Technological Forecasting

This chapter shows how it is possible to use existing foresight studies in a smart way to develop "new" foresight studies that have a high quality but require less time and money. This approach can be seen as recycling existing foresight. Although books about foresight pay no attention to it, many foresight professionals are familiar with the recycling of existing research. A common way to reuse existing foresight is to adopt existing scenarios. In foresight, a meta-analysis can be used to produce a new and meaningful synthesis of the insights provided by earlier studies. The possible advantages of reusing existing futures studies are: efficiency, recognisability, synthesis. The benefit of this form of recycling is that it makes it easier to tailor-make the future visions and scenarios, to make sure they match the new area of study and focuses more on the needs of the customer