The “Mapping Foresight” report is part of a series of publications produced by the European Foresight Monitoring Network (EFMN project coordinated by TNO, 2004-2008). EFMN is a Europe-wide network inspired and financed by the European Commission within the framework of the Foresight Knowledge Sharing Platform implemented under the Research Framework Programme (FP7). The mapping activity was one of the main activities of the network. Over 2000 initiatives were mapped between 2004 and 2008 in Europe and other world regions, including Latin America, North America, Asia and Oceania.

The report is the result of the first large international effort aimed at understanding the nature of foresight practices. Foresight has become more than just a tool to support policy or strategy development in Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI). Foresight practice is the result of a systematic work to promote effective processes to proactively think about the future. These processes can be applied to a variety of research areas or knowledge domains, such as natural sciences, medical sciences, engineering and technology, agricultural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.

Over the coming years, we expect to see further growth of the ‘foresight wave’. This basically means that a growing number of actors (including the European Commission) will increasingly need to advance knowledge and tools related to events and trends potentially shaping the future of science, technology and innovation in Europe. In this context, synergies between research projects like iKNOW (aimed to interconnect knowledge and communities to explore emerging issues, wild cards and weak signals) and the new European Foresight Platform (EFP) – coordinated by the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), which integrates the EFMN and ForLearn, will contribute to the Commission’s goals of consolidating the information and knowledge base on foresight and as well supporting forward looking decision making. We are sure that the complexity of the issues that will be addressed in these projects, together with the complexity of their interconnections, would benefit from the type of analysis that has been carried out in this report, as well as from the next generation of mapping activities in EFP (2009-2012).