• A
  • A
  • A
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
Regular version of the site

News

Engaging Foresight

Foresight may absorb social construction in addition to the forecast of future global challenges, development trends and technology areas. ISSEK Foresight Centre experts Vladimir Mesropyan and Elena Gutaruk analysed how this new dimension can enrich the practice of developing measures of S&T policy during their visit September 9—20, 2013 to the Summer School at International Foresight Academy and the internship program at the Austrian Institute of Technology.

All innovations are socially relevant

This is the motto of the Zentrum fur Sociale Innovation (Centre for Social Innovation, ZSI), one of the three ISSEK’s partners in Austria, which was visited by the ISSEK Foresight Centre experts. It is noteworthy that this visit was not originally planned, but it was an accidental meeting on the flight from Moscow to Vienna and the following conversation with founder and scientific director of the ZSI Josef Hochgerner that somewhat anticipated the main focus of the issues discussed during two weeks in Austria. These discussions concerned mainly the fact that society does not always consider new technologies as promising as it’s seen by their creators, and that to implement development strategies, even the most optimistic, one needs to transmit this optimism to society at large. In general, the best builders of the future are citizens, engaged in the dialogue about the future.

Josef Hochgerner at the map of ZSI projects. HSE (Moscow) is marked on it, as its partner in many projects

Total Recall

This is the subject and motto of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, which launched the teamwork and communication processes for the participants of the Summer School. Various installations embodied approaches of scientists, engineers and artists to the concept of memory, knowledge about the world and its conservation. One of the main ideas, "hanging in the air" of the festival, was this: new technologies allow us to literally "record" all human life on external media, and it is the technology that pretty much organises our lives. At the same time, relying on it entirely, people can become fully dependent on digital support. Many technological solutions are fraught with unpredictable challenges. With the condensation of virtual environments basic mechanisms of human socialisation are changing, and insurmountable obstacles can grow in traditional relations. Rapid development of life systems will create new organisms and "upgrade" the existing ones, which dramatically exacerbates the issue of scientists’ responsibility for the results and implications of their research.

Ruben Nelson from "Foresight Canada" is looking at Ars Electronica exhibits

Foresight week in Schloss Laxenburg

Summer School in Laxenburg (September, 9—13), was called "Futures Studies and Foresight as an Instrument for Public Engagement in Policy-making for a Complex and Uncertain Future". It was the first working meeting of the representatives of the countries-participants of the International Foresight Academy, which unites key organisations conducting Foresight projects on different continents and in different cultural and political contexts. For five days, experts in the field of futures studies got acquainted with a relatively new approach to Foresight, working with experts in the field of education and representatives of development institutes from countries such as Austria, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Latvia, Russia, South Korea, and Switzerland.

Schloss Laxenburg, which is the headquarters for International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), another long-time ISSEK’s partner, was chosen as a site for intense and creative learning. Founded over 40 years ago, the Institute is considered an established independent research centre, where an international team of experts is working to address critical global issues and carries out projects commissioned by the governments of different countries. The staff of the Institute, as its name implies, are seeking applicable, policy-oriented, multi-disciplinary solutions in three areas: 1) energy and climate change, 2) food and water, 3) poverty and equity.

Suzanne Giesecke, leader of the research group “Society and Technology” at the Austrian Institute of Technology and coordinator of the European Foresight Platform, organised the International Foresight Academy Summer School. Ruben Nelson and Felicity Edwards, heading the "Foresight Canada" expert group on strategic consulting, were invited to give lectures. Leena Ilmola, a researcher at the IIASA and president of X-events, a company which studies and predicts extreme events, provided great organisational help. By the way, the company’s co-founder John Casti is one of the authors of the "Foresight-Russia" journal (see his article on extreme events in issue no 1, 2013).

"Foresight Canada" group members are guided by two imperatives, which aren’t the focus of conventional futures studies, — Foresight in their view is a very personal process which at the same time affects the widest possible public.

They believe in the reflexive engagement approach for experts who are involved in the formation of future scenarios, in other words, they should clearly understand their role in the process and through a personal message — inspire, and engage other people, who are somehow related to the generated scenarios. Ruben Nelson pointed out the primacy of individual interests over institutional ones. Ruben and Felicity deliberately move away from S&T Foresight, while recognizing that in conversations about the future with key stakeholders — government and business — specific guidance on emerging technologies, backed up by recommendations for their commercialization, is very important.

The new version of Foresight, as evident from the examples of the Canadian experts projects, is not so much about technologies but about their life in society. The very society they interpret in Foresight 2.0 resembles a conscious child, with whom the parents (the authorities) confer, where to invest resources, rather than decide for themselves (and for the child) how to spend the available budget. First, users in mass may simply be unready for some innovations. Secondly, as the lecturers showed in their case studies, the efficient way to develop a recovery strategy for the region implies relying on citizens, who are inspired by a common vision of the future.

The model territory which was used by the "Foresight Canada" experts to show their approach to strategic forecasting, was the town of Canmore in Alberta province. This municipality with a population of about 12,000, looked much better 30 years ago. Since it is adjacent to Calgary, some part of the infrastructure for the 1988 Winter Olympics was built there, but after decades it is virtually abandoned. In 2005, the local authorities commissioned the "Foresight Canada" group to study the question “What kind of community can we as citizens imagine Canmore becoming in the years ahead?" After nine months of intensive consultations with almost all of the town’s communities, in the format of World café in particular, a Vision for Canmore was drafted — a document that reflects the basic values, principles, goals and criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of steps taken to develop Canmore.

Interestingly, "Foresight Canada" group leaders compare the preparation of the Vision with only the top of the mountain, pointing out another, much more significant, the result of their participation in the life of the town — after such an "Engaging Foresight" the residents received a clear signal for the launch of the development of Canmore and mobilized for the job, after recognizing their role in the process.

It is also noteworthy that the Canadian experts consider Canmore and the whole Alberta province some kind of a "laboratory", and a sufficiently "protected" one to learn to practice "social engagement". To support these initiatives, society, following the previously proposed metaphor of a child should grow up enough, or, in other words, must be mature and civil.

“Charta 21”, written by all the Summer School students, gives an idea of how the experience described by the Canadian lecturers tunes with other experts’ practice of futures studies. The organisers also took part in the creation of the document, and the number they put next to the “charter” represents the number of the document’s authors. Each of them presented his impressions of teamwork and views on the paradigm of Foresight 2.0. Someone is very inspired and sees real demand for such kind of social construction, someone confesses confused feelings, but absolutely all the participants express gratitude to the organisers of the Summer School, its lecturers and colleagues for a productive and exciting intellectual dialogue.

The week at AIT

The internship at the "Innovative Systems" department of the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) also turned out very inspiring. On the first day the head of the division “Research, technology & innovation policy” and the "chief Foresighter" in Austria Matthias Weber acquainted the ISSEK experts with his team’s activities, presented the main Foresight projects and key experts involved in different dimensions of futures studies.

Dimension 1: Shocks for stakeholders

Petra Schaper-Rinkel spoke about several large Foresights performed by AIT (which was either participant or coordinator of the projects) through the request of the European Commission.

The project “Research and Innovation Future” (RIF 2030) is a good example here. The study focuses on measures to stimulate "fresh" thinking among stakeholders, which will encourage them to consider the ongoing processes in terms of their potential and risks, projected for the future. To do this, experts use an original method of creating and validating scenarios. Thus, in the range 2012—2020, basic explorative scenarios are modelled, in 2020 model shocks are "arranged" (for example, a “wild card”: China rejects the strategy of R&D internationalization, stops the flow of publications in English), and then their effect on the trajectory of the development of science in the European Union (transformative scenarios) is studied.

Dimension 2: Agents of influence

Multi-agent simulation of complex socio-technological systems is a very promising approach to the study of hard-to-detect associations of the micro and macro levels in regional innovation systems. This methodology is applied, in particular, in two AIT projects, presented by Manfred Paier and Manuela Korber — INSPIRED and INFRASET.

INSPIRED simulates associations between different agents of innovation systems (companies and research centres, universities and other organisations), reconstructs processes of creating and transferring knowledge in a particular region. The purpose is to study the patterns of various agents’ behaviour of and build an adaptive strategy for sustainable development of a regional innovation system.

INFRASET focuses on how the newest developments are built in an established technological landscape of a selected territory. In the example of a sunny region in Austria, they study how households can implement photovoltaic power stations with the help of smart-grid technology and they can influence the power distribution system. Within the project virtual agents are programmed, which represent distributed infrastructure, households and implemented technologies, and patterns of their relationship are set. Running the models and varying their properties, the authors explore "system shocks" and "inadequacy", and estimate the optimal stimulus package for households to implement new energy-generating technologies.

This approach to the study of interaction models for a large number of "agents" is actively applied in IIASA, where the participants of the Summer School got acquainted with one of such projects realized for the Finnish authorities.

Dimension 3: Technology Foresight System for united Europe

Klaus Kubeczko described the international Joint Programming Initiative (JPI), where you can see some similarities with the national S&T Foresight system evolving in Russia. The aim of this ambitious project is to improve the efficiency of European R&D funding through the expansion of collaborations between scientists and communications at the level of other stakeholders — from government officials to lay citizens.

The project is divided into 10 "initiatives", in which researchers from Europe are looking for answers to the key challenges in the medium and long term and form a common vision of the future development of their areas of study. Klaus himself is involved in one of the blocks of JPI — Urban Europe. According to him, their research group was able to bring a variety of stakeholders with different statuses into this work. JPIs, through the development of Strategic Research Agendas, will have an impact on the coordination of STI policy in the Research Area of the European Union.

Dimension 4: Technology scouting

Edgar Schiebel showed one of the methods of searching for promising technologies and creating research fronts, used at AIT. He demonstrated his programme of processing bibliometric and patent information called “Technology scouting”.

Based on the algorithms of analysis of keywords, reference lists, and patent information, the programme scans databases of scientific publications (primarily Web of science), estimates the degree of documents’ similarity, and then offers very bright clustering and visualisation of the results.

Another member of the AIT Foresight team Joachim Klerx, an economist with a degree in Philosophy, uses ICT tools to study the future. He presented the main methods for "weak signals" identification in the analysis of big data, surprisingly not in a presentation but during a tour around Vienna.

These are only a few short messages on the results of an intensive and intellectually nutritious trip to Austria. Its tangible results can be presented in kilograms of printed paper, in a couple of scribbled notebooks, three gigabytes of photos, etc. However, much more significant are intangible results.

"Together — towards the new discoveries"

The company "Aeroflot", general partner for the Sochi 2014 Olympics, appeals with these words to Sheremetyevo guests. The plane, which made the flight from Moscow to Vienna, was named after Academician Keldysh, and the return flight was performed by "Academician Tsiolkovsky". Such "travel" associations can be interpreted as a signal that Russian society considers science as the power factor and an important driver of the development of the country, and that it is, obviously, very willing to support these "developmental" activities.

Is it a good time to practice Foresight 2.0? Or is version 3.0 relevant? The report with this title will be presented by Rafael Popper (University of Manchester) at the HSE Annual International Research Conference “Foresight and STI Policy” (October 30—31). Its motto is also in tune: "Exploring new frontiers in Foresight".

Written by Elena Gutaruk and Vladimir Mesropyan

Photos by Elena Gutaruk