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Selection of national and international organisations which deal with foresight
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In the developed world, foresight has become a natural part of the process of setting policy targets and their implementation. Foresight is perfomed in very different institutions, in different topics, with different depths and time horizons. At this point, we introduce a selection of other countries institutions and organisations, whose activity is more relevant to the Development Fund's Foresight Division mission. Finland: The Finnish innovation fund Sitra (www.sitra.fi) uses foresight within its own programmes, promotes a foresight culture and organises international foresight networks. As a part of its strategy the foresight is performed by the main financers of Finnish science and development activities: the technological and innovation financing agency TEKES (www.tekes.fi) and the Academy of Finland (www.aka.fi). Their last common foresight work was FinnSight 2015 (www.finnsight2015.fi), which analysed the social and global factors which influence the most Finnish enetrprises, industries and society. It also identified future challenges for science and technology activities and brought out key areas for strengthening expertise. UK: Regular foresight activity at government level was launched in 1994 and is now very widely used. The government central foresight programme and Horizon Scanning Centre (www.foresight.gov.uk) are located in the new education and innovation ministry DIUS (www.dius.gov.uk). The national endowment NESTA (www.nesta.org.uk) is a rather new establishment with an interesting conception, whose mission is to make the United Kingdom more innovative. To do that, NESTA invests in early development stage companies, informs and influences innovation related policies with its own analyses and implements a special programme which is expected to provide inspiration for other parties to prepare for large future challenges. Manchester University's innovation research institute PREST is one of the world's most recognised promoters of foresight theory. Ireland: Forfás (www.forfas.ie) is a national expert organisation which advises on entrepreneurship, export, science, tehnology and innovation policy, which performs under the aegis of the ministry of the economy. Forfás has done very different foresight work: studying technological trends (ICST Technology Foresight 2015), general global trends and their impact on Ireland (global warming thematic foresight EPA 2020), putting up concrete problem (explaining skills that are needed in the future National Skills Strategy: Vision 2020) and Irish socio-economic challenges (Socio-economic Scenarios 2025/2040). |
Sweden: the most well known foresight organisations are the Institute for Futures Studies (www.framtidsstudier.se) and national innovation system agency Vinnova (www.vinnova.se). The most important foresight project from last year Teknisk Framsyn (www.tekniskframsyn.nu), prioritised state knowledege and skills need. France: Foresight is performed by Ministry for Research and New Technologies and the independent research centre Futuribles International (www.futuribles.com). A notable recent foresight project was FutuRIS which ended in 2005, which focused on future challenges for the French science and innovation system and looked for solutions to renew it. Germany: The Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF (www.bmbf.de) last year's biggest foresight project FUTUR, identified technologies which most influenced competitiveness. From the foresight actors, the most important is the system and innovation research institute Fraunhofer ISI (www.isi.fraunhofer.de). Japan: Japan is a country with strong foresight traditions, where regular foresight work started already in the 1970s. One of the main foresight actors is the national science and technology policy institute NISTEP (www.nistep.go.jp). International organisations: For EU level policies, foresight is undertaken in Seville by the future technology research institute IPTS (ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu), which is one of the seven European Comission JRC (Joint Research Centre) institutes. The dissemination of foresight knowledge and practice is undertaken by UNIDO (www.unido.org) which offers foresight training for decision makers as well as for practitioners and is involved in many foresight cooperation projects. Wales: A large amount of good reading and studies from the Welsh Assembly Government (new.wales.gov.uk) |
