Abstract
The Intelligence phase of ForSTI begins with a comprehensive understanding and scanning exercise, which provides input for the overall activity. The aim is to attain a reasonably comprehensive view of situations involved in the STEEPV systems and their future directions of development. This provides a shared understanding and mutual appreciation of situations, issues, and influencing factors as systems within their own contexts by uncovering uncertainties about the values and preferences of actors and stakeholders, and clarifying the goals of the entire ForSTI activity. In this way, the Intelligence phase offers a mind-set for understanding how systems work and behave, and what their emerging characteristics are. The goal is not necessarily to bring about a convergence of views, but, at least a partial convergence is likely to emerge from this process in practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Other systems include PESTLE, where the L is Legal; TEEPSE; where the E is Ethical.
- 2.
We have derived this from a UK Foresight formulation of HS as: “the systematic examination of potential threats, opportunities and likely future developments including but not restricted to those at the margins of current thinking and planning. Horizon scanning may explore novel and unexpected issues as well as persistent issues or trends” (dating from at least 2004, this is reproduced often, e.g. Government Office for Science 2011).
- 3.
There are several differences between the two concepts, though both have high impacts. Wild Cards are (supposedly) unexpected when they happen, but they can simply be events that are seen as having a low probability of occurring (at least within a specific time period). Black Swans are phenomena that were not previously seen as possible—e.g. it was long assumed that all swans were white.
- 4.
The wind tunnelling concept will be elaborated further in Chap. 7.
- 5.
All webpages were accessed on: 14.01.2016.
- 6.
At the time of writing unpleasant cybersquatters seem to have taken over the Forsociety website, but a report on the experience is available in an academic journal, it is to be hoped that the extensive documentation of (especially UK and Dutch) HS will become available again shortly.
- 7.
http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/RTD-general.html (Last visited on: May 19, 2015).
- 8.
http://www.techcastglobal.com/web/guest/whatwedo (Last visited on: May 19, 2015).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
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- 14.
- 15.
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Miles, I., Saritas, O., Sokolov, A. (2016). Intelligence: Environmental and Horizon Scanning. In: Foresight for Science, Technology and Innovation. Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32574-3_5
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