Balancing Security and Innovation: A Policy Perspective

This co-authored chapter by Niklas Swanström and Filip Borges Månsson explains how the academic world should balance between security and innovation. This chapter is a part of the Research and Education Security Report, co-authored by a group of mostly European scholars, aims at analyzing and illustrating challenges, but to a degree also opportunities, connected with academia, research conducted by universities and other institutions, exchange of students and scholars, as well as abuses made by nation states benefiting from features of the research and education community. Understanding that academia cannot be isolated from external influences as it benefits greatly from openness to the world, researchers, students, and R&D sector managers should be aware of the kinds of risks that exist, and try to minimize them without violating basic principles of the broadly understood academia, hence openness to new ideas, new people, revolutionary developments, and contradictions that often bring inventions and provide progress.