Foresight tackling societal challenges: Impacts and implications on policy-making

Foresight activities are often conducted to anticipate major societal future challenges and provide support to current decision-making. Whereas the paper reports some findings on the future of challenges especially related to sustainability, security and information society, it mainly provides evidence on how foresight impacts on policy-making and societal developments. The paper elaborates a framework with key design dimensions related to foresight process and outcomes in order to characterise different kinds of foresight projects. The framework is applied for the empirically based ex post analysis of selected foresight projects around the world in order to clarify (i) different roles for foresight in the innovation system and society and (ii) its respective impacts and implications on policy.