The OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2025 examines how to mobilise research and innovation to address urgent global challenges, such as the climate crisis, rising geopolitical tensions, and rapid technological change.

The report highlights several key pillars for modernizing STI policy:

• Driving Transformative Change: Moving beyond "business-as-usual" to reform STI systems so they can generate and deploy knowledge at an unprecedented pace to support sustainability, economic competitiveness, and resilience.
• Navigating Geopolitics: Reconfiguring international cooperation to protect national security and sensitive knowledge while maintaining the openness necessary for scientific advancement.
• Adapting Science Systems: Implementing structural reforms in academia, such as improving career paths and incentives, to better support multidisciplinary research and engage directly with society.
• Harnessing Convergence and Ecosystems: Leveraging the integration of technologies like AI, biotechnology, and quantum computing while using an "industrial ecosystem" approach to design more effective policies.
• Boosting Agility: Strengthening government capacity for strategic foresight and policy experimentation to remain responsive in a context of high uncertainty.

• China is transitioning to a "standardized consolidation" regime, using mandatory national standards—such as requiring mechanical door releases by 2027 and upgrading dangerous goods transport regulations—to force market consolidation by eliminating under-capitalized operators.
• To support massive fleet electrification, the State Grid Corporation of China has committed 4 trillion yuan to a 2026–2030 investment plan, providing the high-voltage backbone necessary for CATL’s Qiji Energy to expand its national battery-swapping network.
• The 2026 Automotive Data Security Guidelines reinforce digital sovereignty by tightening residency requirements for "important data" and telemetry, ensuring that the "AI dividends" from logistics stay within the Chinese ecosystem to build a national V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) moat.
• Autonomous trucking has shifted from experimental pilots to scalable infrastructure, highlighted by the commercial validation of "1+4" convoys and Inceptio Technology’s 250 million commercial miles, which provide the validated safety dataset for mass-producing Level 4 heavy trucks in 2026.
• Under the 15th Five-Year Plan, China is prioritizing industrial resilience through multimodal integration—such as expanding China-Europe rail routes—and decoupling energy from assets, which reduces total cost of ownership for electric fleets by up to 26%.

• Infrastructure Governance Reform: Sweden is transitioning away from Trafikverket’s traditional monopoly toward state-owned project companies and Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) to address an "Implementation Crisis". While this reform (SOU 2025:120) aims to accelerate 27 priority projects in the National Plan, stakeholders like Mobility Sweden warn that fragmented project companies could overlook necessary digital and energy layer integration.
• Operationalizing the Nordic Energy Backbone: The inauguration of the Aurora Line, a 400 kV connection between Sweden and Finland, marks the transition of the "Green Industrial Corridor" from planning to production. This infrastructure, alongside 5,000 MW of cleared connection requests, provides the transmission capacity required for large-scale electrification of freight and industrial logistics in northern Sweden.
• The FFI "Five-Dimensional" Mandate: New state research and innovation (R&I) funding now strictly requires a "systemic maturity" approach, effectively ending isolated technical pilots. Consortia must simultaneously address technology, business models, policy, infrastructure, and behavior to access capital, forcing a power shift from equipment manufacturers to "need-owners" like IKEA or PostNord.
• Decarbonizing Maritime and Aviation: Energimyndigheten has proposed a National Coordinator for aviation infrastructure and targeted "Klimatklivet" funding for shore power in major ports like Gothenburg. These measures are intended to de-risk massive capital investments for hydrogen refueling and electric flight, ensuring Sweden meets 2029 AFIR requirements ahead of schedule.
• RED III and the "Compliance Moat": New regulations for Origin Guarantees took effect on February 1, 2026, creating a significant regulatory gate for electrified transport. Operators must re-certify their renewable energy use by August 31, 2026; failure to do so will legally bar them from marketing services as "zero-emission" to major industrial shippers.

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• Commercial Maturity of Autonomous Freight: Middle-mile autonomous trucking has officially reached Technology Readiness Level 9, with Gatik transitioning from pilots to sustained, revenue-generating commercial operations across five North American jurisdictions.
• Infrastructure Convergence: A strategic shift toward "Energy-Transport Symbiosis" is underway, with the U.S. and Sweden initiating plans to co-locate high-voltage power lines within transport corridors to create "dual-use utility spines" for grid resilience and heavy-duty fleet electrification.
• Transition to Agentic AI: Logistics is evolving from simple monitoring to "cognitive orchestration," utilizing composable AI agents and hybrid quantum-classical workflows to enable proactive, self-healing supply chain decisions.
• Dual-Use Mobility and Resilience: Amid permanent geopolitical uncertainty, there is an increasing push to harmonize civilian and military logistics, while major shipping lines like MSC are "strategically de-risking" by avoiding the Northern Sea Route.
• Decarbonization Funding Gap: Despite the high readiness of electric truck technology, a looming exhaustion of infrastructure funding (such as the EU’s AFIF) threatens to stall progress and create a "bifurcation of the fleet" between large and small operators.

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• The "Brussels Signal" represents a definitive structural pivot from physical infrastructure optimism to a regime of rigid digital and regulatory enforcement, as the EU transitions from building the transport network to strictly governing the data that flows through it.
• The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has formally acknowledged that the 2030 TEN-T core completion is unviable, with flagship projects like Rail Baltica and the Lyon-Turin link facing massive cost overruns—ballooning by approximately ninety-four billion euros—and significant delays.
• As of February 3, 2026, the transition to ICS2 version three messaging is legally absolute for all modes, creating a "hard digital border" where data accuracy is a prerequisite for transit; discrepancies now trigger automatic vehicle stoppages rather than just warnings.
• To support SME fleet electrification, the "Automotive Omnibus" proposes exempting electric light commercial vehicles (eLCVs) up to four point twenty-five tonnes from tachograph and speed-limiter requirements, effectively removing the "payload penalty" caused by heavy batteries.
• The 2026 operational calendar includes non-negotiable deadlines such as the July 1 mandate for smart tachographs in vans, mandatory advanced safety systems, and the definitive phase of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

• First Fault-Tolerant Lattice Surgery: Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute demonstrated the first fault-tolerant lattice surgery on a superconducting chip, successfully manipulating logical qubits while suppressing errors in real-time.
• Sovereign Industrialization Mandates: The U.S. and EU initiated massive industrialization efforts, including a White House executive order prioritizing a "discovery-class" machine and the €50 million SUPREME consortium aimed at scaling superconducting manufacturing.
• Industrial-Scale Silicon Fabrication: Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) achieved a manufacturing throughput of 250,000 qubit registers in a single shift, signaling a pivot toward using existing semiconductor supply chains for million-qubit processors.
• Record Neutral-Atom Fidelity: Infleqtion reported a 99.93 percent readout fidelity for cesium qubits, a breakthrough that allows for the high-speed mid-circuit measurements necessary for advanced quantum error correction.
• Strategic Vertical Integration: The corporate landscape shifted toward full-stack ownership, highlighted by IonQ’s $1.8 billion acquisition of the SkyWater foundry to bring chip fabrication in-house and insulate itself from supply chain disruptions.

• Mandatory Efficiency Pivot: The MIIT has implemented the world's first mandatory energy consumption standard (15.1 kWh/100km for 2,000 kg EVs), effectively using tax exemption eligibility as a "technical tariff" to purge low-efficiency manufacturers from the market,,,.
• Institutionalized Battery Swapping: A strategic alliance between Kandi and CATL’s Qiji Energy targets 900 heavy-duty swap stations by year-end, leveraging a regulatory exemption that allows swappable batteries to be managed independently of vehicle-linked scrapping mandates,,,,.
• Autonomous Hardware Commoditization: Through the KargoBot and Horizon Robotics alliance, Level 4 hardware costs have been reduced to 90,000 yuan per vehicle, shifting the competitive front from perception capability to mass-production price points,,,,.
• Digital Carbon Traceability: JD Logistics has integrated international ISO and GLEC standards into its carbon-tracking platform to manage SKU-level emissions for 100 million orders, serving as the "digital nervous system" for 15th Five-Year Plan green mandates,,,.
• Strategic Multi-Modal Integration: The "ASEAN Express" has achieved a 50% reduction in transit times via a single digital contract linking Hanoi to Europe, while Western OEMs like Scania are localizing 50,000-unit production hubs to absorb Chinese innovation speed,,,.

• Sovereign Data Mandate: The Swedish government has formally designated data as a national resource, mandating the agency Digg to implement federated data models that allow AI processing to occur "at the source" without compromising proprietary silos,,. This directive aims to end fragmented data silos and bypass the legal paralysis often caused by moving sensitive information,.
• Grid Market Stabilization: Stability in mFRR (manual Frequency Restoration Reserve) prices has been confirmed by Svenska Kraftnät, establishing a predictable environment for hauliers to monetize vehicle batteries as grid-balancing assets,,. This shift allows logistics hubs to treat heavy-duty EV charging not just as a cost, but as a scalable revenue stream,.
• Infrastructure Maturity: Strategic focus has shifted from "range anxiety" to "destination charging," with 95 new heavy-vehicle stations approved and a projection that 80 percent of charging will eventually occur at depots or loading points,,. By 2028, Sweden expects to exceed EU AFIR requirements with charging density reaching every 60 to 100 kilometers on major roads,.
• OEM Strategic Divergence: Volvo Trucks maintains European market leadership through a "three-path" technology strategy (battery-electric, fuel-cell, and renewable combustion), while Scania is undergoing radical restructuring, including 750 redundancies, to transition into a flatter, software-centric organization,,.
• National Plan Friction: The referral process for the 1,171 billion SEK National Plan reveals a conflict between economic theorists questioning "unprofitable" projects and industry stakeholders demanding prioritized funding for 74-ton truck upgrades and the elimination of the railway maintenance debt,,. To mitigate these tensions, a new 39 billion SEK "risk reserve" has been introduced to ensure large-scale project continuity.

• Quantum Optimization Benchmark: Research has confirmed that commercial quantum annealing now outperforms classical systems in solving complex, high-density urban routing problems, creating a structural "Optimization Moat" for early adopters,,.
• Level 3 Autonomy Commercialization: China has issued the first "market-access permits" for Level 3 "Eyes-Off" driving, shifting the industry from pilots to official road-cloud integrated commercialization with high-performance redundant architectures,,.
• Infrastructure Subsidence Risks: The formalization of "Global Water Bankruptcy" has identified land subsidence as a "silent killer" of logistics assets, threatening the extreme floor precision required for automated warehouse robotics,,.
• Solid-State Battery Breakthrough: Solid-state cells have reached a $75/kWh cost threshold, fundamentally improving the payload-to-battery weight ratio and clearing the path for the electrification of long-haul freight,,.
• Shift to "Backcasting" Policy: National transport planning is transitioning from trend-based forecasting to goal-driven "backcasting," using digital blockchain platforms to align current infrastructure investments with a water-resilient, zero-carbon 2050,,.

• Carbon Fiscalization: The transition to a "mandatory financial liability regime" is complete, with CBAM registry integration requiring verified emissions data for customs clearance and the EU ETS expanding to cover 100% of maritime emissions, including methane and nitrous oxide,.
• Digital Border Enforcement: The "Smart Border" logic is now absolute; the Electronic Logistics Envelope (ELO) is a non-negotiable requirement for UK-EU road and rail shipments, with missing data leading to immediate port exclusion and "Orange Lane" diversions,.
• Infrastructure Funding Crisis: The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility (AFIF) budget is exhausted, leading to the cancellation of further funding rounds and a strategic shift toward "Dual-Use" military mobility corridors capable of moving NATO-standard heavy equipment,.
• Industry Consolidation: High compliance costs are fueling large-scale mergers between intermodal giants to absorb fiscal burdens, while SME "Analog Holdouts" face terminal obsolescence due to a lack of digital interoperability with national eFTI gates.
• Rail Freight Distress: Despite the rise of intermodal transport, rail operators in Germany and Poland are facing financial distress and bankruptcies due to the combined pressure of high carbon prices and increased minimum wages.