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

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

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, UK
Centre 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 a b s t r a c t

Article history: This article explores how the term ‘foresight’ originally came to be used in connection with
Received 21 April 2010 science and technology by the author and SPRU colleagues in 1983. It analyses how the
Received in revised form 5 May 2010 rationale for its use evolved over time, first providing a ‘catchy’ title for a study (‘Project
Accepted 15 June 2010
Foresight’), and then a convenient shorthand for the focus of that study, before eventually
coming to formally signify a new approach to looking systematically into the future of science
Keywords: and technology, an inclusive and wide-ranging process that differed appreciably from that of
Technology foresight traditional ‘technology forecasting’. The paper reflects on the importance of concepts and
Foresight terminology in the field of science policy research, providing examples of how an inappropriate
Science
term or phrase can damn the prospects of the research having an impact on policy, while a
La prospective
Terminology
more politically astute use of terminology can greatly enhance the probability of making a
Policy research significant impact. The paper also examines other early uses of the concept of ‘foresight’ in the
Priority United States and Canada at about the same time. In addition, it highlights the conceptual
similarities between foresight and la prospective, a novel approach developed in France not just
for looking into the future but also for shaping or even ‘constructing’ the future of our choice, an
ambitious aspiration that it shares with foresight. This case-study on the origins and early
evolution of ‘technology foresight’ illustrates the essential importance of terminology in
differentiating key concepts in social sciences (where it sometimes gives rise to unfortunate
priority disputes), and particularly in the case of policy research.
© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

‘Technology foresight’ is a term now widely used by academic researchers, policy-makers, industrialists, consultants and others
round the world, although less so perhaps in the United States. According to Google Scholar, there have been over 5000 academic
articles employing this term, while Google itself registers over 90,000 ‘hits’.1 When was the term ‘foresight’ first used in connection
with science and technology to denote something different from traditional ‘technology forecasting’? Ian Miles [1] has carried out
a thorough review of the origins and early use of the concept of ‘foresight’, initially more generally with respect to futures work
and later more specifically with regard to technology. This article should be read in conjunction with his review, offering the
reflections 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 some
new phenomenon, or at least the recognition of an existing phenomenon that, until now, has lain undetected by social scientists.

⁎ SPRU, The Freeman Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QE, UK. Tel.: + 44 1273 873562.
E-mail address: B.Martin@sussex.ac.uk.
1
In both cases, these databases were accessed on 16 April 2010.

0040-1625/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2010.06.009
 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447 1439

Alternatively, it may relate to the development of a new concept, model or theory that provides a significantly improved
understanding of an already acknowledged phenomenon in the social world. A new term may not infrequently be the subject of a
priority dispute as to who identified the phenomenon, concept or whatever first. In addition, as this story reveals, terminology is
especially important in the world of policy research, where a particular choice of phrasing may either greatly enhance the prospect
of the work making a significant impact on policy or management practice, or alternatively may, for political or other reasons, ruin
the 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 and
why the SPRU team of which I was part first came to adopt the terminology of ‘foresight’ in the Spring of 1983, and to analyse the
evolving rationale for the use of this particular term as distinct from ‘forecasting’. However, the paper also reflects more generally
on the importance of concepts and terminology in the field of science policy research, providing specific examples of how this can
substantially influence the impact on policy. In addition, I discuss my changing perceptions on the tangled issue of priority
regarding the concept of ‘foresight’ with respect to other early users of the term in the United States and Canada, and in the light of
the substantial conceptual and philosophical similarities with la prospective, the approach pioneered in France. This case-study of
the origins and early evolution of technology foresight illustrates the essential importance of terminology in identifying key
concepts in social sciences, and particularly in the case of policy research, as well as the often intractable problems of establishing
intellectual 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 the
fact 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 for
attempting to identify areas of basic research beginning to exhibit strategic potential” (Irvine and Martin [2], p.7), as I describe in
Section 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 particular
terminology chosen for the subtitle of the resulting book, we were virtually guaranteed to have no impact on Mrs Thatcher's
Conservative Government in the 1980s. Section 6 reviews other early uses of the ‘foresight’ terminology with regard to science and
technology, while Section 7 examines the second SPRU report to the UK Government and explains how, having learnt from
previous experiences, SPRU this time made sure that the terminology was more appropriate, enabling that report to have a major
impact on subsequent UK policy. Finally, Section 8 discusses the main conclusions to be drawn from this case-study on the role of
new 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 UK
Cabinet Office) set up a study group “to survey current scientific developments and advise the Council on work which showed
commercial and economic promise for the medium to long term” (ACARD [3], p.7). As part of this, the Cabinet Office invited SPRU
to bid for a study to survey the approaches adopted in other countries for looking into the longer-term future of science and
technology in order to identify exploitable areas of research, and to identify what lessons the UK might draw from these. The
decision to approach SPRU almost certainly reflected its prominent involvement in ‘futures’ research during the 1970s, in
particular its critique of the influential book, The Limits to Growth [4].2 John Irvine and I, who had previously been working on the
issue of how to identify priorities in the area of ‘big science’ (and specifically high-energy physics [9]), and who were at that stage
looking for funds, decided to prepare a proposal. In doing this, we received substantial help from colleagues who had been
involved 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 of
strategic 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, “SPRU would then offer suggestions as to the approach that ACARD might adopt in their survey
of promising scientific areas”. [10] However, before it could be submitted, the proposal obviously had to be given a title. Even at
this stage, it was clear that the study would give considerable attention to “retrospective studies tracing back the scientific origins
of significant technological innovations”. [10] Moreover, from our previous graduate studies (John Irvine at the University of
Sussex and myself at the University of Manchester), we were aware that two of the most important retrospective studies were
Projects Hindsight [11] and TRACES [12]. One of the iconic contributions of these two studies consists of various figures tracing
back the scientific and technological origins of key innovations (in the military and civil sectors, respectively). It was apparent that
what 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].
1440 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447

identifying what previous scientific and technological advances (or ‘critical events’) had made it possible, one wanted to explore
whether one could start with current (or foreseeable) scientific and technological activities, and then try to identify what
innovations they might eventually contribute to. In deference to the seminal influence of Project Hindsight, and with a certain
touch 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 review
on previous forecasting or futures work, and we certainly had no idea whether or not the term ‘foresight’ had been used by others
in 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 just
under £11,500, sufficient for only 80 person-days of effort. It was carried out mainly by John Irvine and myself, but with significant
inputs from various SPRU colleagues including Ian Miles, Geoffrey Oldham, Keith Pavitt, Roy Rothwell and Tom Whiston. [13] The
first phase involved a systematic review of retrospective studies of the scientific and technological origins of technological
innovations, including Projects Hindsight and TRACES, a Battelle study on ‘Interactions of Science and Technology in the Innovative
Process’ [14], a study of biomedical innovations by Comroe and Dripps [15], and a number of other studies including the work by
University 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 and
the United States. This research revealed that a considerable amount of work was going on in these countries – in both the private
and public sectors – in terms of trying to identify exploitable areas of science. It was during the process of carrying out the
extensive 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 research
beginning to exhibit strategic potential”.3 And by ‘strategic potential’, we meant “areas … that are beginning to show promise of
constituting a knowledge base that, with further funding, might eventually contribute to the solution of important practical
problems” ([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 we
were studying, during the 1983 study a third and much more fundamental reason for the use of this term emerged. From our work
in the United States and Japan in particular, it was apparent that there was an essential difference between ‘technology forecasting’
(as developed in the US in the late 1940s and the 1950s, particularly in the military sector by researchers at RAND and elsewhere4)
and a more 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 SPRU
study for the Dutch Government between 1987 and 1989, but we were already aware of the central differences between the two in
1983. As we later wrote:

Forecasting has been defined by Wills ([20], p.263) as the task of making ‘a probabilistic statement, on a relatively high
confidence level, about the future’, and accuracy is therefore of paramount importance.5 Hence, the failure to predict the
1973 ‘oil-shock’ led to considerable scepticism concerning the validity and utility of forecasting … Anticipation or foresight
involves an explicit recognition that the choices made today can shape or create the future, and that there is little point in
making deterministic predictions in spheres (including science and technology) where social and political processes
exercise a major influence. There has consequently been a move away from forecasting and prediction towards activities
variously 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 up with one of the earliest definitions: “a process by which one comes to a fuller understanding of the forces
shaping the long-term future which should be taken into account in policy formulation, planning and decision-making”. As we
noted then (and as several researchers have argued subsequently – for example, Cuhls [23]), there are several key features that
distinguish foresight from forecasting:

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

3
Our definition of foresight was to evolve over time, but by the 1990s, we had settled on the following, often quoted version: “the process involved in
systematically attempting to look into the longer-term future of science, technology, the economy and society with the aim of identifying the areas of strategic
research and the emerging generic technologies likely to yield the greatest economic and social benefits” (Martin [18], p.140).
4
See also Linstone [19].
5
Many of those engaged in forecasting today would doubtless see this as too narrow a definition of ‘forecasting’, not least because of the now widespread use
of tools such as scenario analysis. However, it does reflect how many saw the subject in the 1960s and 1970s before the emergence of ‘foresight’.
 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447 1441

the form of predictions about the future, foresight is much more concerned with creating an improved understanding of
possible developments and the forces likely to shape them. … Third, the notions of forecasting and foresight involve very
different ontological assumptions about the future. In conventional forecasting, the aim is to arrive at predictions which
can be justified ‘scientifically’ … The underlying assumption is that only one probable future exists, and that this can be
linked in a unilinear and deterministic way to the present and the past. In contrast, the goal in foresight is to survey as
systematically as possible ‘what chances for developments and what options for action are open at present, and then
follow 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 philosophical
starting point to la prospective, the approach developed by Michel Godet and others in France, namely that there exists not
one but many possible futures (les futuribles): ‘The future is not written, it remains to be carried out. The prospective
process admits that, at any given moment, the future is multiple and that from the confrontation between the various
actors [we] will derive one future rather than another’ (Godet [25], p.136). Whereas predictive forecasting implies a rather
passive attitude towards the future, foresight and la prospective involve a much more active stance – reflecting a belief that
the future is there to be created through the actions we choose to take today. (Martin and Irvine [21], p.5, original
emphasis)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 the
rubric 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-year
forecasts. These had a number of characteristics:

• they were 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 different
stakeholders and getting them to communicate with each other; (ii) forcing them periodically to concentrate on the longer-term
future; (iii) enabling them to coordinate their future R&D activities: (iv) creating a measure of consensus on future priorities for
strategic research: and (v) most importantly, generating a feeling of commitment to the outcome of the foresight, making it likely
that 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 been widely taken up in Europe (including Central and
Eastern Europe), Asia and Latin America. However, it is somewhat less common in the United States, where the term ‘technology
forecasting’ 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 acceptance
of the argument that science and technology were of growing importance and, that with resources being limited, there was a need
to arrive at funding priorities and policies that were targeted towards the research areas likely to yield the greatest economic and
social benefits. However, in 1983, Britain was at the height of ‘Thatcherism’; the incumbent Conservative Government was intent
on ‘rolling back the state’, reducing the number and level of government responsibilities, not adding to them, as our report
proposed. Consequently, this was far from a propitious time to advocate that the UK Government should launch a foresight
exercise (even a modest pilot study, as we proposed) based on what we had learnt from other countries.

6
This fundamental difference in terms of philosophical starting point was at the heart of the annual debates staged for SPRU MSc and DPhil students between
Keith Pavitt and the author in the 1990s. For Pavitt, science and technology were essentially unpredictable or ‘serendipitous’, whereas I stressed that humans
have some 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.
It is somewhat ironic that, despite being a strong Francophile, Pavitt was apparently unfamiliar with (or at least unsympathetic towards) this notion with its
origins in the French school of thought surrounding la prospective.
7
It is true that some of the work by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) went well beyond traditional technology forecasting, but it was not very
participatory, one of the key differentiating characteristics of ‘foresight’ (Miles, private communication).
8
The 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 in
the early 1990s (see [26], [27]). The foundation of the Science and Technology Foresight Center of NISTEP signalled this change (Cuhls, private communication).
9
This emphasis on widespread participation has since been one of the defining features of ‘foresight’ activities as carried out in Europe, Asia and elsewhere
(see e.g. [28], [29]).
1442 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447

In addition, with the benefit of hindsight, we made two tactical errors. The first was to argue that the UK had most to learn from
Japan. 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, Japan was clearly different from the UK. This
left us vulnerable to the following criticism: “Because Japan is so very different, what works in Japan will not work in the UK.” We
responded by pointing out that this was a very ‘unscientific’ attitude to adopt. Furthermore, it completely ignored the point that
we advocated not a wholesale transfer of the Japanese foresight apparatus to the UK, but learning from the Japanese experiences
and constructing a pilot programme of foresight tailored specifically to UK circumstances. However, even these arguments failed
to convince a sceptical UK Government.
However, we made a second, more fundamental mistake, one hinging crucially on terminology and therefore of particular
relevance here. After submitting our report [13] to ACARD and the Cabinet Office in December 1983, we spent the next few months
expanding and converting this into a book. We decided to give this the title, ‘Foresight in Science’, but were worried that many
potential readers might not know what ‘foresight’ was, so we decided to add an explanatory subtitle. We carried out some
rudimentary ‘market research’ in SPRU on a number of possible subtitles. The phrase that our colleagues liked was ‘Picking the
Winners’, 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 Mrs
Thatcher's Government of the merits of our case. For the Prime Minister and her ideological colleagues like Sir Keith Joseph, it was
most definitely not the role of government to ‘pick the winners’; one left this to ‘the market’ (cf. e.g. Wilks, [30]).10 This fateful
choice of subtitle therefore doomed whatever faint hopes we might have previously entertained of persuading the UK
Government to launch a pilot foresight exercise. It took another eight years, and a change in Primer Minister (to John Major) and in
political philosophy, before the UK Government was willing to even consider the possibility of adopting foresight as a means of
identifying scientific and technological priorities, giving rise to another SPRU report [32], one which this time culminated in the
launch 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 in
each of France, Germany, the United States and Japan. This was sufficient to conduct a total of around 100 interviews but meant
that only a rather brief search through the archives for relevant written material 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 did
not come across other written material using the term ‘foresight’ in connection with science and technology, although it is possible
that 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 of
foresight. This time, the focus was on eight countries, with Australia, Canada, Norway and Sweden being added to the original four.
In addition, we were provided with a more realistic budget and time-scale for conducting the research. As a result, we were able to
carry out many of the tasks that had not been possible in the 1983 study, including a full literature review and the development of
a 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 foresight
projects. 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 with
science and technology. In the case of the United States, we came across the 1983 Foresight Task Force report on Foresight in the
Private Sector: How Can Government Use It? We also talked to Len Lederman, the author of a 1983 NSF report on foresight12 [34] and
of two related articles [35] [36]. In addition, we interviewed Joseph Coates and obtained from him a copy of his 1985 article on
foresight [22], subsequently drawing extensively on his definition of foresight in our study for the Dutch Government (see Irvine
and Martin [33], p.14; Martin and Irvine [21], pp.4-5). From these interviews (which were mostly conducted in 1988), it became
clear that the term ‘foresight’ was already beginning to be used in the US back in 1983, even though we had not picked this up in
our 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 1983
report on Foresight as Anticipatory Intelligence. [37] We noted that he “advocated a foresight approach combining systematic
monitoring of scientific trends with consensus-seeking expert discussions”. Elzinga's ideas had already had some impact within
the Science Council of Canada, where it was accepted that “The [foresight] process must serve a broader purpose than simply
producing a forecast. Identifying a range of possible developments can help stimulate public discussion of desirable futures and of
the 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 are
on 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-quality
investment”. [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 project
(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.
 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447 1443

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 or
technology.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 UK
Government to take up the recommendations of the 1983 SPRU report to the Cabinet Office, my response was along the lines of the
following: “Yes, but are you willing to listen to the conclusions this time?” After a slight embarrassed silence, I was given various
assurances. The replacement of Margaret Thatcher by John Major heralded a significant shift in government philosophy. Under the
former, there was presumed to be no need for an industrial policy or an innovation policy – one could leave such matters to ‘the market’.
In contrast, John Major and more specifically Michael Heseltine (then President of the Board of Trade, i.e. the Cabinet Minster responsible
for Trade and Industry) recognized that the UK needed to have an explicit policy for innovation and for technology. Moreover, to develop
this, one required appropriate policy tools, in particular tools for identifying priorities when the best that could be hoped for with regard
to the funding of science and technology was “a modest enhancement within budget”.15 Despite the apparent lack of impact of the 1983
SPRU 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 terminology
was still ‘research foresight’, the term used in the Dutch study [21] [33], in contrast to the term ‘foresight in science’ employed in
the 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 relationship
between science and innovation. As part of this new study, SPRU was asked to come up with a workable definition of ‘emerging
generic technologies’, and to identify criteria for identifying such technologies promptly so suitable policies could then be put in
place. Grahame Walshe stressed that it was vital to get the terminology right if the UK Government was to be persuaded of the
merits of launching a Technology Foresight Programme. Definitions of ‘generic’ and ‘emerging’ were therefore constructed in such
a way that it was clear to all that an ‘emerging generic technology’ would almost certainly be at a ‘pre-competitive’ stage. In other
words, a ‘market failure’ rationale16 could be invoked to justify government support, for example, to encourage companies to carry
out collaborative R&D until ideas for specific new products or processes appeared and the work ceased to be ‘pre-competitive’ (see
Martin [32], p.51). In short, the terminology and definitions were deliberately constructed with the explicit aim of persuading a
right-of-centre government that it was legitimate to intervene through a foresight process. This focus on emerging generic
technologies 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 update
of technology foresight in other countries. A crucial question here was ‘Which countries should one focus on in attempting to draw
relevant lessons for the UK?’ Given the very small size of the project (one person-month), it was not possible to look at more than
two countries in detail. I could have again opted to focus on Japan, the country with the most experience of technology foresight
and therefore arguably the one from which others had most to learn. Instead I chose to focus on Germany and the US, two
countries with more decentralised approaches to science and technology, and both with 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 three
years. 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 the
technological ‘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 by Miles [1]. It may well have eluded my previous
searches 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 the
research community as an inducement to participate in the newly launched Technology Foresight Programme. The more sceptical wondered how one could have
even “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’ at
the 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 technology
foresight 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 the
system 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 which
the 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 as
identifying ‘critical technologies’ and constructing ‘technology road maps’, but these activities certainly came within the definition of ‘foresight as set out, for
example, 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 be
that 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), the
Netherlands (Ruud Smits), Germany (Hariolf Grupp and Kerstin Cuhls), the UK (John Irvine and myself, and also researchers at Manchester such as Luke
Georghiou, Denis Loveridge and Ian Miles) and Australia (Ron Johnston).
1444 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447

Wall in 1989 and the subsequent re-unification of Germany. This meant that a substantial portion of Federal Government
resources now had to be devoted to building up science and technology in the former German Democratic Republic – in other
words, resources were spread much more thinly than previously. This gave rise to a need for clearer priorities and, in turn, for
policy 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 (something
modelled on the Committee on Basic Science established by BMFT in Germany in 1990) to the more ambitious (for example, a
critical 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 Technology
Agency, 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 had
been a minister of cabinet rank in charge since Lord Hailsham in the early 1960s). Moreover, Waldegrave was in the process of
preparing a White Paper on science and technology, the first such White Paper for 20 years, and he was reportedly on the look out
for 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 Grahame Walshe
and I were asked to prepare a two-page ‘brief’. We were then summoned to a meeting with the Minister and senior civil servants
concerned with science and technology policy. The two of us duly presented the brief, dealing with such questions as: What is foresight?
Why is it important? And why should the UK launch a foresight initiative? At the end of the presentation, the Minister was clearly very
enthusiastic, even to the extent of implying that technology foresight had been his idea in the first place. This posed a dilemma. Normally
academics become somewhat annoyed when they feel ‘their’ ideas have been ‘stolen’ by others (as we discuss below). However, in the
world of policy research, the reverse is true, at least with regard to dealing with policy-makers; policy researchers actually want their
ideas to be taken up by policy-makers, and this is far more important than issues of intellectual ‘ownership’. So instead of contesting
with the Minister whose idea foresight had been, the response we duly followed (one clearly suggested by the TV series, Yes, Minister, of
which 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 and
elegant summary of where the discussions had got to, along with a particular ‘spin’ that would imply that the proposed Technology
Foresight 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 and
Technology, who was also present at the meeting. He had severe doubts about the wisdom of spending a million pounds or more
on 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 those
appropriate 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 clearly
remained unconvinced, with the result that at the end of the meeting it was not obvious to me whether Technology Foresight
would 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 been
present) to his office. There, he congratulated us. Surprised, I asked: “But how can you be sure we've convinced Waldegrave and he
will put Technology Foresight in the White Paper, given that his junior minister is so clearly against it?” His response was that the
two ministers did not get on (in fact, he expressed it much more bluntly!), and the more the junior minister was opposed, the
more Waldegrave would be in favour. Hence his confidence that foresight would appear in the White 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 technologies
exercise (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 some
new phenomenon in the social world or by giving a specific ‘label’ to a particular phenomenon, or alternatively by developing a
new concept, model or theory that provides a significantly improved understanding of an already established phenomenon. As
academia has (like the rest of the world) become more competitive, so the pressures on social scientists to ‘discover’ something
new or to come up with a new and unique ‘label’ that will be universally attributed to them (and hence earn them a large number
of 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’
something which had in fact been identified and analysed by someone else, often many 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 more
instances of the failure of younger researchers to recognise and cite similar or very closely related research from 30 or more years ago!
 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447 1445

been amplified in recent decades first by the growing emphasis on publications and citations, and more recently by the increasing
reliance of authors (apparently almost total in the case of some younger researchers) on electronic libraries when carrying out
their literature reviews. As a result of this latter trend, publications from the pre-digital era are often overlooked, leading authors
to 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 of
plagiarism. Such disputes are familiar to historians and sociologists of science (see e.g. Merton [44]), but they also occur in the
social 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 uniquely
and universally ascribed to Cohen and Levinthal [45], the latter has been the focus of a long-running and acrimonious debate, as
one 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 of
innovation’, one of the most important concepts to emerge from the field of science policy and innovation studies over the last two
decades. 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, while
both 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 are
often 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's
notion 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 illustrates
all too well the difficulty of establishing unambiguously who was the first to begin using a particular new concept. In 1983, John
Irvine and I were under the impression that we were perhaps the first to use the term in this way, initially as a catchy title, ‘Project
Foresight’, and subsequently as a convenient shorthand for what we were focussing on, namely, “the process involved in
systematically attempting to look into the longer-term future of science, technology, the economy and society with the aim of
identifying the areas of strategic research and the emerging generic technologies likely to yield the greatest economic and social
benefits”. Only when we came to analyse the findings from the 1983 study did we begin to use ‘foresight’ as a way of clearly
differentiating 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 similar
way 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 the
term ‘foresight’ with respect to science and technology.24 The situation was further complicated by the realisation (again in 1988
rather than during the earlier 1983 study) that similar activities had been developed several years earlier in France by Michel
Godet and colleagues under the rubric of ‘la prospective’ (e.g. [25] [56] [57] [58] [59]).25 But once the similarities26 between
foresight and la prospective were recognised, the proponents of each allied themselves with the other.27 This entente cordiale
between the primarily Anglophone proponents of technology foresight and the Francophone advocates of la prospective was to
prove 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” (see
http://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 Research
Policy 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. This
review concluded that “There is no single ‘inventor’ of the term or the concept of ‘innovative capacity’; rather the term (and its closely related variants) evolved
as 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 process
or 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 in
Industrial 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 a
1931 Harvard lecture (see http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Future-Foresight-Knowledge-Economy/dp/1405116153#reader_1405116153 – accessed on 6
May 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 have
been 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. The
second 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 la
prospective 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 of
interessement, attempting to enrol the other side and to mobilise them as allies of their cause.
1446 B.R. Martin / Technological Forecasting & Social Change 77 (2010) 1438–1447

In this article, we have tried to trace how and why the concept of ‘foresight’ was developed in connection with science and
technology. We have seen how this apparently simple task is beset with problems. Even as someone centrally involved in this early
work, my perceptions on the issue of priority changed over time as further information became available. Moreover, that
additional information, rather than clarifying the situation, tended to make the origins more complicated. Arguably, from the
material 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 ten
years later in 1983 when Elzinga [37], Irvine and Martin [10] [13], and Lederman [34] [35] each independently began to use the
term 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 researchers
hoping to make an impact on policy or management practice. This discussion is particularly topical as the concept of foresight once
more 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 technology
foresight, including Ian Miles (whose article in this Special Issue prompted the preparation of this paper, and who provided helpful
comments on a preliminary draft), Michel Godet (who strongly encouraged the author to prepare this paper), Kerstin Cuhls (who
commented in detail on an early draft), Hal Linstone (who provided helpful criticisms of the previous draft), Rémi Barré, Joseph
Coates, Aant Elzinga, Luke Georghiou, Hariolf Grupp, John Irvine, Ron Johnston, Michael Keenan, Stefan Kuhlmann, Len Lederman,
Denis Loveridge, Alan Porter, Ruud Smits and Grahame Walshe. The author is grateful to all of these and to any others he may have
inadvertently omitted. The usual disclaimers apply.

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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 Associate
Fellow 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 out
pioneering research in the field of research evaluation, science indicators, and international comparisons of research funding and research performance. John
Irvine 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 in
1984, with another, more comprehensive book being published in 1989.