Validation of a Foresight Support System to Imagine an Uncertain Future

Abstract

This paper shows the validation process of the effectiveness of Foresight Support System to help people detect signs of future uncertainties through scenario planning workshops. By enabling us to efficiently collect and output weak signals, the system has been developed to support Foresight activities that generate future-oriented ideas as a response to uncertainties involved in the global economy and society. Although gathering weak signals generally requires considerable amount of time and labor, such signals are essential to forcibly drive the creativity of people who attended Foresight workshops. To validate the efficiency of the system, scenario planning workshops were held using Scanning Materials collected both by the system and manually as a comparison. . The outcome of the validation process suggested that weak signals gathered by Foresight Support System developed by authors can fast retrieve information in wider scopes. Moreover, the system enables us to collect and output information that includes semantically diversified words. During the workshops, it was also confirmed that the Scanning Materials collected by the system were employed as sprouts of ideas more often than manually collected materials. As a result, the effectiveness of the system in supporting people to detect signs of uncertainties in mid- and long-term was successfully validated.