Futures of Foresight

Given the complexity, urgency, and likely fundamental impacts of the already known challenges (among others, climate change, geopolitical uncertainties and severe tensions, migration, emerging disruptive technologies, social conflicts), foresight would be even more in demand to underpin various decisions by politicians, policy-makers, and business people, as well as actions of other (non-decision-maker) players and citizens. The question arises, therefore: can current foresight approaches and methods meet these challenges in the next 10–15 years? What new factors might reshape i) the context, in which foresight is used, and ii) foresight itself? How does the field of practices (need to) adapt? Which drivers and trends influence these change processes? What new opportunities might evolve – or ned to be created by targeted and concerted – efforts to improve the current foresight practices and increase the chance for wider and more effective use of the insights generated by foresight processes?
The presentation offers a first insight into our research on these issues, its conceptual framework and methods, as well as some preliminary results from the early phase of the process.