Policy lensing of future-oriented strategic intelligence: An experiment connecting foresight with decision making contexts

The rich and complex outcomes of foresight activities are often difficult to translate into policy relevant intelligence.
The struggle in connecting futures intelligence to policy making can be read as a basic challenge in
foresight: working on futures intelligence has emerged as a way to improve policy, but once it is delegated to
professional foresight practitioners with attendant quality and quality control, however, it also introduces a
distance to policy making. Whilst independence and methodological rigour is desirable for high quality futures
intelligence, bridging this intelligence with the policy context is essential for its use. Experiencing this challenge
during a scenario exercise on the future European research and innovation system, the authors of this paper
embarked on an experiment to go beyond evaluating the robustness of the scenarios, produced in a foresight
exercise, by developing and applying “policy lenses” to translate the scenarios into policy tailored intelligence.
This paper describes the experiment, which saw the development and application of three types of policy lenses:
(1) a lens based on the layered processes of European policy making, (2) a lens based on three research and
innovation policy priorities and (3) a lens on alternative geo-political situations of the European continent. The
paper describes the logic behind the lenses, the interpretation of the original scenarios when viewed through
these lenses, and then concludes by reflecting on how such an experiment could be generalised to other settings
of policy-oriented foresight.