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Foresight and Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators
Technology foresight as one of the key areas of forward looking activities has become a tool with a significant influence on science, technology and innovation (STI) policies in many countries worldwide over the last two decades, with a much longer tradition in Japan and few other countries. Since early 1990s foresight has been evolving from an instrument to assess future prospects of individual research areas to an integral part of STI policy formulation and implementation. Luke Georghiou singles out five generations of Foresight that vary from mainly forecasting referred to the internal dynamics of technology to a wide mix of activities aimed at either structures of actors within the STI system or the STI dimensions of broader social or economic context.
Foresight can affect the innovation performance of a country through different channels. In the present globalization context in the industrialized nations it is accepted that an explicit and coherent STI policy is essential for the economic and social development. Foresight studies affect STI policy strategy decisions by supporting priority-setting. They create, in addition, crucial networks and interactions between participants in the national system of innovation and contribute to the acceptance of new developments and to the consideration of all of the technological potentials.
Since foresight, and STI indicators, are both aimed at informing and improving policy-making, they quite naturally have much in common, are interdependent and complement each other.
The interrelations between foresight and STI indicators are many. On the one hand, indicators are extensively used in foresight to provide data on STI trends thus stimulating experts’ creative thinking and solidifying their judgments. On the other hand, foresight exercises contribute to highlighting new areas of concern for STI policy that can and should be addressed by statistical measurement and emerging research areas with a great innovation potential that need more detailed statistical analysis. Between these two extremes, there are many other fields where the two areas are closely related.
Another topic of increasing interest is the search for suitable practically proven indicators available for measuring and assessing foresight studies as such, e.g. in terms of management but also with respect to their eventual impact in either a direct or indirect way on the national innovation system (NIS) and on the long term economic performance. Hence it shows an urgent need to develop and apply a coherent and consistent set of indicators which are suitable for monitoring the effectiveness and efficiency of foresight studies from a process perspective and which can contribute to measuring their impact.
This chapter introduces three major dimensions of interrelations between foresight and STI indicators: 1) use of indicators in the course of foresight studies; 2) building particular STI indicators to monitor and measure foresight activities; and, 3) the contribution of foresight to complement existing indicators and develop new ones.
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