Juha Kaskinen on the special skill of delivering foresight results to stakeholders

Being able to disseminate scientific knowledge and deliver foresight results to stakeholders is very important, noted Juha Kaskinen, director of the Finland Futures Research Centre (Turku School of Economics), at the at the IV Foresight and STI Policy conference.

Usually, foresights are combined projects with different stakeholders. The project itself spreads the information already, and this is a valuable part of this group work. But sometimes one needs to get the news through to “outside clients” — e.g. politicians or other stakeholders, and this can be a difficult task.

“Foresight is supposed to help planning and decision-making, so you have to be extra careful on the process of how you deliver results to the stakeholders”, Juha Kaskinen says. “That needs skills for dissemination. You never know whether you are good or bad [at this], but there are some basic rules you should follow”. At the Foresight Conference, Dr. Kaskinen shared some advice on how this dialogue with stakeholdersto could be organized.