Foresight on Demand: Lessons from Responsive Foresight on Emerging and Complex R&I issues

While facing ongoing multiple crises, the interest in and demand for Foresight to support STI policy has been growing over the past years. At the same time, the crises have eroded people’s trust in governments, as markets fail, ecosystems deteriorate, and technological dependencies grow. This has raised high expectations, nurtured by the scientific communities, regarding a more effective and ‘transformative’ STI policy enhancing future preparedness
and addressing emerging societal challenges. We - as practitioners in these processes - reflect on these challenges and how they have been addressed in recent Foresight practice at the intersection of science and policy. We conduct a cross-cutting analysis of FoD Foresight projects to highlight new governance needs. We want to show how these emerging needs were addressed through the participatory design and implementation of specific Foresight activities by analysing a set of strategic features at the level of specific Foresight projects,
such as key design elements (i.e. purpose and objectives, targeted audience, Foresight knowledge sources, methods, participation, outputs, alleged impacts) and how they relate to context-specific needs and requirements (i.e. the characteristics and culture of the innovation policy governance sub-system, embedding in policy-preparing processes, interactions and power relationships in the institutional environment, client expectations and needs, etc.) as well as to features characterising the success/failure (e.g., in terms of generating usable knowledge, building of actor networks, triggering conflict, etc.) and impact of the respective Foresight projects. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of how to address governance needs without compromising on
key characteristics of Foresight, as well as help to sharpen the view on appropriate entry points for Foresight in
policy-making processes.