totti. konnola@impetusolutions. com. In this paper, we discuss key issues in harnessing horizon scanning to shape systemic policies, particularly in the light of the foresight exercise‘Facing the future:
the synthesis of such issues into encompasssin clusters; and the interpretation of resulting clusters as an important step towards the coordinated development of joint policy measures.
and network analysis for prioritizing, clustering and combining issues. Furthermore, these methods provide support for traceability,
horizon scanning‘may explore novel and unexpected issues, as well as persistent problems or trends. 1 At present, various forms of horizon scanning are quite widespread (Amanatidou et al. 2012),
journals. permissions@oup. com. Are felt to be potential indications of new emerging issues that may have received insufficient attention..
horizon scanning can serve as a systemmati approach to support the early identification and collective exploration of emerging issues.
and when the issues evolve through an incipient phase that is initially only observed by some individuals.
Methodological advances have been pursued, for instance, in the Framework programme 7 Blue sky Foresight projects on emerging issues that shape European science and technoloog (Amanatidou et al. 2012.
But even if the scope of scanning is left rather open, other design issues, such as available resouurce or the duration of the exercise, may impose comparrabl bounds. 2. 2 Sense-making:
Moreover, the most interestiin emerging issues may be characterized ambiguous by nebulous cause-and-effect relationships between existing and emergent knowledge.
which may also convey patterns of emerging issues. The deployment of these methods and the interpretation of their results in terms of requisite actions builds on individuua and collective sense-making activities.
From the process perspective, this type of direct engagemeen in workshops helps expose policy-makers to the diversity of issues at stake.
This is because the mere listing of issues appears so fragmented that it does not lead to the development of overarching policy agendas,
This suggests that horizon scanning can benefit from methods that provide explicit support for the synthesis of relevant combinations (e g. by using multi-criteria models in the assessment of issues
This is likely to be true especially in policy contexts where the issues are not yet prominent on the agenda
Brummer et al. 2008,2011) would be conducted to engage a wider community of experts in the assessment of key findings from these reports towards the identification of most pertinnen issues.
in order to take stock of these issues and, specificcally to make sense of them in terms of crosscutting challenges and policy implications. 3. 1 Identification of Issues BEPA and JRC-IPTS initiated the analysis in six broad areas following the structure of previous work that had been delivered to BEPA by other EC services.
JRC-IPTS and BEPA refined these areas through close interaction to accommodate a more comprehensive analysis across all economic sectors and responsibilities of BEPA.
A total of 129 such reports were reviewed by JRC-IPTS and external experts2 following common guidelines concerrnin the identification and refinement of issues from the reports in two phases:.
Issue recognition by individuals consisted of the identificcatio and codification of specific issues which included both evidence-based and new emerging trends, wild cards and even brief descriptions of anticipated impacts and prospective policy recommendatiions Here,
when selecting issues and outlining them for further analysis..Bilateral and collective discussions between experts
and JRC-IPTS helped to synthesize relevant issues into an interim report. In particular, these creative constructiion allowed individual experts to codify their tacit knowledge about possible interlinkages among trends
and wild cards as well as related policy recommendatioons These reviews resulted in the jointly authored area descriptions and the identification of 370 codified and traceable issues.
These issues were complemented with additional issues from the FTA 2008 conference survey. 3 3. 2 Assessment of issues The formulated issues were assessed in an online survey by some 270 external experts who represented foresight practitiooners
Specifically, these experts were requested to generate additional issues and to assess all the issues using three criteria:.
relevance to EU policy-making. novelty in comparison with earlier policy debates. probability of occurrence by 2025 In total, 381 issues were evaluated on a seven-point Likert-scale
which extended from one (issues that are totally lacking in relevance/novelty/probability) to seven (issues that exhibit a very high degree of relevance/novelty/probability).
4 3. 3 Analysis of issues In order to support the identification of most pertinent issues, the expert assessments were synthesized with the RPM tool (Liesio et al. 2007;
Ko nno la et al. 2007. In the RPM framework, the criterion-specific scores v j i for each issue j=1,,
...m are aggregated using the weighted sum: Vjðwþ w1v j 1+w2v j 2+w3v j 3 In contrast to conventional multi-criteria methods, RPM admits incomplete weight information expressed through linear
Core issues which belong to all non-dominated portfollios defined (in an approximate sense) as those collecttion of issues for which no other portfolio would yield a higher overall value for all stated weight information..
Exterior issues that belong to no such portfolios..Borderline issues which are in some but not all non-dominated portfolios.
Three different analyses were conducted to highlight different aspects of relevance: mean-oriented analysis, variance-oriented analysis and rare event-oriented analysis. In each analysis, attention was given particularly to the top-10 issues with the highest core index values among all
issues in a given area (there were 42 90 issues in the areas. 3. 3. 1 Mean-oriented analysis. Mean-oriented analysis helped identify issues that were considered relevant, novel and probable by the majority respondents,
whereby the criterion-specific scores v j i were obtained by taking the means of the respondents'assessments.
Then, the overall value Vjðwþ was computed then for each issue such that relevance was seen as the most important criterion,
followed by novelty and probability, i e.,, w1>w2>w3. Because the relevance criterion had the highest weighting,
the core issues identified in this analysis seemed to be the most relevant for EU policy-making. 3. 3. 2 Variance-oriented analysis. Variance-oriented analysis was conducted
in order to recognize issues on which the respondents had different viewpoints. Thus the scores v j i were defined by the variances of the responddents criterion-specific assessments.
The variance of assessment of novelty was regarded as the most imporrtan criterion, followed by variances of relevance and probability,
This analysis helped identify issues that the respondents did see similarly, which provided interesting inputs for debate in the final workshop. 226.
T. Ko nno la et al. 3. 3. 3 Rare event-oriented analysis. Rare eventorieente analysis was carried out to identify those issues that the respondents considered improbable but still novel
but v j 3 was defined such that the issues with the lowest occurrence probabilities received the highest scores,
As a rule, this analysis helped to identify issues which were deemed unlikely but potentially of high significance in terms of their consequences.
All in all, the three complementary RPM analyses helped to highlight issues which were seen to merit attentiio from different perspectives
and thus paved way for the formulation of crosscutting challenges. 3. 4 Synthesizing issues A two-day workshop was organized to group the identified issues into crosscutting challenges
In addition to the numerical statistics of the assessments, participants were provided with information about the core issues
For an example, see Table 1 which shows seven issues out of 42 in the area of defence and security.
Participants then prepared proposals for crosscutting challenges that would combine at least three different issues into a comprehensive story which would elucidate how this challenge could become reality
At least one of the three issues had to be among the top-10 core issues in one of the three different analyses,
and the challenges were required to contain issues from at least two of the six areas that were analysed.
the RPM analysis assisted in focusing on the most pertinent issues among which the workshop participants created novel interlinkagge by formulating crosscutting challenges and by envisioonin corresponding EU policies and actions in domains such as:
Table 2 provides an example of such a crosscutting challenge that synthesizes issues from different thematic areas.
made it possible to group Table 1. Core/borderline status of selected issues in area of defence
and security Issue Borderline issue>50%Core issue 100%A major war by 2020 R NATO will become more open to outside partnerships M Terrorists
the exercise can be viewed as a collective sense-making process where emerging issues were identified first
In its approach, the workshop evolved from a loosely structured discussion of issues resulting from the scanning of reports to a collective sense-making process that focused on how such issues could be brought together into crosscutting challenges
particularly when describing grand challenges that have to be addressed through European policy-making. 4. Implications for horizon scanning The recent proliferation of horizonscanning activities is linked partly to the popularity of the‘wisdom of the Table 2. Example of a crosscutting challenge consisting of issues from all three analyses
font styles of issue codes refer to results obtained in different RPM analyses(<http://foresight. jrc. ec. europa. eu/survey issues. pdf,
Issue code Key words from issue description (optional) Save natural resources (water, food) to prevent conflicts over their scarcity
however, this type of‘bottom-up'process implies that the list of prioritized issues may not be very coherent (Bunn and Salo 1993.
It may therefore be beneficial to synthesize issues into a smaller number of internally consistent theme clusters which reflect the full scope of the issues
For example, if there are 40 issues from which clusters of contaiinin three issues are to be built,
there would be nearly ten thousand possible combinations (40!//3! 37!==9880). ) Due to this mathematical reality, it is practically impossiibl to evaluate all combinations systematically.
Building an initial set from one or few issues that appear to be particularly significant..
Expanding such sets with additional issues that are consistent with the ones that have been selected already..
Continuing until the resulting set has reasonably many issues and sufficiently broad coverage. Because these steps rely on subjective judgements that call for creative sense-making,
'which combined issues from at least two areas in the case study) may have to be described at a more abstract
and general level than the issues from which they were built. In consequence, the clusters may not be all that easy to interprret especially
if there are no pointers to underlying evidence about the issues or the insights that may have guided their aggregation.
One may therefore wish to strive for a traceability that allows users to explore which issues a given cluster was built from and
Based on their experiences from the exercise on‘Scanning for emerging science and technology issues',Amanatidou et al.
and emerging issues as well as ensuing workshops need to be structured around specific policy challenges and aligned with the agendas of policy-makers.
In particular, linkages to prevalent issues that were already on the radar of policy-makers were seen to contribute to the usefulness of the exercise.
although the issues as such may be known, they merit renewed attention if their broader signifiicanc for society and policy-making has not yet been addressed sufficiently.
Overall, it appears the methodological approach in this exercise which had well-defined phases for the systematic‘bottom-up'scanning of issues
The particularly novel issues from this survey were added to the issues collected from the literature review. 4. These issues plus the 73 additional issues identified by the survey participants can be found at<http://foresight. jrc. ec. europa. eu/bepa. html
Lessons from initiating policy dialogues on emerging issues',Science and Public policy, 39: 208 22. Anderson, W. 2005)‘ Wiring up Whitehall:
2011)‘ Horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2011',Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 26:10 6. Taleb, N. N. 2007) The Black swan:
Global challenges therefore represent different strands of issues (authors'own observation:.Some selected trends or‘megatrends'that are observed in a global context..
and multicultural for early alert and analysis of long-range issues, opportunities, challenges and strategies. The information generated is made available through a variety of media for consideration in policy-making, advanced training
The 14th issue (Glenn et al. 2009) was used. The following process steps were performed to distill specific Fraunhofer challenges from the report:(
Future radar 2030 (Zukunftsradar 2030)',International Journal of Foresight and Innovation policy, forthcoming special issue. Lund Declaration.
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