National Foresight Research Articles

Humanizing the future: managing change with soft technology

Technology has always inspired social change, but its scale and complexity have begun to bewilder even the politicians and policymakers. Several recent national foresight studies point to a need for socio‐organizational or “soft” technologies to help Europe manage change and respond to major new economic opportunities. Research is required in fields such as neuro‐linguistic programming, the psychology of knowledge management and the ergonomics of the man‐machine interface. “Electronic pets” showed that we can learn to love machines – now the challenge is to embed technology in such a way as to marry science with society.

On the Future of Technological Forecasting

Technological forecasting is now poised to respond to the emerging needs of private and public sector organizations in the highly competitive global environment. The history of the subject and its variant forms, including impact assessment, national foresight studies, roadmapping, and competitive technological intelligence, shows how it has responded to changing institutional motivations. Renewed focus on innovation, attention to science-based opportunities, and broad social and political factors will bring renewed attention to technological forecasting in industry, government, and academia. Promising new tools are anticipated, borrowing variously from fields such as political science, computer science, scientometrics, innovation management, and complexity science.

Public foresight exercises at an intermediate level: the French national programmes and the experience of Bordeaux

The article aims at describing an experience of technology foresight at the regional level. That experience was built upon previous national (and international) foresight studies. It is possible to analyse the institutional process of such a project in a global context, and also to draw some conclusions on the possibility and usefulness of articulating different geographical levels. The experience enlightens the notion of intermediate level in process of foresight, assessment or policy evaluation. Our study gives good confirmation of the fact that public technology foresight studies are often more valuable as a process of communication, network building and collective learning than for their results. The choice of the operators, their legitimacy and the right timing proved also to be crucial aspects for the success of such programs.

Foresight - seven paradoxes

Hidden beneath the surface of the fury of the current flurry of institutional national foresight activity are many paradoxes. Seven such paradoxes are explored in this paper in order to expose some myths and some conveniently ignored aspects of institutional foresight. Most controversial are perhaps the difference between real foresight and its institutional counterpart, and the role of the behavioural traits that have an intense influence on the conduct of foresight, which is seen as an ineluctable activity in human development.

The use of foresight: institutional constraints and conditions

The idea of foresight as a new tool for S&T policies rests on the need to face the challenges of high tech developments, to respond to increasing global competition and to develop inter-organisational strategies. However, the impact of technological and global changes varies per country and per innovation sector, as do possibilities to develop inter-organisational strategies. In this article, we analyse how the use of foresight studies depends on institutional characteristics of innovation sectors. We distinguish two independent factors to explain why foresight has more impact in certain countries and in certain sectors than in others. The first factor is the dependency between the actors involved in the foresight activity. The second is the strategic uncertainty due to the technological and global developments. The argument is supported by a secondary analysis of national foresight studies and of environmental technology foresight in the Netherlands, and a first analysis of foresight in medical technology.

Foresight as a core competence

Foresight is an elusive and oft-misunderstood term. Lacking a widely accepted definition, it is unclear when and whether it refers to a process, to a human attribute or competence, or to a national Foresight programme. This paper argues that foresight has developed largely in isolation to the extensive literature on business strategy. By relating foresight to this literature it can be put into a context with a far larger pool of existing knowledge. This paper relates foresight specifically to the core competence view of strategy. The resultant connections have implications for the process and competence concepts of foresight, national Foresight programmes and the core competence view.

The ECT angle

This paper examines future trends in the environment and clean technologies (ECT) sector. Seven national technology foresight studies have been reviewed with the purpose of (i) screening the main issues linked to environmental and clean technologies (ii) highlighting major developments that are likely to play a crucial role for future paths towards sustainability.

Food for the future

This paper aims to identify the future trends in the agro‐food sector over the next two decades. Ten national technology foresight studies have been reviewed with the purpose of (i) envisaging the future socio‐economic and technology framework of the sector and (ii) highlighting major agro‐food technology clusters and their future application.

The road ahead

The transport system is fundamental to both meeting social needs and providing the lifeblood for the economy. In recent years, transport and especially the automotive sector has had to respond to increased competition and environmental concerns. Technological innovations in transport appear particularly important since they could provide competitive advantage for providers of transport technology and also address environmental issues. This article considers both short‐term and long‐term policy implications which emerge from analysis of national foresight studies in the area of transport.

Materials in the making

Materials and materials technologies are recognized to be key underpinning and critically enabling areas of R&D. Most industrial sectors and fields of technology application depend upon them. Materials research can provide new solutions capable of optimizing the application of current technologies, minimizing their negative side effects and reducing production costs. However, the long development time and slow return on materials research investments make industry reluctant to take on the associated risks. This alone suggests that policy initiatives to sustain long‐term research efforts are necessary. This article considers the policy findings of national foresight initiatives in the area of materials and material technologies.

Power to the 21st century

This article reflects an analysis of the energy issues tackled in national foresight studies to date. The energy sector has not been explicitly mentioned in some of the studies but it is integrated in other sectors. What follows is a summary of the issues on which the different foresight studies are focused. The summary includes the most important topics affecting energy‐related issues for the panel of experts of each country. The article shows, first, a group of general considerations specific for each country. It then shows the types of technologies which have been considered in each foresight study. Finally, before drawing conclusions, it provides a technology table from which it is possible to see which energy technologies have been considered as important in each country.

Future perspectives on ICTs

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have featured strongly in all the recent national foresight studies. This paper documents some of the common trends that emerge from a comparison of these different studies and attempts to draw some strategic conclusions. The first section charts their relative importance. The main trends identified in the national foresight studies are then discussed by main technological areas in turn: software, components and peripherals, advanced telecommunications and telematics applications. Finally, the third part of the paper, strong interactions that ICTs have with other technological disciplines is considered, especially in relation to new materials, nanostructures and bioinformatics.

A comparison of national foresight exercises

This paper discusses recent trends in public‐administration‐led foresight exercises from the perspective of how the choice of objectives and scope is reflected in the methods used. In countries where successive projects have been carried out, one can observe how the evolution in methods employed, aims to increase the impact and effectiveness of foresight. Organizing the discussion in terms of objectives departs from previous approaches in the literature which mostly distinguish between different foresight exercises according to the principal methodology used.

Rationalising the future? Foresight in science and technology policy co-ordination

Commentators from diverse fields and backgrounds have argued the present innovation environment is one constituted by unprecedented levels of uncertainty. National Foresight programmes recently have emerged as a means of co-ordinating science and technology policies and responding to a condition of uncertainty and change. Perhaps the most systematic Foresight programme is that of the United Kingdom. This article discusses the response the UK Foresight programme offers to the present and future innovation environments. In doing so, it is argued we should examine how the `need' for the programme is constructed and how that need is defined and shaped in relation to past UK science and technology policies. It is suggested that Foresight presents an ambivalent response to many of the concerns it proposes to address.

A simple guide to successful foresight

The term “foresight” is often misunderstood and is used to indicate a variety of programmes, exercises, studies and techniques for looking at the future. There have been several national foresight programmes in recent years (including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, and Japan), usually conducted at government level and carried out for a variety of reasons including the promotion of national R&D and industry competitiveness. Larger business organizations, particularly those with a scientific and technical base, sometimes carry out their own exercises usually as part of longer term strategy, although foresight is possible for smaller organizations too. This article provides a short and simple guide to the foresight process with the specific aim of deriving real value for organizations rather than merely conducting an interesting exercise.

Technology Foresight Activities in Korea and in Countries Closing the Technology Gap

This article discusses technology foresight in selected countries which were politically dependent (colonial) before World War II and considered as “under-developed” in the post-war period. Most of them show considerable economic dynamism in the 1990s, which is not always based on their own scientific and technological capability. For this group of countries, national exercises in technology foresight are likely to be an important tool in planning the strategic direction for science and technology development in order to catch up economically as well as socially. In Korea, which has recently become an OECD member, comparative advantage based on factors such as low wages and protected industries are no longer effective as the economy is now wide open to the world. Foresight is being used to look at comparative advantages based on Korea’s own knowledge-creating activities. In southeast Asian countries, foresight is still in an infant stage, but most of these have medium-term planning cycles and have undertaken longer-term vision studies. In South Africa, a national foresight project is running, as is an adapting foresight process to make the large national research organization fit. In Latin America, an agenda has been set up which indicates the desire of several countries to engage in foresight activities using different approaches.

Technology Forecasting Activities in Japan

Japan started its development in science and technology later than other countries but was nevertheless quite successful. Many factors contributed to this success—and one of them was the adaptation of large foresight studies at the end of the 1960s. In Japan, the Science and Technology Agency (STA), among others, in 1971 started to conduct a large study on the future of science and technology. The Delphi method was one technique used for foresight activities. This was not considered a tool of prediction but an instrument to systematically look into the long-term future. Among the aims of this type of national activity is the identification of areas of strategic research and of generic technologies most likely to yield the greatest economic and social benefits. Although many countries stopped their national foresight activities in the 1970s, the Japanese Delphi process continued and was applied every five years. In 1997, the sixth study was finished. Yet, Japanese technology policies are less consistent than is commonly believed and involve an assortment of policy measures and actors/agencies pragmatically devised to address diverse, ever-changing, and sometimes conflicting needs embedded in a broad range of issues. Forecasting results provide the “language” to communicate among Japanese actors in science, technology, and society.

Current Foresight Activities in

During the early 1990s, technology foresight has become much more widespread. First pioneered in the United States and later in Japan, it has now spread to continental Europe. One of the first engagements in modern national foresight occurred in the Netherlands. The task is to identify the areas of strategic research and the emerging generic technologies likely to yield the greatest socio-economic benefits. The decentralized foresight approaches are less holistic than elsewhere and are concerned with selected areas. In Germany, parallel approaches have been adopted for looking systematically into the longer-term future of science, technology, the economy, and society. In an era characterized by ever fiercer global economic competition, and with the burden of unifying two different science systems and over-stretched public expenditure budgets, the German governments on federal and state levels and indeed the public are coming to expect more direct economic and social benefits from science in return to their investment. Decentralized types of foresight are also observed in Austria, whereas in Hungary the first attempts to arrive at a foresight program seem to be modelled after British experiences.

A foresight strategy for future generations

This paper briefly considers three key areas where forward thinking is particularly vital: education, business and government. Drawing mainly upon examples from the Australian context, it suggests a broad rationale for establishing a ‘national foresight strategy’. The latter is supported by a more general model for developing social foresight. A further stimulus to forward thinking and future vision is to consider what advice future generations might offer us if they had the chance.