In recent years, many countries have carried out foresight exercises to better exploit scientific and technological opportunities. Often, these exercises have sought to identify 'critical' or 'key' technologies or, more broadly, to establish research priorities. In this paper, we consider the potential of multicriteria decision-making methods in this kind of priority-determination and examine the limitations of these methods in the foresight context. We also provide results from a combined evaluation and foresight study where multicriteria methods were deployed to support the shaping of research and technology development activities in the Finnish forestry and forest industry. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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The preparation of research and technology development (RTD) programs calls for the analysis of prospective technological advances and the consideration of 'lessons learned' from earlier programs. In this paper, we report experiences from a pilot project in which an internet-based survey and five participatory workshops were organised in conjunction with a Finnish RTD program in telecommunications. At these workshops, leading representatives from industry and the research community were invited to report their experiences from a concluding RTD program and to address future research needs, whereby they were assisted by a group support system (GSS). The workshop process was well received, which suggests that the preparation of RTD efforts can benefit from the deployment of GSS tools in support of face-to-face discussions. To our knowledge, this is the first account on GSS use in the foresight context.

In this paper, we report a prospective evaluation process for a major research program for the Finnish forestry and forest industries. To a significant extent, this process was based on fifteen participatory workshops where tools of operational research — most notably multi‐criteria methods embedded in a group support system — were deployed to help representatives from industry, the research community, and public administration in the assessment of socio‐economic impacts and the identification of further research topics. Drawing upon this case study, we also analyze the preconditions, advantages, and limitations of similar kinds of participatory processes in the implementation of formative and summative evaluations.

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