Articles

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