The impact of foresight on innovation policy-making: Recent experiences and future perspectives

Foresight has evolved as a distinct prospective analytical tool: it considers alternative futures of various S&T fields or socio-economic systems by bringing together the perspectives of various stakeholder groups, and thus assists the decision-making processes at different levels. However, in order to avoid hypes - and subsequent disappointments - about what foresight can deliver, the potential contributions to decision-making processes by foresight should be clearly understood. The article puts foresight into this broader context of policy-making processes, with a particular emphasis on innovation policy. It describes the evolution of different policy rationales since the 1960s, develops a framework to classify the impacts of various types of prospective analyses, and reviews the evaluation results of several national foresight programmes by using this framework. On that basis, future directions of how foresight might evolve are considered to spur discussions.