Parts of this kind of work sound analogous to the kind of work consulting and market research and tech scouting firms do. I work at such a company with a technology focus (my own background is in materials science and physics). Basically my job is to review literature, talk to the people and companies inventing things, and distill it down to, “Here’s what’s happening, here’s the timeline it’s happening on, here’s our best estimates as to how much impact it will have on each other thing we could think of, here are the assumptions driving it, and we’ve condensed/crystallized it into as few pages or paragraphs as possible but are happy to talk in more detail as needed.” Our individual clients are companies, or investors, or governments, who don’t have incentive enough to each do it all themselves, but collectively they are all willing to each spend a little on it getting done.
I’m not saying the same types of companies are well suited to the specific goals outlined in the OP. But I *do* think the skill sets involved overlap, and you might want to look at those kinds of companies for people who know how to go about answering these kinds of questions in ways that also get various stakeholders interested enough to contribute actual money. Once done, and once you reach a wide enough audience, such companies’ brands and predictions also start to form anchoring points that everyone in a field at least recognizes and respects.
Similarly, the hard but still important work of filling in critical details, or filling in a common groundwork, for any intellectual or technological problem with eventual real-world impact, often happens not in universities but in consortia involving companies, governments, national labs, universities, and start-ups. It’s a massive coordination challenge, though, to do it well.
Parts of this kind of work sound analogous to the kind of work consulting and market research and tech scouting firms do. I work at such a company with a technology focus (my own background is in materials science and physics). Basically my job is to review literature, talk to the people and companies inventing things, and distill it down to, “Here’s what’s happening, here’s the timeline it’s happening on, here’s our best estimates as to how much impact it will have on each other thing we could think of, here are the assumptions driving it, and we’ve condensed/crystallized it into as few pages or paragraphs as possible but are happy to talk in more detail as needed.” Our individual clients are companies, or investors, or governments, who don’t have incentive enough to each do it all themselves, but collectively they are all willing to each spend a little on it getting done.
I’m not saying the same types of companies are well suited to the specific goals outlined in the OP. But I *do* think the skill sets involved overlap, and you might want to look at those kinds of companies for people who know how to go about answering these kinds of questions in ways that also get various stakeholders interested enough to contribute actual money. Once done, and once you reach a wide enough audience, such companies’ brands and predictions also start to form anchoring points that everyone in a field at least recognizes and respects.
Similarly, the hard but still important work of filling in critical details, or filling in a common groundwork, for any intellectual or technological problem with eventual real-world impact, often happens not in universities but in consortia involving companies, governments, national labs, universities, and start-ups. It’s a massive coordination challenge, though, to do it well.