Articles

Steering the future. The emergence of “Western” futures research and its production of expertise, 1950s to early 1970s

This article deals with the emergence of Futures Research after 1945 and its production of future expertise. The field of futures research (or futures studies/futurology) was conceptualised in a process of circul...

Authors: Elke Seefried

Scenario development without probabilities — focusing on the most important scenario

Within foresight management in general and scenario development in particular, the question is often asked: “For what scenario do I have to be prepared?” Since there are manifold approaches of scenario techniq...

Authors: Volker Grienitz, Michael Hausicke and André-Marcel Schmidt

A scientific enquiry into the future

Thinking about the future in a scientific manner is often characterised by an illusion of knowledge, leading to precarious one-sidedness and false conclusions. The reasons for this are misinterpretations of co...

Authors: Johannes Gabriel

Evaluation of technology foresight projects

Foresight is a well-known and widely used methodology for the creation of medium and long-term visions of technological, economic and social development. The need for evaluating foresight projects is unquestio...

Authors: Beata Poteralska and Anna Sacio-Szymańska

After the Arab Spring: an opportunity for scenarios

Since the start of the Arab Spring, the Middle East has been the scene of conflict that resonates far beyond its borders. This paper will argue that the upheavals in the Middle East cry out for a long view and...

Authors: P. W. F. Van Notten

Social network analysis in innovation research: using a mixed methods approach to analyze social innovations

The importance of social networks for innovation diffusion and processes of social change is widely recognized in many areas of practice and scientific disciplines. Social networks have the potential to influe...

Authors: Nina Kolleck

Foresighting addiction and lifestyles in Europe 2030+

The paper links to the EU funded project titled «Addictions and lifestyles in contemporary Europe – reframing addictions project», acronym: ALICE RAP. The project invited 17 European and three international dr...

Authors: Jan Erik Karlsen, Antoni Gual and Peter Anderson

A new monitoring process of future topics for innovation and technological analysis: informing Germanys’ innovation policy

Technology assessment (TA) is defined as problem-oriented transdisciplinary research that aims at working out solutions for societal problems. It provides advice to those in politics, science and wider society...

Authors: Nora Weinberger, Michael Decker, Torsten Fleischer and Jens Schippl

Migrant economies as new arenas to rethink policies and territorial development

The paper is based on an on-going empirical PhD project (Free University of Bolzano, Italy) and deals with the action framework of migrant economies in the South Tyrol of Italy. Self-organization among migrant...

Authors: Claudia Lintner

Social media analytics for future oriented policy making

Research indicates that evidence-based policy making is most successful when public administrators refer to diversified information portfolios. With the rising prominence of social media in the last decade, th...

Authors: Verena Grubmüller, Katharina Götsch and Bernhard Krieger

Limits to prediction: Europeanizing technology in an expert forum

EU expert institutions delivering policy advice about the promise of emerging technologies, help frame the issues that technologies might address. Their assumptions about European contexts for technology futur...

Authors: Mads Dahl Gjefsen

Scenarios for the future of the European process industry - the case of the chemical industry

Will the European manufacturing industry survive in the long term? This question has been discussed for decades. The issue is particularly controversial for the chemical industry with its energy-intensive prod...

Authors: Inga-Lena Darkow and Heiko A. von der Gracht

Part-time work: Atypical? Precarious? Normal?

There is no consensus among scholars about whether part-time work is an alerting signal of an on-going fragmentation of the labour market and of the rise in atypical working arrangements or whether it should b...

Authors: Tobias Hinterseer

Futures, communication and social innovation: using participatory foresight and social media platforms as tools for evaluating images of the future among young people

As many futurists have argued, images of the future have a crucial role to play in societal development. At an individual level, the understanding of people’s hopes, fears and expectations becomes important no...

Authors: Mario Guillo

Participatory futures research. Research or practice consulting?

This article combines futures research with participatory practice research, whose methodical approaches such as “community participation”, “community-based participatory research” and “participatory action re...

Authors: Reinhold Popp

Smurfs, cyborgs and changelings: prospects of human enhancement retrospected

This article stems from the impression of being condemned to late and moralizing reactions in regard to advances in the life sciences. We suggest a return to a speculative and theoretical approach in posing th...

Authors: Predrag Krstić and Srđan Prodanović

Foresight 2.0 - Definition, overview & evaluation

This paper contains a definition of Foresight 2.0 and summarizes the status quo of current methodological approaches in the field. It offers a categorization of individual applications by their technical featu...

Authors: Jörg Schatzmann, René Schäfer and Frederik Eichelbaum

Don’t blame the economists. It is an inverse problem!

The seriousness of the current crisis urgently demands new economic thinking that breaks the austerity vs. deficit spending circle in economic policy. The core tenet of the paper is that the most important proble...

Authors: Jaime Gomez-Ramirez

New man in utopian and transhumanist perspective

The title assumes that there is a difference between political Utopia and the transhumanist techno-vision. But if one follows recent publications that promise a renaissance of utopia, the transhumanist 21st ce...

Authors: Richard Saage

Futures Clinique—method for promoting futures learning and provoking radical futures

This paper introduces, illustrates and evaluates the concept of Futures Clinique, which is a participatory and exploratory futures workshop and a collective futures research method to tackle uncertainties, ide...

Authors: Sirkka Heinonen and Juho Ruotsalainen

Scenarios for selected maritime economic functions

This paper discusses the use of scenarios in the ‘Blue Growth’ project, which was aimed at elaborating the maritime dimension of the Europe 2020 strategy, with a 15-year time horizon (2025/2030). Scenarios wer...

Authors: H. A. Wolters, J. Gille, J. M. de Vet and R. J. Molemaker

Scenarios to explore the futures of the emerging technology of organic and large area electronics

Emerging technologies pose challenges for futures research because of their uncertainties combined with promises. Actors are anticipating and acting strategically. Sociotechnical scenarios building on endogeno...

Authors: Alireza Parandian and Arie Rip

Requirements for innovation policy in emerging high-tech industries

Innovation policy can never be fully technology-neutral and policies often align to support incumbent technological regimes obstructing the development of new industries. In this paper, two fields are analyzed...

Authors: Matti Pihlajamaa, Anne Patana, Kirsi Polvinen and Laura Kanto

Editorial

Authors: Christine Ahrend, Daniel Barben, Gerhard de Haan, Erik F. Øverland, Reinhold Popp, Ulrich Reinhardt and Doris Urbanek