How Do We Identify Great Opportunities?
A Knowledge Lab to Evaluate and Improve the Use of Foresight in Addressing Societal Challenges.
Opportunity and the future are two terms that go together quite naturally. An opportunity is a circumstance that allows for something to be done. The future is some time later than now. Putting the two together is the ticket to making things happen, particularly things that do not yet exist in the present but are desired.
This three-day Knowlab convenes 45 senior leaders from the innovation, foresight, and evaluation communities, spanning the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
The Knowlab will use case studies to advance our capacity to put the relationship between opportunities and the future to good use. Real world examples from three institutions — UNESCO, the European Commission and the Rockefeller Foundation —offer direct experience with the processes for using the future to address societal challenges.
The Knowlab, as a knowledge co-creation process, uses practical methods to address practical tasks:
- How can we identify new ways to tackle old problems, such as poverty, ignorance, food insecurity and the destruction of ecosystems?
- How can we better sense and understand change?
- How can we increase the success of human efforts to create a better world by becoming more effective at using all kinds of anticipatory systems (different ways of understanding the role and nature of the future)?
Our hope is that the findings, which will be widely disseminated, will enable all actors trying to improve societal wellbeing to more effectively and meaningfully use the future to create positive change in the present.