Strategic Foresight
Why strategic foresight?
The world is undergoing a period of remarkable transformation. From breakthroughs in medicine and technology to the rise of artificial intelligence and increasingly interconnected societies, the pace of change presents exciting opportunities.
However, this complexity also brings challenges and uncertainty. Geopolitical shifts, climate change, economic turmoil and social unrest — all require organizations to adapt and plan for a range of possible futures.
In such a world, strategic foresight becomes a powerful tool. It can help organizations anticipate long-term and potentially disruptive change. IDRC is using foresight to navigate the world’s complexities, ensuring that IDRC-supported research remains relevant and impactful.
How foresight works
Foresight is a systematic approach that uses an array of processes and tools to explore a range of plausible futures. It empowers organizations to discern potential challenges and opportunities before they arise, allowing them to develop strategies that are flexible and adaptable in the face of change.
Foresight helps lay a path to more future-ready strategies, programming and planning. It also sets a course that can be flexible to circumstances. Foresight encourages creativity and innovation as it opens up thinking on different possibilities.
Moving our thinking forward
Explore our foresight framework to see strategic foresight in action at IDRC.
How is IDRC using foresight?
Strategic foresight has the potential to support IDRC’s Strategy 2030 objectives by ensuring that the research we support is contextualized and anticipates emerging needs and challenges.
Through foresight, our approach is both internally focused, helping us better anticipate and respond to potential futures, and externally focused, providing support to strategic foresight organizations, networks and communities of practice in developing-country contexts.
We are using strategic foresight in three ways
1. Building our institutional understanding and practice
IDRC is actively using strategic foresight to inform our future directions. Here are some highlights:
- Scanning the horizon – We commissioned a scan of the disruptors and enablers in the research-for-development landscape – part of a foresight initiative – to shape our Strategy 2030 review.
- Benchmarking foresight practices – We are generating a report to explore how other organizations use foresight, informing our own approach. (Full report coming soon).
2. Contributing to the global foresight landscape
IDRC strengthens the broader field of strategic foresight, especially its intersection with research in the Global South and global development cooperation.
- Foresight directory – In collaboration with the School of International Futures, IDRC developed a directory of foresight actors across the Global South and North, including some insights and learnings.
- Contextual foresight methods – We are supporting the development of new, contextually relevant methods and criteria for assessing (and evaluating) quality foresight, with a focus on food systems.
- Foresight in development cooperation – We guest-edited a special issue on foresight and international development cooperation in ODI’s Development Policy Review, with an introduction to the issue that explores foresight’s promises and pitfalls.
3. Strengthening strategic foresight in the Global South
IDRC supports strategic foresight initiatives with partners where we know foresight can add value. This includes a range of support to projects in the Global South where grantees are using foresight to think differently about the future.
Join us as we drive global change through foresight and innovation!
Stay updated on the latest developments and insights in strategic foresight, which showcase our commitment to help shape the future for the benefit of all.
