Foresight.Edu

The project aimed to strengthen the role of strategic foresight as a practical competence within vocational education. Its ambition was to raise the quality and visibility of futures thinking as a...

The project aimed to strengthen the role of strategic foresight as a practical competence within vocational education. Its ambition was to raise the quality and visibility of futures thinking as a discipline that supports sustainable innovation and long-term planning in organisations and regions. The activities focused on both strengthening the existing community of foresight professionals and supporting the development of new specialists through accessible, practice-oriented learning formats. The partnership set six linked objectives: (1) exchange knowledge between Polish and Dutch experts through study visits; (2) improve foresight competences through hands-on training and simultaneously refine applied methodologies, with key insights captured in a white paper; (3) produce an open handbook that packages methods for wider vocational use; (4) build a cross-border community of foresight consultants; (5) keep all training openly accessible to a diverse mix of professionals, educators and learners; and (6) testing and implementation of digital tools for workshops based on group work.

Between October 2024 and May 2025, the partnership carried out a comprehensive programme of activities combining education, content development and strategic cooperation. This included five in-person workshops across five Polish cities, two expert sessions in the Netherlands, and three online workshops supported by digital facilitation tools. The implementation was accompanied by a project kickoff, regular coordination meetings, ongoing risk monitoring. In total, 211 people participated in the workshops (161 in Poland and 50 in the Netherlands), exceeding the original target of 200. An additional 74 individuals joined the online community of practice. Alongside the training programme, the partnership developed two key publications. The Foresight Edu handbook offers a structured introduction to foresight methods and is designed for vocational use in diverse fields. The white paper State of Futures presents insights from the Dutch foresight community and documents the use of digital tools in remote education. Both outputs serve as open-access resources that support further development of foresight competences across Europe.

A key outcome of the project was the Foresight Edu handbook, a Polish-language publication that presents a nine-step foresight process with a curated set of methods assigned to each phase, including signal scanning, trend analysis, scenario planning and strategic design. Another important result was the white paper State of Futures, which synthesises insights from Dutch foresight practitioners and documents the use of digital tools in remote educational formats. Both publications were made freely available and are already being used within broader professional networks. To strengthen outreach and engagement, the project team also published four peer-reviewed articles on the EPALE platform, distributed five thematic newsletters and shared workshop materials in the form of an open slide deck. The educational activities were highly rated by participants, with an average quality score of 4.5 out of 5. Pre- and post-training surveys demonstrated clear learning effects: 86.6% of participants improved their theoretical knowledge by at least 25%, while 81.2% reported an increase in practical skills of over 30%.