Experiences and practices of Technology Foresight in the European Region

The evolution of foresight since its inception in the Nineties is a success story in terms of the prominence the approach has acquired as a process to support forward-looking opinion formation in society and support tool for policy-making. However, in spite of this apparent success, the perspectives for the future are unclear. The notion of “hype-disappointment cycles”, which has been developed to describe the patterns of attention paid to new emerging technologies, seems to be applicable to foresight, too: initial enthusiasm has given way to a significant deal of scepticism and more recently to a more realistic assessment of the strengths and the weaknesses of foresight-type of approaches.