Foresight

We can help to identify trends and developments at an early stage.

The future is uncertain – even we can’t change that. But we can help you to identify trends and developments at an early stage, to relate them to each other and to make them plausible. Formulating different manifestations of the future enables you to identify, evaluate and prioritize your options.

While forecasts and projections attempt to predict future developments in mostly narrowly defined contexts, such an approach is bound to fail in complex entities such as a society: The influencing factors are too diverse and their degrees of freedom too variable for them to be predicted with any certainty. Accordingly, in strategic foresight, we rely on identifying factors across category boundaries, correlating them with one another and making assumptions about possible chains of effects. In this process, plausibility takes the place of certainty in order to be able to describe events that are possible but by no means certain to occur. To ensure that our statements are as robust as possible, we use data analytics and expert knowledge to ensure that they are based on a solid foundation.

With our many years of experience in strategic foresight, which we have applied and further developed in projects for the European Commission, several German federal ministries and other clients, we also support you in identifying and taking viable paths into the future in the face of growing uncertainty, volatility, contradictoriness and complexity.

Our clients of Foresight projects (selection)

Projects

Please find below an overview of the iit’s foresight projects.
Many of the evaluation projects listed on the ‘evaluation’ site also include elements of foresight.

Energy & Sustainability, Innovations & Technologies

Our society is experiencing rapid changes - caused by technological developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, driven by ecological challenges such as climate tipping points, water scarcity or the destruction of natural habitats, but also influenced by social innovations such as a sharing economy. Other developments cast their […]

Digitisation & Artificial Intelligence, Economy & Labor, Business development, Innovations & Technologies

The German Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies VDE starts a process of early strategic foresight. In this way, it is identifying opportunities for new success potential and preparing for risks in good time. As part of innovation management, the new process looks at a period more than five years […]

Digitisation & Artificial Intelligence, Innovations & Technologies

Digital sovereignty means being able to shape one's own life with digital technologies in a self-determined manner and being able to assess the consequences of digitalised actions. In the digital society, competent handling of new media, digital shadows, quantified self, big data, platform economies, social bots and bit coins is […]

Energy & Sustainability

The project supports activities in the portfolio of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) for the programmatic operationalization, implementation and updating of the Integrated Environmental Program (IUP).Aspects of the iit‘s services are analyses of the conditions for success and obstacles to sustainability transformations, […]

Energy & Sustainability

In the project 'Horizon Scanning 2.0 – Establishment of a Horizon Scanning System', the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) is supported by the Institute for Innovation and Technology (subcontract: adelphi consult GmbH) in implementing a system for identifying and processing topics that will be highly relevant to the work of […]

Digitisation & Artificial Intelligence, Economy & Labor, Business development

For the German Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, an interdisciplinary team from the Institute for Innovation and Technology (iit) is developing a foresight study on the topic of the 'digital working world'. The focus is on a structured analysis of expert opinions and research on new digitally mediated […]

Energy & Sustainability

Within the framework of a service contract for the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt – UBA), adelphi research GmbH and iit are developing a method for in-depth trend analysis to be applied to two dynamically developing topics. The aim is not only to identify trends relevant to environmental policy, but also […]