures of the number of companies active in the respective technological fields, R&D expenditure and inventions. 

Emerging science and technology domains are fluid and rapidly changing, posing several challenges for measurement and monitoring. OECD measurement work in this area combines complementary approaches to measuring scientific and technological emergence.

• Opportunity-data based methods can be used to draw relevant signals from existing administrative or related databases that exist for purposes other than producing statistics and indicators. Examples of data sources that provide insights on various aspects of technology development include scientific bibliometric data, repositories of government funded R&D projects, data on patents and company reports. Coverage of relevant phenomena is shaped by incentives to disclose information.
• Statistically representative survey-based methods, designed with the explicit purpose of producing indicators, are used by several OECD countries to monitor the engagement of companies or other actors in the development and adoption of specific technologies. With few exceptions, such methods (definitions, taxonomies, and survey implementation guidance) are not standardised and coordination across countries is challenging as priorities on which technologies to monitor can differ. These methods tend to be used more often for technologies with higher degree of maturity and adoption.  

Indicators are available for free download in Excel format. They are updated in November of each year.

For survey-based indicators, the indicators selected are those that are readily available for a sufficiently large number of countries. Information on the methodologies used by countries is available within the published KBI and KNI databases, illustrating variations in approaches in terms of reference populations and criteria for collecting data on R&D expenditures, which can either be reported as mutually exclusive or potentially overlapping categories.