Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447

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Technological Forecasting & Social Change

The origins of the concept of ‘foresight’ in science and technology:An insider's perspective

Ben R. Martin⁎SPRU, The Freeman Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QE, UKCentre for Science and Policy (CSaP), University of Cambridge, 11-12 Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1QA, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

⁎ SPRU, The Freeman Centre, University of Sussex, BE-mail address: B.Martin@sussex.ac.uk.

1 In both cases, these databases were accessed on 1

0040-1625/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc.doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2010.06.009

a b s t r a c t

Article history:Received 21 April 2010Received in revised form 5 May 2010Accepted 15 June 2010

This article explores how the term ‘foresight’ originally came to be used in connection withscience and technology by the author and SPRU colleagues in 1983. It analyses how therationale for its use evolved over time, first providing a ‘catchy’ title for a study (‘ProjectForesight’), and then a convenient shorthand for the focus of that study, before eventuallycoming to formally signify a new approach to looking systematically into the future of scienceand technology, an inclusive and wide-ranging process that differed appreciably from that oftraditional ‘technology forecasting’. The paper reflects on the importance of concepts andterminology in the field of science policy research, providing examples of how an inappropriateterm or phrase can damn the prospects of the research having an impact on policy, while amore politically astute use of terminology can greatly enhance the probability of making asignificant impact. The paper also examines other early uses of the concept of ‘foresight’ in theUnited States and Canada at about the same time. In addition, it highlights the conceptualsimilarities between foresight and la prospective, a novel approach developed in France not justfor looking into the future but also for shaping or even ‘constructing’ the future of our choice, anambitious aspiration that it shares with foresight. This case-study on the origins and earlyevolution of ‘technology foresight’ illustrates the essential importance of terminology indifferentiating key concepts in social sciences (where it sometimes gives rise to unfortunatepriority disputes), and particularly in the case of policy research.

© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords:Technology foresightForesightScienceLa prospectiveTerminologyPolicy researchPriority

1. Introduction

‘Technology foresight’ is a term nowwidely used by academic researchers, policy-makers, industrialists, consultants and othersround the world, although less so perhaps in the United States. According to Google Scholar, there have been over 5000 academicarticles employing this term, while Google itself registers over 90,000 ‘hits’.1Whenwas the term ‘foresight’ first used in connectionwith science and technology to denote something different from traditional ‘technology forecasting’? Ian Miles [1] has carried outa thorough review of the origins and early use of the concept of ‘foresight’, initially more generally with respect to futures workand later more specifically with regard to technology. This article should be read in conjunction with his review, offering thereflections of one who was centrally involved in the early work to develop the concept of ‘foresight’ and to differentiate it from‘forecasting’ as well as in efforts to introduce it to the world of policy.

Terminology is vitally important in the social sciences. The emergence of a new term often heralds the identification of somenew phenomenon, or at least the recognition of an existing phenomenon that, until now, has lain undetected by social scientists.

righton, BN1 9QE, UK. Tel.: +44 1273 873562.

6 April 2010.

All rights reserved.

1439B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447

Alternatively, it may relate to the development of a new concept, model or theory that provides a significantly improvedunderstanding of an already acknowledged phenomenon in the social world. A new termmay not infrequently be the subject of apriority dispute as to who identified the phenomenon, concept or whatever first. In addition, as this story reveals, terminology isespecially important in theworld of policy research, where a particular choice of phrasingmay either greatly enhance the prospectof the workmaking a significant impact on policy or management practice, or alternatively may, for political or other reasons, ruinthe chances of that research having any appreciable impact.

The original objective of this paper was to respond to the request of the editors of this special issue to set on record how andwhy the SPRU team of which I was part first came to adopt the terminology of ‘foresight’ in the Spring of 1983, and to analyse theevolving rationale for the use of this particular term as distinct from ‘forecasting’. However, the paper also reflects more generallyon the importance of concepts and terminology in the field of science policy research, providing specific examples of how this cansubstantially influence the impact on policy. In addition, I discuss my changing perceptions on the tangled issue of priorityregarding the concept of ‘foresight’with respect to other early users of the term in the United States and Canada, and in the light ofthe substantial conceptual and philosophical similarities with la prospective, the approach pioneered in France. This case-study ofthe origins and early evolution of technology foresight illustrates the essential importance of terminology in identifying keyconcepts in social sciences, and particularly in the case of policy research, as well as the often intractable problems of establishingintellectual priority.

The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 2 describes the background to the first SPRU study, ‘Project Foresight’,explaining why this particular terminology was adopted in 1983 in deference to the earlier ‘Project Hindsight’ and reflecting thefact that this new project essentially involved the ‘mirror image’ of what Project Hindsight had been trying do. Subsequently,however, SPRU adopted ‘foresight’ as a convenient form of shorthand for “the techniques, mechanisms and procedures forattempting to identify areas of basic research beginning to exhibit strategic potential” (Irvine and Martin [2], p.7), as I describe inSection 3. Later still, as we will see in section 4, the use of the term ‘foresight’ received another, much more substantial rationale,namely to differentiate certain recent anticipatory activities from those more traditional ones that went under the rubric of‘technology forecasting’. Section 5 considers the output from the original SPRU foresight study and why, with the particularterminology chosen for the subtitle of the resulting book, we were virtually guaranteed to have no impact on Mrs Thatcher'sConservative Government in the 1980s. Section 6 reviews other early uses of the ‘foresight’ terminology with regard to science andtechnology, while Section 7 examines the second SPRU report to the UK Government and explains how, having learnt fromprevious experiences, SPRU this time made sure that the terminology was more appropriate, enabling that report to have a majorimpact on subsequent UK policy. Finally, Section 8 discusses the main conclusions to be drawn from this case-study on the role ofnew concepts and terminology in social sciences and in policy research in particular.

2. Project Foresight

Early in 1983, the Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development (ACARD, an advisory body reporting to the UKCabinet Office) set up a study group “to survey current scientific developments and advise the Council on work which showedcommercial and economic promise for the medium to long term” (ACARD [3], p.7). As part of this, the Cabinet Office invited SPRUto bid for a study to survey the approaches adopted in other countries for looking into the longer-term future of science andtechnology in order to identify exploitable areas of research, and to identify what lessons the UK might draw from these. Thedecision to approach SPRU almost certainly reflected its prominent involvement in ‘futures’ research during the 1970s, inparticular its critique of the influential book, The Limits to Growth [4].2 John Irvine and I, who had previously been working on theissue of how to identify priorities in the area of ‘big science’ (and specifically high-energy physics [9]), and who were at that stagelooking for funds, decided to prepare a proposal. In doing this, we received substantial help from colleagues who had beeninvolved in the earlier SPRU ‘futures’ work, including Marie Jahoda, Ian Miles, Keith Pavitt and Tom Whiston.

The resulting proposal set out the specific objectives of the study:

a) to analyse attempts made in France, Germany, Japan, and the United States over the last 20 years to identify emerging areas ofstrategic research that at the time showed long-term promise of leading to significant commercial benefits;

b) to examine the role, if any, that these forecasts played in promoting such developments;c) to evaluate retrospective studies tracing back the scientific origins of significant technological innovations in order to

determine whether one could have predicted the subsequent economic impact of the preceding research. [10]

From the results thus obtained, “SPRUwould then offer suggestions as to the approach that ACARDmight adopt in their surveyof promising scientific areas”. [10] However, before it could be submitted, the proposal obviously had to be given a title. Even atthis stage, it was clear that the study would give considerable attention to “retrospective studies tracing back the scientific originsof significant technological innovations”. [10] Moreover, from our previous graduate studies (John Irvine at the University ofSussex and myself at the University of Manchester), we were aware that two of the most important retrospective studies wereProjects Hindsight [11] and TRACES [12]. One of the iconic contributions of these two studies consists of various figures tracingback the scientific and technological origins of key innovations (in the military and civil sectors, respectively). It was apparent thatwhat the ACARD study required was essentially the ‘mirror image’ of these figures – i.e. instead of taking a specific innovation and

2 See, for example, the critiques by Cole et al. [5], Encel et al. [6], Clark and Cole [7] and Miles [8].

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identifying what previous scientific and technological advances (or ‘critical events’) had made it possible, one wanted to explorewhether one could start with current (or foreseeable) scientific and technological activities, and then try to identify whatinnovations they might eventually contribute to. In deference to the seminal influence of Project Hindsight, and with a certaintouch of whimsy, we therefore decided to give our proposal the title of ‘Project Foresight’. [10]

At this stage of preparing the proposal (in Spring 1983), we had not carried out more than a bare minimum of literature reviewon previous forecasting or futures work, and we certainly had no idea whether or not the term ‘foresight’ had been used by othersin connection with forecasting or futures studies. That would only come later, as we shall see below.

3. ‘Foresight as a convenient shorthand

The SPRU bid was successful, and the study was carried out in Autumn 1983. It was not a large study; the total budget was justunder £11,500, sufficient for only 80 person-days of effort. It was carried out mainly by John Irvine andmyself, but with significantinputs from various SPRU colleagues including Ian Miles, Geoffrey Oldham, Keith Pavitt, Roy Rothwell and TomWhiston. [13] Thefirst phase involved a systematic review of retrospective studies of the scientific and technological origins of technologicalinnovations, including Projects Hindsight and TRACES, a Battelle study on ‘Interactions of Science and Technology in the InnovativeProcess’ [14], a study of biomedical innovations by Comroe and Dripps [15], and a number of other studies including the work byUniversity of Manchester researchers on Wealth from Knowledge [16] and by SPRU researchers on Project SAPPHO [17].

The second and main phase consisted of fieldwork (including 100 interviews) in four countries – France, Germany, Japan andthe United States. This research revealed that a considerable amount of work was going on in these countries – in both the privateand public sectors – in terms of trying to identify exploitable areas of science. It was during the process of carrying out theextensive programme of interviews that we began to adopt the term ‘foresight’ as a convenient shorthand for efforts to identify“which research areas are likely to lead to the greatest economic and social benefits” (Irvine and Martin [13], p.2). In due course,this gradually became formalised in terms of a definition of foresight. For example, in our 1984 book (Irvine and Martin [2], p.7),we defined foresight activities as “the techniques, mechanisms and procedures for attempting to identify areas of basic researchbeginning to exhibit strategic potential”.3 And by ‘strategic potential’, we meant “areas … that are beginning to show promise ofconstituting a knowledge base that, with further funding, might eventually contribute to the solution of important practicalproblems” ([2], p.6). Since this was a bit of a mouthful, ‘foresight’ quickly became the standard shorthand for this.

4. The conceptual distinction between forecasting and foresight

Although ‘foresight’ started out first as a snappy title for the project, and later became a convenient shorthand for what wewere studying, during the 1983 study a third andmuchmore fundamental reason for the use of this term emerged. From our workin the United States and Japan in particular, it was apparent that therewas an essential difference between ‘technology forecasting’(as developed in the US in the late 1940s and the 1950s, particularly in themilitary sector by researchers at RAND and elsewhere4)and amore recent set of activities that we came to label as ‘foresight’ (but which also went under other labels such as ‘anticipation’or ‘la prospective’). This distinction between ‘forecasting’ and ‘foresight’ was only fully developed and formalised in a later SPRUstudy for the Dutch Government between 1987 and 1989, but wewere already aware of the central differences between the two in1983. As we later wrote:

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Forecasting has been defined by Wills ([20], p.263) as the task of making ‘a probabilistic statement, on a relatively highconfidence level, about the future’, and accuracy is therefore of paramount importance.5 Hence, the failure to predict the1973 ‘oil-shock’ led to considerable scepticism concerning the validity and utility of forecasting… Anticipation or foresightinvolves an explicit recognition that the choices made today can shape or create the future, and that there is little point inmaking deterministic predictions in spheres (including science and technology) where social and political processesexercise a major influence. There has consequently been a move away from forecasting and prediction towards activitiesvariously labelled as ‘outlook’, foresight’, ‘issues management’ and ‘la prospective’. (Martin and Irvine [21], p.4)

By then, the concept of ‘foresight’ had begun to be adopted by others to differentiate it from ‘forecasting’, and indeed Coates([22], p.30) had come upwith one of the earliest definitions: “a process by which one comes to a fuller understanding of the forcesshaping the long-term future which should be taken into account in policy formulation, planning and decision-making”. As wenoted then (and as several researchers have argued subsequently – for example, Cuhls [23]), there are several key features thatdistinguish foresight from forecasting:

The first is the emphasis placed on foresight as a process rather than as a set of techniques. … Second, whereas forecastingtechniques can be – and indeed often are – treated as a ‘black box’ for translating input assumptions into outputs taking

definition of foresight was to evolve over time, but by the 1990s, we had settled on the following, often quoted version: “the process involved intically attempting to look into the longer-term future of science, technology, the economy and society with the aim of identifying the areas of strategich and the emerging generic technologies likely to yield the greatest economic and social benefits” (Martin [18], p.140).also Linstone [19].y of those engaged in forecasting today would doubtless see this as too narrow a definition of ‘forecasting’, not least because of the now widespread usesuch as scenario analysis. However, it does reflect how many saw the subject in the 1960s and 1970s before the emergence of ‘foresight’.

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the form of predictions about the future, foresight is much more concerned with creating an improved understanding ofpossible developments and the forces likely to shape them. … Third, the notions of forecasting and foresight involve verydifferent ontological assumptions about the future. In conventional forecasting, the aim is to arrive at predictions whichcan be justified ‘scientifically’ … The underlying assumption is that only one probable future exists, and that this can belinked in a unilinear and deterministic way to the present and the past. In contrast, the goal in foresight is to survey assystematically as possible ‘what chances for developments and what options for action are open at present, and thenfollow up analytically to determine to what alternative future outcomes the developments would lead’ (Solem [24], p.4).(Martin and Irvine [21], p.5, original emphasis)

We then went on to acknowledge the similarities between foresight and la prospective:

Although there are differences in emphasis, the essentially Anglo-Saxon notion of foresight thus has a similar philosophicalstarting point to la prospective, the approach developed by Michel Godet and others in France, namely that there exists notone but many possible futures (les futuribles): ‘The future is not written, it remains to be carried out. The prospectiveprocess admits that, at any given moment, the future is multiple and that from the confrontation between the variousactors [we] will derive one future rather than another’ (Godet [25], p.136). Whereas predictive forecasting implies a ratherpassive attitude towards the future, foresight and la prospective involve a much more active stance – reflecting a belief thatthe future is there to be created through the actions we choose to take today. (Martin and Irvine [21], p.5, originalemphasis)6

At the time of our 1983 study, it was apparent that, while most of what we witnessed in the United States still fell under therubric of ‘technology forecasting’,7 in Japan there had been a substantial shift towards a new and significantly different approach,one that we characterised as ‘technology foresight’.8 Typifying this were the Science and Technology Agency (STA) 30-yearforecasts. These had a number of characteristics:

• theywere not carried out by a few forecasting ‘experts’ but were based on a large-scale process involving thousands of scientists,industrialists, government officials and others;9

• they considered the ‘demand’ side of future economic and social needs, not just science and technology ‘push’;• they combined top-down and bottom-up elements;• they gave rise to a number of important process benefits – the ‘5 Cs’ as we termed them: (i) bringing together differentstakeholders and getting them to communicate with each other; (ii) forcing them periodically to concentrate on the longer-termfuture; (iii) enabling them to coordinate their future R&D activities: (iv) creating a measure of consensus on future priorities forstrategic research: and (v) most importantly, generating a feeling of commitment to the outcome of the foresight, making it likelythat what start out as predictions turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. (Irvine and Martin [2], p.144, original emphasis)

These characteristics clearly distinguished the Japanese activities from earlier technology forecasting in the US and elsewhere,and hence merited the introduction of a new term to describe and signify this new concept. From here on, the use of the term‘foresight’ or more specifically ‘technology foresight’ encapsulated these fundamentally different characteristics from those of‘technology forecasting’. Since then, the concept of technology foresight has beenwidely taken up in Europe (including Central andEastern Europe), Asia and Latin America. However, it is somewhat less common in the United States, where the term ‘technologyforecasting’ is often used more broadly to embrace foresight-type activities amongst others.

5. The first Foresight report – getting the terminology wrong!

Unfortunately the SPRU report [13] to ACARD and the Cabinet Office had a very limited impact. There was a general acceptanceof the argument that science and technology were of growing importance and, that with resources being limited, there was a needto arrive at funding priorities and policies that were targeted towards the research areas likely to yield the greatest economic andsocial benefits. However, in 1983, Britain was at the height of ‘Thatcherism’; the incumbent Conservative Government was intenton ‘rolling back the state’, reducing the number and level of government responsibilities, not adding to them, as our reportproposed. Consequently, this was far from a propitious time to advocate that the UK Government should launch a foresightexercise (even a modest pilot study, as we proposed) based on what we had learnt from other countries.

fundamental difference in terms of philosophical starting point was at the heart of the annual debates staged for SPRU MSc and DPhil students betweenavitt and the author in the 1990s. For Pavitt, science and technology were essentially unpredictable or ‘serendipitous’, whereas I stressed that humansme ability to shape the future and to influence which future we might arrive at, with foresight offering a policy tool for doing this in a systematic manner.ewhat ironic that, despite being a strong Francophile, Pavitt was apparently unfamiliar with (or at least unsympathetic towards) this notion with its

in the French school of thought surrounding la prospective.true that some of the work by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) went well beyond traditional technology forecasting, but it was not veryatory, one of the key differentiating characteristics of ‘foresight’ (Miles, private communication).term ‘foresight’ was apparently not in use in Japan at that stage. It was only taken up later after foresight became prominent in Europe and elsewhere iny 1990s (see [26], [27]). The foundation of the Science and Technology Foresight Center of NISTEP signalled this change (Cuhls, private communication).emphasis on widespread participation has since been one of the defining features of ‘foresight’ activities as carried out in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. [28], [29]).

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In addition, with the benefit of hindsight, wemade two tactical errors. The first was to argue that the UK hadmost to learn fromJapan. It was certainly true that Japan had, at that stage, by far the greatest experience of ‘technology foresight’ (as opposed to‘technology forecasting’). However, in terms of politics, institutions, culture and so on, Japanwas clearly different from the UK. Thisleft us vulnerable to the following criticism: “Because Japan is so very different, what works in Japan will not work in the UK.”Weresponded by pointing out that this was a very ‘unscientific’ attitude to adopt. Furthermore, it completely ignored the point thatwe advocated not a wholesale transfer of the Japanese foresight apparatus to the UK, but learning from the Japanese experiencesand constructing a pilot programme of foresight tailored specifically to UK circumstances. However, even these arguments failedto convince a sceptical UK Government.

However, we made a second, more fundamental mistake, one hinging crucially on terminology and therefore of particularrelevance here. After submitting our report [13] to ACARD and the Cabinet Office in December 1983, we spent the next fewmonthsexpanding and converting this into a book. We decided to give this the title, ‘Foresight in Science’, but were worried that manypotential readers might not know what ‘foresight’ was, so we decided to add an explanatory subtitle. We carried out somerudimentary ‘market research’ in SPRU on a number of possible subtitles. The phrase that our colleagues liked was ‘Picking theWinners’, so the book was duly published as ‘Foresight in Science: Picking the Winners’. [2]

Only a little later to our horror did we discover that this was precisely the wrong terminology to use if trying to persuade MrsThatcher's Government of the merits of our case. For the Prime Minister and her ideological colleagues like Sir Keith Joseph, it wasmost definitely not the role of government to ‘pick the winners’; one left this to ‘the market’ (cf. e.g. Wilks, [30]).10 This fatefulchoice of subtitle therefore doomed whatever faint hopes we might have previously entertained of persuading the UKGovernment to launch a pilot foresight exercise. It took another eight years, and a change in PrimerMinister (to JohnMajor) and inpolitical philosophy, before the UK Government was willing to even consider the possibility of adopting foresight as a means ofidentifying scientific and technological priorities, giving rise to another SPRU report [32], one which this time culminated in thelaunch of the UK Technology Foresight Programme in 1993.

6. Other early users of the ‘foresight’ terminology

The first SPRU study on foresight was relatively short. With a total of just 80 person-days, we could only spend a week or so ineach of France, Germany, the United States and Japan. This was sufficient to conduct a total of around 100 interviews but meantthat only a rather brief search through the archives for relevant writtenmaterial was possible. The US chapter in the resulting book[2] contained 54 references and that for Japan 23. In none of these was the word ‘foresight’ used in the title. At that stage, we didnot come across other writtenmaterial using the term ‘foresight’ in connectionwith science and technology, although it is possiblethat one or two of the US interviewees may have used the term in discussions with us.11

In 1987, SPRU was approached by the Dutch Ministry of Education and Science (MOW) to carry out a more extensive study offoresight. This time, the focus was on eight countries, with Australia, Canada, Norway and Sweden being added to the original four.In addition, we were providedwith a more realistic budget and time-scale for conducting the research. As a result, we were able tocarry out many of the tasks that had not been possible in the 1983 study, including a full literature review and the development ofa conceptual model of the foresight process (see Chapter 2 in [21]). The resulting report to the Ministry of Education and Science,Research Foresight: Creating the Future [33], had a major impact in the Netherlands, leading MOW to launch a number of foresightprojects. It also stimulated the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs to launch its own technology foresight exercise.

In the course of this second study, we became aware that others were beginning to use the term ‘foresight’ in connection withscience and technology. In the case of the United States, we came across the 1983 Foresight Task Force report on Foresight in thePrivate Sector: How Can Government Use It?We also talked to Len Lederman, the author of a 1983 NSF report on foresight12 [34] andof two related articles [35] [36]. In addition, we interviewed Joseph Coates and obtained from him a copy of his 1985 article onforesight [22], subsequently drawing extensively on his definition of foresight in our study for the Dutch Government (see Irvineand Martin [33], p.14; Martin and Irvine [21], pp.4-5). From these interviews (which were mostly conducted in 1988), it becameclear that the term ‘foresight’ was already beginning to be used in the US back in 1983, even though we had not picked this up inour earlier (and necessarily rather brief) 1983 study.

In addition, in the Canadian component of this second study, we came across work by Aant Elzinga and specifically his 1983report on Foresight as Anticipatory Intelligence. [37] We noted that he “advocated a foresight approach combining systematicmonitoring of scientific trends with consensus-seeking expert discussions”. Elzinga's ideas had already had some impact withinthe Science Council of Canada, where it was accepted that “The [foresight] process must serve a broader purpose than simplyproducing a forecast. Identifying a range of possible developments can help stimulate public discussion of desirable futures and ofthe role of government in such futures” (Steed and Tiffin [38], pp.12-13, quoted in Martin and Irvine [21], p.244). These notions,like those of Lederman in the US, were again influential in refining our thinking in the Dutch study on what constituted ‘foresight’and how it was differentiated from ‘forecasting’.

10 Somewhat surprisingly, a search of Hansard reveals no instance of Mrs Thatcher asserting this explicitly, although several Conservative Ministers and MPs areon record making a similar assertion. For example, Mr Tim Smith (Tory MP for Beaconsfield, where he had defeated a youthful Tony Blair in the 1982 election)stated on 13 February 1990 that “It is not the job of the state to pick winners. Private investors make better investment decisions and produce a better-qualityinvestment”. [31]11 However, neither Len Lederman nor Joseph Coates, two early users of the term ‘foresight’, were included among the US interviewees for that 1983 projec(see Appendix 1 in [13] for a full list of interviewees).12 This is the earliest US document that we had previously found that refers to ‘foresight’ in the title and that is directly concerned with science and technology

t

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In summary, although John Irvine and I had chosen the term ‘Project Foresight’ for our original Cabinet Office proposal in 1983,Len Lederman and Aant Elzinga also used the same term ‘foresight’ in connection with science and technology in the same year,1983. Moreover, as we now know from Miles [1], there were others in the United States using the term ‘foresight’ before that,although mostly with respect to general futures studies (e.g. Bezold [39]) rather than specifically in connection with science ortechnology.13 It is therefore somewhat ironic that, while the term ‘technology foresight’ is now in widespread use in Europe, Asia,Latin America and Africa, it is rather less common in the United States.

7. The second UK foresight report – getting the terminology right!

Early in 1992, the author received a phone call from Grahame Walshe, a civil servant then in the UK Cabinet Office.14 He asked:“Would SPRU be interested in carrying out a study of foresight in science and technology?” Given the earlier failure of the UKGovernment to take up the recommendations of the 1983 SPRU report to the Cabinet Office, my response was along the lines of thefollowing: “Yes, but are you willing to listen to the conclusions this time?” After a slight embarrassed silence, I was given variousassurances. The replacement of Margaret Thatcher by John Major heralded a significant shift in government philosophy. Under theformer, therewas presumed to be noneed for an industrial policy or an innovation policy–one could leave suchmatters to ‘themarket’.In contrast, JohnMajor andmore specificallyMichaelHeseltine(thenPresidentof theBoardof Trade, i.e. theCabinetMinster responsiblefor Trade and Industry) recognized that theUKneeded tohaveanexplicit policy for innovationand for technology.Moreover, todevelopthis, one required appropriate policy tools, in particular tools for identifyingprioritieswhen the best that could behoped forwith regardto the funding of science and technologywas “amodest enhancementwithin budget”.15 Despite the apparent lack of impact of the 1983SPRU report, someone had recalled that foresight might represent a potentially useful policy tool in this respect.

Armed with these reassurances, I submitted a proposal, and work began in the summer of 1992. Again, it was a small project,this time occupying just one person-month, with the report being completed in August 1992. [32] At this stage, the terminologywas still ‘research foresight’, the term used in the Dutch study [21] [33], in contrast to the term ‘foresight in science’ employed inthe original 1983 study [2]. However, by now the emphasis was switching from science to technology, or more specifically to‘emerging generic technologies’, partly in recognition that the earlier terminology reflected too ‘linear’ a view of the relationshipbetween science and innovation. As part of this new study, SPRU was asked to come up with a workable definition of ‘emerginggeneric technologies’, and to identify criteria for identifying such technologies promptly so suitable policies could then be put inplace. Grahame Walshe stressed that it was vital to get the terminology right if the UK Government was to be persuaded of themerits of launching a Technology Foresight Programme. Definitions of ‘generic’ and ‘emerging’were therefore constructed in sucha way that it was clear to all that an ‘emerging generic technology’would almost certainly be at a ‘pre-competitive’ stage. In otherwords, a ‘market failure’ rationale16 could be invoked to justify government support, for example, to encourage companies to carryout collaborative R&D until ideas for specific new products or processes appeared and the work ceased to be ‘pre-competitive’ (seeMartin [32], p.51). In short, the terminology and definitions were deliberately constructed with the explicit aim of persuading aright-of-centre government that it was legitimate to intervene through a foresight process. This focus on emerging generictechnologies was to prove crucial in the later switch in terminology from ‘research foresight’ (as used in the 1992 SPRU report[32]) to ‘technology foresight’ (as appeared in the subsequent 1993 Government White Paper [42] – see below).

The main part of the SPRU study consisted of a review of various foresight-related activities in the UK together with an updateof technology foresight in other countries. A crucial question here was ‘Which countries should one focus on in attempting to drawrelevant lessons for the UK?’ Given the very small size of the project (one person-month), it was not possible to look at more thantwo countries in detail. I could have again opted to focus on Japan, the country with the most experience of technology foresightand therefore arguably the one from which others had most to learn. Instead I chose to focus on Germany and the US, twocountrieswithmore decentralised approaches to science and technology, and bothwith right-of-centre governments, as in the UK.Moreover, in both of these, there had been a dramatic upsurge of interest in technology foresight activities in the last two or threeyears. In the case of the US, this had been driven by growing concern that the country was in danger of losing out to Japan in thetechnological ‘race’ in an increasing number of industrial sectors.17 In the case of Germany, the key event was the fall of the Berlin

13 The one exception is Cahn and Primack [40], an article that I was unaware of until I received a draft of the paper byMiles [1]. It may well have eludedmy previoussearches because it uses the phrase ‘technological foresight’ as opposed to ‘technology foresight’. I am grateful to Miles for drawing this article to my attention.14 When the Office of Science and Technology was set up shortly afterwards within the Cabinet Office, he was transferred to this.15 This curious terminology (probably the result of some civil servant's judicious attempt ‘to square the circle’) represented the ‘carrot’ dangled before theresearch community as an inducement to participate in the newly launched Technology Foresight Programme. The more sceptical wondered how one could haveeven “a modest enhancement” while remaining “within budget” or whether these two were logically inconsistent.16 It was a few years later before an alternative rationale for foresight was developed. With the emergence of the concept of a ‘national system of innovation’ atthe end of the 1980s (see below), governments needed new policy tools of a systemic nature. In 1999, Ron Johnston and I set out the argument that technologyforesight could be employed as a means of ‘wiring up’ the national innovation system, linking the actors that make up such a system and thus enabling thesystem to learn and innovate more effectively (Martin and Johnston [41] – see especially pp.49-51). We had in mind here an analogy with the process by whichthe infant brain develops, as neurons are progressively connected or ‘wired up’, enabling the brain to learn more effectively.17 Those involved in these US activities in the late 1980s and early ’90s did not generally use the term ‘technology foresight’, instead preferring such phrases asidentifying ‘critical technologies’ and constructing ‘technology road maps’, but these activities certainly came within the definition of ‘foresight as set out, forexample, in Martin and Irvine [21]). Given that, as Miles [1] has now demonstrated, it was individuals in the US who were among the first to use the term‘foresight’ in connection with technology, it is at first sight rather puzzling that this terminology was later apparently dropped. The explanation appears to bethat in the late 1980s and 1990s there was no-one in the US ‘pushing’ the concept of technology foresight, unlike in countries like Canada (Elzinga), theNetherlands (Ruud Smits), Germany (Hariolf Grupp and Kerstin Cuhls), the UK (John Irvine and myself, and also researchers at Manchester such as LukeGeorghiou, Denis Loveridge and Ian Miles) and Australia (Ron Johnston).

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Wall in 1989 and the subsequent re-unification of Germany. This meant that a substantial portion of Federal Governmentresources now had to be devoted to building up science and technology in the former German Democratic Republic – in otherwords, resources were spread much more thinly than previously. This gave rise to a need for clearer priorities and, in turn, forpolicy tools such as technology foresight to help identify such priorities.

On the basis of recent experiences in the US and Germany (and with a brief analysis of developments in the Netherlands,Australia and New Zealand), my report set out a number of possible options for the UK, ranging from the most modest (somethingmodelled on the Committee on Basic Science established by BMFT in Germany in 1990) to the more ambitious (for example, acritical technologies exercise as conducted in the United States). For the sake of completeness, I also included the option of a large-scale ‘holistic’ technology foresight programme similar to the 30-year forecasts conducted in Japan by the Science and TechnologyAgency, even though the prospects of this being adopted by the UK seemed slim.

The SPRU report [32] was submitted in August 1992 to the newly established Office of Science and Technology (OST). By then,William Waldegrave had been appointed as the Cabinet Minister responsible for science and technology (the first time there hadbeen a minister of cabinet rank in charge since Lord Hailsham in the early 1960s). Moreover, Waldegrave was in the process ofpreparing aWhite Paper on science and technology, the first suchWhite Paper for 20 years, and he was reportedly on the look outfor a ‘big new idea’ that might form the centrepiece of the document and hence put his ‘stamp’ on it.

Although the SPRU report was relatively brief (60 pages), this was deemed far too long for a Minister to read, so GrahameWalsheand I were asked to prepare a two-page ‘brief’. We were then summoned to a meeting with the Minister and senior civil servantsconcernedwith scienceand technologypolicy. The twoof usduly presented thebrief, dealingwith suchquestions as:What is foresight?Why is it important? Andwhy should the UK launch a foresight initiative? At the end of the presentation, theMinister was clearly veryenthusiastic, even to theextent of implying that technology foresighthadbeenhis idea in thefirst place. This posedadilemma.Normallyacademics become somewhat annoyedwhen they feel ‘their’ ideas have been ‘stolen’ by others (aswe discuss below). However, in theworld of policy research, the reverse is true, at least with regard to dealing with policy-makers; policy researchers actuallywant theirideas to be taken up by policy-makers, and this is far more important than issues of intellectual ‘ownership’. So instead of contestingwith theMinisterwhose idea foresight had been, the responseweduly followed (one clearly suggested by the TV series, Yes,Minister, ofwhich I was a devoted fan) was “Yes, Minister, what a brilliant idea. Have you thought about … ? And what about … ?” The ‘Yes,Minister’ flavour was further enhanced by occasional interventions of the senior civil servants present, each offering a succinct andelegant summary of where the discussions had got to, along with a particular ‘spin’ that would imply that the proposed TechnologyForesight Programme should come within their ‘territory’ rather than that of some rival mandarin.

Somewhat more disconcerting, however, were the critical or even hostile remarks from the junior Minister for Science andTechnology, who was also present at the meeting. He had severe doubts about the wisdom of spending a million pounds or moreon a UK Technology Foresight Programme. Could we not instead buy the results of the Japanese technology foresight exercise for£50, he asked? I responded that, first, the priorities identified for Japan would, almost certainly, be rather different from thoseappropriate to the UK.18 Secondly, and more importantly, his approach would generate none of the process benefits – the ‘5 Cs’identified above, all of which corresponded to areas where the UK had previously been comparatively weak. However, he clearlyremained unconvinced, with the result that at the end of the meeting it was not obvious to me whether Technology Foresightwould or would not feature in the forthcoming White Paper.

After the meeting, Walshe and I were invited by the Government Chief Scientist, Sir William Stewart,19 (who had also beenpresent) to his office. There, he congratulated us. Surprised, I asked: “But how can you be sure we've convincedWaldegrave and hewill put Technology Foresight in theWhite Paper, given that his junior minister is so clearly against it?” His response was that thetwo ministers did not get on (in fact, he expressed it much more bluntly!), and the more the junior minister was opposed, themoreWaldegrave would be in favour. Hence his confidence that foresight would appear in theWhite Paper. And it did! Moreover,by now Waldegrave was so enthusiastic about ‘his big new idea’ that, rather than opting for a US-style critical technologiesexercise (as I had assumed he would), he instead plunged for the most ambitious form of technology foresight, a large-scale‘holistic’ Technology Foresight Programme of the type pioneered by Japan. This was duly launched in the 1993 White Paper,Realising Our Potential. [42]

8. Discussion and conclusions

Many social scientists are driven at least in part by a desire to make their name and further their career by discovering somenew phenomenon in the social world or by giving a specific ‘label’ to a particular phenomenon, or alternatively by developing anew concept, model or theory that provides a significantly improved understanding of an already established phenomenon. Asacademia has (like the rest of the world) become more competitive, so the pressures on social scientists to ‘discover’ somethingnew or to come up with a new and unique ‘label’ that will be universally attributed to them (and hence earn them a large numberof citations) have grown. This has a number of unfortunate consequences.

A first takes the form of a tendency on the part of some social scientists ‘to reinvent the wheel’, in other words, ‘discovering’somethingwhich had in fact been identified and analysed by someone else, oftenmany years earlier.20 This effect has undoubtedly

18 Such international differences were clearly apparent, for example, from a comparison of the results of the Delphi survey conducted in Japan and Germany –

see [43].19 He was subsequently knighted a year later in 1994.20 It would be invidious to give specific examples and cite references here. Suffice it to say that one sign of growing old is a tendency to spot more and moreinstances of the failure of younger researchers to recognise and cite similar or very closely related research from 30 or more years ago!

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been amplified in recent decades first by the growing emphasis on publications and citations, and more recently by the increasingreliance of authors (apparently almost total in the case of some younger researchers) on electronic libraries when carrying outtheir literature reviews. As a result of this latter trend, publications from the pre-digital era are often overlooked, leading authorsto conclude (erroneously) that they have come up with something ‘new’.

Secondly, competition to be ‘first’ can give rise to priority disputes and, in the most bitterly contested cases, to accusations ofplagiarism. Such disputes are familiar to historians and sociologists of science (see e.g. Merton [44]), but they also occur in thesocial sciences. In the case of my own field of science policy and innovation studies, one might consider the case of two concepts –‘absorptive capacity’ and ‘innovative capacity’ – and what might be termed ‘A tale of two capacities’. While the former is uniquelyand universally ascribed to Cohen and Levinthal [45], the latter has been the focus of a long-running and acrimonious debate, asone can see by ‘Googling’ the terms ‘innovative capacity’ and ‘plagiarism’.21

Fortunately, such disputes are by no means inevitable. Take the rather different case of the concept of the ‘national system ofinnovation’, one of themost important concepts to emerge from the field of science policy and innovation studies over the last twodecades. Priority for this concept is generally accorded to Chris Freeman and his book on technology policy in Japan [47]. However,Freeman himself claims that “the first person to use the expression ‘National System of Innovation’ was Bengt-Åke Lundvall”,noting that Lundvall “is also the editor of a highly original and thought-provoking book [48] on this subject” (see Freeman [49],p.5). Lundvall, in contrast, openly credits Freeman with the concept, tracing it back to an even earlier (but unpublished) paper22

written by Freeman around 1983 as an input to an OECD ‘Group on Science, Technology and Competitiveness’ (Lundvall [50],p.531). In this, admittedly somewhat atypical, case, the two main protagonists are each willing to cede priority to the other, whileboth acknowledging their historical intellectual debt to Friedrich List [52],23 a salutary lesson to us all!

Thirdly, attempts to establish which researcher was ‘first’ in identifying, labelling or explaining a particular phenomenon areoften clouded by the fact that different researchers may have used different terminology for the same (or a closely related)phenomenon. For example, to what extent is Michael Porter's concept of a ‘cluster’ (e.g. [54]) different from Alfred Marshall'snotion of an ‘industrial district’ [55]? Or to take the case described here, to what extent is ‘foresight’ different from ‘la prospective’?

In conclusion, this case-study on the origins of the use of the term ‘foresight’with respect to science and technology illustratesall too well the difficulty of establishing unambiguously who was the first to begin using a particular new concept. In 1983, JohnIrvine and I were under the impression that we were perhaps the first to use the term in this way, initially as a catchy title, ‘ProjectForesight’, and subsequently as a convenient shorthand for what we were focussing on, namely, “the process involved insystematically attempting to look into the longer-term future of science, technology, the economy and society with the aim ofidentifying the areas of strategic research and the emerging generic technologies likely to yield the greatest economic and socialbenefits”. Only when we came to analyse the findings from the 1983 study did we begin to use ‘foresight’ as a way of clearlydifferentiating such activities from what had gone before under the heading of ‘technology forecasting’.

It was a further five years before we realised Len Lederman and Aant Elzinga had also been using the term ‘foresight’ in a similarway in 1983. From then on, we were careful to describe any claims to priority in terms merely of being “one of the first” to use theterm ‘foresight’ with respect to science and technology.24 The situation was further complicated by the realisation (again in 1988rather than during the earlier 1983 study) that similar activities had been developed several years earlier in France by MichelGodet and colleagues under the rubric of ‘la prospective’ (e.g. [25] [56] [57] [58] [59]).25 But once the similarities26 betweenforesight and la prospective were recognised, the proponents of each allied themselves with the other.27 This entente cordialebetween the primarily Anglophone proponents of technology foresight and the Francophone advocates of la prospective was toprove crucial in giving each approach greater visibility and impact from the late 1980s onwards.28

21 On the one hand, there is a claim that “The concept of national and regional innovative capacity was originally introduced by Prof. Suarez-Villa in 1990” (seehttp://innovativecapacity.com/ – accessed on 20 April 2010), along with quite vituperative anonymous accusations that authors who fail to cite Suarez-Villa [46]are guilty of ‘plagiarism’ (for example, see the email that has been widely circulated among the innovation research community, which is reproduced at http://www.helloanz.org/showthread.php?t=18087 – accessed on 20 April 2010). However, an extensive review of the literature carried out by the Editors of ResearchPolicy shows that the term ‘innovative capacity’ was in widespread use well before 1990, being used by the authors of some 70 publications prior to 1990. Thisreview concluded that “There is no single ‘inventor’ of the term or the concept of ‘innovative capacity’; rather the term (and its closely related variants) evolvedas a result of the efforts of numerous authors interested in explaining the differing ability of firms, regions, and countries to produce innovations.” Consequently,the consensus view (and certainly the one arrived at in the Research Policy investigation) seems to be that “no plagiarism or other violation of academic processor ethics had occurred” (see ‘Porter and plagiarism: an urban myth’ at http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/portermyth.html – accessed on 20 April 2010).22 The paper was never published by OECD, perhaps for the reasons identified by Lundvall ([50], p.531). However, it finally appeared in print 20 years later inIndustrial and Corporate Change [51].23 Godin [53] has explored in depth the origins of the concept of the ‘national innovation system’.24 We were also aware that the term ‘foresight’ had been used as an alternative to ‘forecasting’ by others in earlier times, such as Alfred North Whitehead in a1931 Harvard lecture (see http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Future-Foresight-Knowledge-Economy/dp/1405116153#reader_1405116153 – accessed on 6May 2010) and HG Wells in a 1932 BBC radio broadcast (reprinted in [60]). However, in none of these earlier instances does the term ‘foresight’ seem to havebeen used to denote a significantly different concept from ‘forecasting’.25 See Durance [61] for an analysis of the origins of la prospective starting with the work of Gaston Berger (e.g. [62]) in the 1950s. As Durance makes clear,Berger stressed the idea that “foresight (prospective) … enables us to determine not only what can happen but what people would like to have happen. Thesecond dimension opens the door to the real construction of the future” ([61], emphasis added).26 As Godet [63] points out, however, the concepts are not completely identical (see also Cuhls [23]).27 See the earlier quote from Martin and Irvine [21] on the similar philosophies of foresight and la prospective, and Durance [61] on the similarity between laprospective and ‘strategic foresight’.28 This mutual reinforcement can be viewed as an example of ‘actor-network theory’ in practice, with the proponents of each approach engaging in a process ofinteressement, attempting to enrol the other side and to mobilise them as allies of their cause.

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In this article, we have tried to trace how and why the concept of ‘foresight’ was developed in connection with science andtechnology.We have seen how this apparently simple task is beset with problems. Even as someone centrally involved in this earlywork, my perceptions on the issue of priority changed over time as further information became available. Moreover, thatadditional information, rather than clarifying the situation, tended to make the origins more complicated. Arguably, from thematerial that Miles [1] has now uncovered, Cahn and Primack [40] have a case for being seen as the first to use the term ‘foresight’specifically in connection with technology. However, their article seems to have had little long-term impact.29 It was not until tenyears later in 1983 when Elzinga [37], Irvine and Martin [10] [13], and Lederman [34] [35] each independently began to use theterm that the concept of foresight in science and technology began to take off. In conclusion, this paper provides a thought-provoking case-study illustrating how terminology can be vitally important in social sciences, especially among policy researchershoping tomake an impact on policy ormanagement practice. This discussion is particularly topical as the concept of foresight oncemore comes under discussion, with attempts to link it more directly to strategy,30 to incorporate it in new foresight networks,31

and to encourage the participation of a wider range of communities via new digital media.32

Acknowledgements

The work reported here is based in part on discussions over the years with others involved in the early stages of technologyforesight, including IanMiles (whose article in this Special Issue prompted the preparation of this paper, andwho provided helpfulcomments on a preliminary draft), Michel Godet (who strongly encouraged the author to prepare this paper), Kerstin Cuhls (whocommented in detail on an early draft), Hal Linstone (who provided helpful criticisms of the previous draft), Rémi Barré, JosephCoates, Aant Elzinga, Luke Georghiou, Hariolf Grupp, John Irvine, Ron Johnston, Michael Keenan, Stefan Kuhlmann, Len Lederman,Denis Loveridge, Alan Porter, Ruud Smits and GrahameWalshe. The author is grateful to all of these and to any others hemay haveinadvertently omitted. The usual disclaimers apply.

References

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[10] J. Irvine, B.R. Martin, Project Foresight, a proposal submitted to the Cabinet Office, SPRU, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, 1983.[11] C.W. Sherwin, R.S. Isenson, First Interim Report on Project HINDSIGHT, Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Washington D.C, 1966.[12] Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in Science (TRACES), National Science Foundation,

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Ben R. Martin is Professor of Science and Technology Policy Studies at SPRU, University of Sussex, where he was Director from 1997 to 2004. He is also an AssociateFellow at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), University of Cambridge. He has worked for over 30 years in the field of science policy research, carrying outpioneering research in the field of research evaluation, science indicators, and international comparisons of research funding and research performance. JohnIrvine and Ben Martin were among the earliest to develop the concept of foresight in science and technology, writing the first book specifically on the subject in1984, with another, more comprehensive book being published in 1989.