The Last and Next 10 Years of Foresight

This study investigates trends in Foresight and establishes how the changing global landscape has affected the Foresight activities over the last decade. The strategies these countries have adopted to counter the effects and make the best of these changes have also been examined. Key issues discussed in the paper cover the drivers of the trends in the past and next decade and their future implications for Foresight. The study identifies trends in Foresight through case studies. Five leading countries in Foresight have been selected for analysis including Finland, the UK, Germany, Japan and Russia. A set of indicators have been designed for the purpose of benchmarking national Foresight activities of these five countries. Among the indicators are: the contextual landscape, scope of the exercise, regularity of using Foresight for policy formulation, funding mechanisms, scale of participation as well as use and implementation. The results of the study show that, Foresight activities have changed in content, context and process over the last ten years. First, Foresight has moved from large scale national activities and become narrower in scope with attempts to focus on specific grand challenges, sectors or technologies. Second, in the quest to provide a broader picture of the social environment within which the results of the study will be implemented in order to ensure robust STI policy, Foresight exercises have become more extensive by involving more social stakeholders and expert consultations. Also, technological applications have shortened the entire Foresight process as new tools have been created for gathering and processing data, eliciting opinions, and disseminating them widely. This is a result of more intensive use of technologies and electronic platforms for the purpose of Foresight studies. Recent Foresight literature lacks a comprehensive overview of the changing landscape of policy making, motivations for organizing Foresight activities and processes of implementing Foresight. The present study aims to fill this gap with a holistic analysis of the context, content and process of Foresight activities in the past 10 years, and discusses possible transformations in the next 10 years.