The European Foresight Platform (EFP) is a project under the European Commission Framework 7 Program under the Socio-economic sciences and Humanities calls for Coordination and Support Action. EFP aims at supporting forward looking decision making and thus addresses different foresight communities and methodologies as well as EU policy makers. Additionally it serves the goal of fostering the dialogue and networking between foresight, science, policy and society in relation to important future questions, issues and challenges. Thus EFP is envisioned as an umbrella institution for networking foresight experts from different areas as well as policy makers and contributors from R&D and business.

www.foresight-platform.eu

Interconnecting Knowledge for the early identification of issues, events and developments shaping and shaking the future of STI in the ERA (iKnow) The project is co-ordinated by the University of Manchester and Manchester Business School. The partners, including the FFRC, are Z-Punkt (Germany), RTC North (UK), Techonology Centre (Czech), University of Tel Aviv, ICTAF (Israel) and IT companies Mindcom Ltd. (Finland) and CyberFox (Czech). The project is focused on the study of wild cards and weak signals, in other words the study of issues which are just emerging or not yet visible but with far-reaching implications. The project will also focus on IT applications on social media and second life technologies. Web-based tools established during the project are going to be used also in the EU’s own foresight systems. iKnow is part of the EU’s BlueSky programme. Researchers at the project are Research Director Jari Kaivo-oja and Researcher Tuomo Kuosa.