Foresight Centre: An Outlook on International Cooperation
Everyone wants to know the future, and the Internet is full of the “top ten trends” which will define the next several decades. The Foresight Centre at HSE, however, does not meddle in such speculations: they analyze the existing technology, the state of economy and society, and use different methodologies in order to see the way to arrive at the desirable image of the future. International Research and Educational Foresight Centre works within the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK) at HSE since 2006. It is a prominent research and expertise centre in the area of long-term futures studies, science, technology and innovation (STI) policy, and the Foresight methodology; the centre also coordinates the national system for technology Foresight in Russia as well as works actively with international partners.
The Foresight Centre is quite well known both nationally and internationally – its Director Alexander Sokolov and First Vice-Rector, Director of ISSEK and chief editor of the Foresight and STI Governance journal Leonid Gokhberg represented Russia on the most recent OECD Government Foresight Community meeting on October 2, 2015. The unique advantage of the Foresight Centre at HSE is a combination of a wide pool of experts (over 10 000), an actively used knowledge base, vast statistical databases and analysis of a wider economic and social environment. All together they enrich the traditional Foresight methodology and produce results which are highly in demand, both in terms of research and policy.
In July, the Foresight Centre held a summer cooperation session with its Brazilian partner – the Center for Strategic Studies and Management in Science, Technology and Innovation (CGEE), to explore collaboration opportunities and draft the roadmaps of implementing them. Both institutions study problems of the STI policy and use similar methodology, which allows for a good synergy of efforts and development of shared tools and approaches.
The first area for collaboration is identification of priorities in STI policy: how limited resources are allocated for technological advances and how these decisions are brought to life, through connection of STI priority areas to particular products and markets. Another promising field of activity is trends monitoring – not only for BRICS but also globally – and publishing regular trendletters. Both centres have their own databases and tools which can be shared and used jointly to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of both STI strategies and their implementation and of other trends (education, demography, etc.) which influence them. The Foresight Centre and CGEE will have an opportunity to collaborate in person soon, at the Fifth HSE Annual Conference on Foresight and STI Policy, which will take place on November 19-20, 2015.
Apart from scientific cooperation, the Foresight Centre also organizes workshops for policy-makers in STI sphere. During a week-long workshop government officials from Vietnam were studying good practices in STI management from the state’s and the company’s perspective. In addition, for the first time two senior researchers from ISSEK went as trainers to the annual Foresight course at the University of Manchester – Alexander Chulok, Deputy Director of the Foresight Centre, and Konstantin Vishnevskiy, Head of Department of the Private-Public Partnership in Innovation the Sector at ISSEK.