Prof. Adrian Curaj, Manager of the Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education project, presented, before a group of Romanian and international foresight experts, rectors and pro-rectors of Romanian universities, the document Blueprint for Organizing Foresight in Universities, this Thursday, September 30th. The presentation took place at the Bucharest University of Agronomics and Veterinary Medicine, during a workshop under the same name. This is the fourth mutual learning workshop in the Bucharest Dialogues series, organized by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI) as part of the Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education project.

The purpose of the event was to reinforce and make the most of the outcomes of the Blueprint for Organizing Foresight in Universities document, by enabling dialogue between Romanian university professors, the beneficiaries of the document, and the international experts.

Blueprint for Organizing Foresight in Universities was written under the supervision of Prof. Adrian Curaj and included articles from five international contributors: Alain Michel (Futuribles - France), Ozcan Saritas (University of Manchester – the UK), Pierre Rossel (Ecole Polytehniques Federale de Lausanne – Switzerland), Ilkka Tuomi (Meaning Processing Ltd. – Finland), and Riel Miller (Institut d’etudes poltiques de Paris - France) plus one Romanian contributor, Dan Grosu (UEFISCDI).

“Blueprint for Organizing Foresight in Universities is not meant as a foresight guidebook or textbook for Romanian universities. It does not claim, in any way, to offer a success recipe about how to conduct foresight exercises in universities. This document does however provide practical solutions to challenges that universities might be confronted with while conducting their own foresight exercises. The work is the more valuable as it is built on real challenges for the Romanian universities, challenges identified during a large-scale evaluation process of Romanian higher education”, said Adrian Curaj in the opening of the session.

Made up of six chapters, the work starts from identifying the main higher education future challenges, suggests a possible methodology for conducting foresight exercises, introduces a few cases of universities in Ireland, Canada, the United States of America, Turkey and Malaysia, which developed their own foresight exercises to identify potential consequences both for university strategic management and educational or research processes.

“Higher education must take into account several alternative scenarios about the future so as to enable each student to gain awareness of the consequences of current trends and to influence events. Therefore, foresight exercises – or foresight activities – can be considered, to some extent, the antonyms of fatalism and resignation,” explained Alain Michel, Group Futuribles.

Ozcan Saritas, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, said: “Systemic foresight is a new methodological approach to the analysis of complex social, technological or sustainability problems, aimed at explaining the latter through the relationships among them, developing alternative and desirable models of the future, as well as methods of reaching those through behavioral and structural changes.”

“As the university and the society that contains it change, there are people who raise the question: how should the university change? Generally, these people – some of them feeling responsible for what is happening – are looking for an answer to this question because they have a specific vision of the university. They believe that the university should change in ways that would ensure a better future for the university and, usually, for the society in general. As a result, in order to analyze the way it should change, the university must be able to imagine the future. This is where foresight studies come into play,” shows Riel Miller, Sciences Po, Paris.

Blueprint for Organizing Foresight in Universities was published by the Romanian Academy and will be distributed in Romanian universities as a support instrument for conducting foresight exercises.

Support Information
The Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education project is one of the six higher education strategic projects run by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding and funded by the European Social Fund, the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development.
One of the purposes of the project is to enhance the capacity for long-term strategic analysis in Romanian universities.
To improve leadership capacity, the project will produce a series of working instruments for universities. In addition, the project aims at strengthening the Romanian foresight practitioner community and its integration into the international community. For this purpose, a series of 10 workshops, under the umbrella of the Bucharest Dialogues, are organized with a view to developing basic foresight concepts through international expert dialogue.