From forecasting to foresight processes—new participative foresight activities in Germany

Abstract

The definitions of forecasting vary to a certain extent, but they all have the view into the future in common. The future is unknown, but the broad, general directions can be guessed at and reasonably dealt with. Foresight goes further than forecasting, including aspects of networking and the preparation of decisions concerning the future. This is one reason why, in the 1990s, when foresight focused attention on a national scale in many countries, the wording also changed from forecasting to foresight. Foresight not only looks into the future by using all instruments of futures research, but includes utilizing implementations for the present. What does a result of a futures study mean for the present? Foresight is not planning, but foresight results provide 'information' about the future and are therefore one step in the planning and preparation of decisions. In this paper, some of the differences are described in a straightforward manner and demonstrated in the light of the German foresight process 'Futur'.

Semantic Knowledge Extraction from Research Documents

“…Technology forecasting is used widely by the private sector and by governments for applications ranging from predicting product development or a competitor's technical capabilities to the creation of scenarios for predicting the impact of future technologies [19]. It is "the prediction of the invention, timing, characteristic, performance, technique or process serving some useful purpose".…”

“…It is "the prediction of the invention, timing, characteristic, performance, technique or process serving some useful purpose". Detailed account of achievements and failures of the technology forecasting over the four decades is given by Cuhls [19]. Johnston [20] proposed five stages in the chronology of foresight, technology forecasting and futurism leading to technology foresight, which can be used for wide understanding of the economic and social processes that shape technology.…”

Futures of European welfare models and policies: seeking actual research questions, and new problem-solving arsenal for European welfare states

“…However, qualitative research generally fails to go beyond defining the concept of the welfare state and applying it to several cases simultaneously, thus failing to direct research to comparable, systematic data collection. In addition, quantitative research often fails to go beyond the technical aspects of empirical analysis, thus failing to ask whether the most used, or available, data sets are worth analysing [99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106]. Collecting comparable data on non-spending aspects of welfare state programmes is an important step in bridging this research gap.…”

FinnSight 2015 – A Foresight Exercise for the Shaping of National Strategies

“…[Attila, 2003;Durand, 2003;Cuhls, 2003;Keenan, 2003] соответственно). Возможным объяснени-ем служит тот факт, что Финляндия -страна неболь-шая, и результаты исследований, на первый взгляд не связанных друг с другом, хотя в них участвовали одни и те же эксперты, могут быть подспудно использова-ны при принятии политических решений на основе неформальной координации.…”