Concurrent Design Foresight

[PDF]

Executive Summary (excerpt)

Foresight addresses open and complex futures. The fast-changing and complex nature of many future challenges requires faster, more experimental and more adaptive forms of foresight processes. Expert and stakeholder participation and public engagement are increasingly important to draw on a broader pool of knowledge, to mobilise action and to enhance the legitimacy of foresight results. Foresight needs to be properly embedded into decision-making, both in process terms along the different phases of decision-making and in structural/organisational terms as a network across policy areas. This requires a rapid response capability, which can be delivered through the development of ‘Concurrent Design Foresight’. This includes modelling and the recent Science and Technology Advisory Council report concludes ‘the Commission needs multidisciplinary foresight activities, including modelling and simulation’ (STAC, The future of Europe is science, October 2014, p. 19).