Innovation Futures in Europe: A Foresight Exercise on emerging Patterns of Innovation. Visions, Scenarios and Implications for Policy and Practice

Objective

The INFU Foresight project will develop plausible and relevant long-term scenarios of future innovation landscapes in order to orient long-term strategy building for policy and other innovation actors. The scenarios will outline how future actors may collaborate in new configurations and with new approaches to transform knowledge into products and services within different socio-economic frameworks. To generate this anticipatory intelligence INFU is implementing a progressive explorative dialogue with key stakeholders and experts using advanced creativity methods to foster thinking beyond established pathways and up-to-date prospective methods to structure the debate and ensure rigour of analysis. Particular emphasis is placed on optimising the knowledge flow through tailored and vivid formatting of outcomes for audiences in and outside the project. The INFU futures dialogue departs from an identification of emerging signals of change in current innovation patterns and progresses with increasing integration of diverse perspectives and knowledge sources towards consolidated innovation futures scripts. These bottom-up visions are then confronted with different possible socio-economic framework conditions and global megatrends to finally synthesise consistent scenarios that are integrating micro, meso and macro elements of possible innovation futures with particular emphasis on the changes in nature and content of research. The explorative analysis will be complemented with value-related debate on the desirability of different innovation futures based on an assessment of the scenario implications for key societal challenges such as sustainability. Options for policy strategies to prepare for the identified changes in innovation patterns are derived together with key policy actors. The INFU consortium comprises strong complementary competencies in Foresight, strategic support to policy and industry and academic innovation research.

Keywords

• Foresight
• innovation
• innovation systems
• open innovation
• scenarios
• user innovation

Programme(s)

• FP7-SSH - Specific Programme "Cooperation": Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities

Topic(s)

• SSH-2007-7.4-01 - Blue Sky Research on Emerging Issues Affecting European S&T

Call for proposal

FP7-SSH-2007-1
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (3)