The Foresight-Driven University
The Foresight-Driven University explores how foresight can become a transformative capability within higher education, using the Université Catholique de Lille as a case study. The book argues that universities must go beyond teaching and research to become places where society learns to anticipate, deliberate, and build desirable futures. It proposes a model of the foresight-driven university based on eight capabilities: anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize, and transform.
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Reflective Study of Innovation Ecosystems, Artificial Intelligence, and Desirable Futures in Higher Education
Lessons from the Université Catholique de Lille Experience
Front Matter
Foreword
The question of the future of higher education has become one of the defining issues of our time. Universities are no longer only institutions devoted to teaching, research, and the preservation of knowledge. They are increasingly called upon to help societies navigate uncertainty, technological disruption, ecological transition, geopolitical instability, and the profound transformation brought by artificial intelligence.
This essay offers a distinctive contribution to that debate. It does not present a theoretical model detached from institutional life, nor does it offer a simple institutional narrative. It is grounded in a concrete university experience: the development of foresight practices at the Université Catholique de Lille through innovation ecosystems, territorial engagement, civic dialogue, international networks, and the search for desirable futures.
The originality of this work lies in its combination of three dimensions. First, it explores foresight as an institutional capability. Second, it studies innovation ecosystems as environments from which universities can learn. Third, it places artificial intelligence and desirable futures at the heart of the contemporary transformation of higher education.
The Université Catholique de Lille experience is not presented as a universal model to be copied. Rather, it is offered as a situated experiment from which other universities may draw lessons. Its value lies precisely in the fact that it is concrete, imperfect, evolving, and embedded in a specific territory, while also connected to global conversations about the future of universities.
At a time when higher education is being challenged by artificial intelligence, social fragmentation, ecological urgency, and new expectations from students and societies, this book invites universities to ask a deeper question: not only what knowledge should be transmitted, but what futures should be imagined, debated, and built.
The concept of the foresight-driven university proposed here deserves attention because it extends existing models of the entrepreneurial, civic, and engaged university. It suggests that the universities of the twenty-first century must become capable of anticipation, experimentation, documentation, civic engagement, and transformation.
This text is therefore both a study of one university experience and an invitation to rethink higher education more broadly.
Author’s Note — A Participant-Observer Perspective
This book is written from a situated position.
I was not an external observer of the experience described in these pages. I was directly involved in it as Director of Foresight at the Université Catholique de Lille. I participated in the creation and development of several of the initiatives analyzed in this book, including the work around innovation ecosystems, foresight dialogues, audiovisual archives, ECOPOSS, and international foresight networks.
For this reason, the book does not claim the distance of a neutral external history. It is written instead as a reflective study from the perspective of aparticipant-observer and practitioner-scholar.
This position has limits. It requires vigilance, reflexivity, and methodological clarity. Being involved in an experience can create blind spots. It can also create access: access to intentions, debates, tensions, decisions, failures, intuitions, and transformations that are often invisible from the outside.
The purpose of this book is not to celebrate an institution, nor to produce a personal memoir. It is to transform a twelve-year university experience into an object of reflection, analysis, and transmission.
The guiding question is not: “What did we do?” The guiding question is: “What can this experience teach other universities?”
The answer proposed here is that universities need to develop foresight as a transversal capability. Such a capability cannot be reduced to a strategy document, a department, a seminar, or an event. It emerges through a combination of research, experimentation, territorial engagement, civic dialogue, international cooperation, and living memory.
The role of audiovisual archives is particularly important in this book. Videos, interviews, conferences, and recorded dialogues are not treated as secondary illustrations. They are considered part of the empirical material of the study. They preserve voices, gestures, contexts, concepts in formation, and moments of collective intelligence.
This reflective study therefore rests on several kinds of sources:
- direct participation in the experience;
- institutional documents;
- publications;
- conferences and public events;
- audiovisual archives;
- interviews and dialogues;
- international comparisons;
- the evolving conceptual vocabulary of foresight.
The ambition of the book is not to generalize from one case in a rigid way. It is to identify transferable lessons. Each university has its own history, territory, culture, constraints, and possibilities. The Université Catholique de Lille experience is therefore presented not as a formula, but as a learning field.
If the book succeeds, it will help readers understand how a university can become more attentive to emerging futures, more capable of collective anticipation, more engaged with its territory, more open to civic imagination, and more responsible in the age of artificial intelligence.
Executive Summary
The Foresight-Driven University presents a reflective study of how foresight can become a transformative capability within higher education.
Based on the Université Catholique de Lille experience, the book explores how a university can move beyond the traditional functions of teaching and research to become a place where society learns to anticipate, deliberate, and build desirable futures.
The central thesis of the book is that a foresight-driven university is not defined by one foresight office, one innovation laboratory, one festival, or one strategic plan. It is defined by its capacity to integrate foresight across research, innovation ecosystems, artificial intelligence, territorial engagement, civic dialogue, international cooperation, and living memory.
The book is structured around three major transformations.
The first transformation concerns innovation ecosystems. Through the creation of IIPEI and the development of Learning Expeditions, the Université Catholique de Lille explored how universities can learn from global innovation environments such as Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Copenhagen, Munich, Taipei, and Lausanne. These ecosystems are not treated as models to copy, but as environments through which universities can observe futures already in motion.
The second transformation concerns artificial intelligence and civilizational futures. The rise of artificial intelligence does not only affect tools, professions, and learning methods. It transforms the very conditions of knowledge, decision-making, creativity, responsibility, and education. The book argues that AI makes foresight more necessary, not less necessary.
The third transformation concerns desirable futures. Through ECOPOSS, civic foresight, and public dialogue, the university experience expanded beyond expert circles. Futures became public, debatable, cultural, artistic, and experiential. This movement shows that universities can become civic agoras where society collectively explores what futures are not only possible, but desirable.
The book proposes a model of the foresight-driven university based on eight capabilities:
- Anticipate — develop long-term foresight capacity.
- Explore — learn from global innovation ecosystems.
- Connect — link university, territory, companies, citizens, and institutions.
- Experiment — create research-action devices.
- Document — build living memory through publications, archives, and videos.
- Engage — open futures thinking to society.
- Internationalize — connect local learning to global foresight networks.
- Transform — move from vision to institutional, territorial, and civic action.
The book is intended for university leaders, researchers, foresight practitioners, innovation ecosystem builders, policy makers, educators, doctoral students, and readers interested in the future of higher education.
Its academic contribution lies in four areas:
- it develops the concept of the foresight-driven university;
- it connects foresight with innovation ecosystems and artificial intelligence;
- it treats audiovisual archives as part of the empirical material of a reflective study;
- it proposes a transferable capability model for universities facing uncertainty.
The book does not claim that the Université Catholique de Lille experience is complete or perfect. On the contrary, it also analyzes limits, tensions, unfinished questions, and conditions of transferability.
Its final argument is simple:
Universities must not only transmit knowledge. They must become foresight-driven institutions capable of helping society imagine, debate, and build desirable futures.
Acknowledgements
This book is the result of a collective experience.
It could not have been written without the many people who contributed, directly or indirectly, to the foresight journey of the Université Catholique de Lille: university leaders, researchers, students, colleagues, partners, entrepreneurs, artists, speakers, civic actors, and international collaborators.
I would like to acknowledge the institutional support that made possible the development of foresight within the university, from the first steps of IIPEI to the later emergence of ECOPOSS and international foresight networks.
I also wish to thank the colleagues and partners who participated in the exploration of innovation ecosystems, the Learning Expeditions, the conferences, the publications, the audiovisual interviews, the foresight dialogues, and the many moments of collective reflection that shaped this experience.
Special recognition is due to those who contributed to the intellectual and methodological development of the project: researchers in foresight, complexity, innovation ecosystems, artificial intelligence, territorial transformation, civic engagement, and desirable futures.
The work around videos and audiovisual archives also deserves particular acknowledgement. Many of the ideas discussed in this book were not born only in written texts, but in conversations, interviews, conferences, and public events. The audiovisual memory of this journey is therefore an essential part of its intellectual heritage.
I also thank the students, participants, and audiences who engaged with these questions over the years. Their questions, doubts, intuitions, and expectations helped transform foresight from an expert practice into a shared conversation.
Finally, this book is indebted to the French tradition of prospective, while seeking to translate that tradition into the international language of foresight. It is written in gratitude to those who believe that universities can still be places of anticipation, responsibility, dialogue, and transformation.
This book is dedicated to all those who believe that the future is not only something to predict, but something to explore, discuss, and build together.
Introduction — Why Universities Need Foresight
Universities are entering a period of profound transformation. For centuries, their central missions have been to preserve knowledge, transmit learning, conduct research, and educate new generations. These missions remain essential. Yet they are no longer sufficient. In a world shaped by artificial intelligence, ecological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, social fragmentation, technological acceleration, and cultural instability, universities must also learn to anticipate, deliberate, and act in relation to futures that are uncertain but already emerging.
The central question of this book is therefore simple but demanding: how can a university develop foresight capabilities that help society imagine, debate, and build desirable futures?
This question is not only strategic. It is also epistemological, civic, ethical, and institutional. It concerns the way universities understand knowledge, the way they relate to territories, the way they engage with technology, the way they educate students, and the way they contribute to the long-term transformation of society.
Artificial intelligence makes this question especially urgent. Since 2022, generative AI has rapidly transformed the conditions of teaching, learning, research, writing, creativity, assessment, work, and decision-making. It is not simply another technological tool added to the university environment. It challenges the organization of knowledge, the role of teachers, the agency of students, the meaning of expertise, and the future of professions. In this context, universities cannot limit themselves to adapting reactively. They must become capable of foresight.
This book explores that challenge through the experience of the Université Catholique de Lille. This experience is not presented as a model to be copied mechanically. It is presented as a situated, evolving, and collective experiment from which broader lessons can be drawn. Over more than a decade, the university explored foresight through innovation ecosystems, Learning Expeditions, territorial engagement, research-action, audiovisual archives, civic dialogue, ECOPOSS, international networks, and the search for desirable futures.
The book is written from the perspective of a participant-observer. The author was involved in the experience not as an external historian, but as an actor in the development of foresight within the university. This position requires methodological clarity. It does not allow the book to claim the distance of a neutral external account. Instead, it makes possible a reflective study grounded in direct participation, documents, publications, events, videos, interviews, and institutional memory.
For this reason, this book is neither an institutional report nor a personal memoir. It does not aim to celebrate an institution, nor to present a success story without tensions. Its purpose is to transform a university experience into an object of reflection, analysis, and transmission. The guiding question is not simply: what happened at the Université Catholique de Lille? The deeper question is: what can this experience teach other universities facing uncertainty, artificial intelligence, and the need to build desirable futures?
The concept proposed in this book is that of the foresight-driven university. A foresight-driven university is not defined by a single foresight office, a strategic document, an innovation center, a festival, or a network. It is defined by its ability to develop foresight as a transversal institutional capability. Such a capability connects research, innovation ecosystems, territorial transformation, artificial intelligence, civic engagement, international cooperation, and living memory.
Three major themes structure the book.
The first is innovation ecosystems. The creation of IIPEI, the International Institute for Foresight on Innovation Ecosystems, opened a field of inquiry into how universities can learn from territories, companies, laboratories, entrepreneurs, public institutions, cultural dynamics, and global innovation environments. Innovation ecosystems are not treated here as models to imitate, but as living contexts through which universities can observe futures already in motion.
The second is artificial intelligence. AI is not approached only as a technological tool, but as a civilizational disruption. It transforms the conditions of learning, research, work, knowledge production, creativity, and responsibility. It raises fundamental questions for universities: what should students learn when knowledge is increasingly mediated by intelligent systems? What becomes of expertise, judgment, creativity, and ethical discernment? How can universities avoid being passive consumers of AI and instead become places where AI is critically understood, governed, and oriented toward human and social purposes?
The third is desirable futures. The future cannot be reduced to what is technically possible or economically probable. It must also be debated in terms of what is desirable, responsible, just, sustainable, and meaningful. Through ECOPOSS and other civic foresight initiatives, the Université Catholique de Lille experience suggests that universities can become public spaces where citizens, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, institutions, and decision-makers collectively explore possible futures and discuss the futures they wish to build.
This book is therefore both specific and transferable. It is specific because it is grounded in one university, one territory, one institutional history, and one set of initiatives. It is transferable because it identifies broader capabilities that other universities may adapt to their own contexts. The goal is not to offer a universal formula. The goal is to propose a framework for thinking about how universities can become more anticipatory, more engaged, more imaginative, and more responsible.
The book is organized in four parts.
The first part establishes the conceptual and methodological foundations. It explains why higher education needs foresight, clarifies the relation between French prospective and international foresight, and presents the reflective methodology of the study.
The second part examines the Université Catholique de Lille experience through the creation of IIPEI, the exploration of innovation ecosystems, and the territorial anchoring in the Hauts-de-France region.
The third part expands the analysis from innovation toward artificial intelligence, civilizational futures, crisis, resilience, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, and civic foresight.
The fourth part synthesizes the lessons of the experience and proposes the model of the foresight-driven university, based on eight capabilities: anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize, and transform.
The academic contribution of this book is fourfold. First, it contributes to the field of foresight by proposing the concept of the foresight-driven university. Second, it contributes to the study of higher education by showing how universities can develop anticipation as an institutional capability. Third, it contributes to innovation ecosystem studies by examining how universities learn from and contribute to ecosystems. Fourth, it contributes methodologically by treating audiovisual archives, public events, and participant-observation as part of a reflective study.
Ultimately, this book argues that universities must not only transmit knowledge. They must also help societies anticipate uncertainty, question technological acceleration, cultivate collective intelligence, and build desirable futures. In the age of artificial intelligence and systemic transformation, the university’s responsibility is not only to prepare students for the future. It is to help society think, debate, and shape the futures it is willing to inhabit.
Oui, Michel. Voici un brouillon rédigé en anglais pour l’ouverture de la Part I — Foundations, à partir de vos 10 lignes. Il peut servir d’introduction à la première partie du livre.
Part I — Foundations
The first part of this book establishes the conceptual and methodological foundations required to understand the emergence of a foresight-driven university. Before entering into the Université Catholique de Lille experience itself, it is necessary to clarify why foresight matters for higher education, how the French tradition of prospective can be translated into the international language of foresight, and why a reflective, participant-observer approach can produce rigorous and transferable knowledge.
Higher education is undergoing a profound transformation. Universities are confronted with systemic uncertainty: artificial intelligence, ecological disruption, geopolitical instability, social fragmentation, technological acceleration, and changing expectations from students, employers, territories, and society. In this context, universities can no longer understand their role only in terms of teaching, research, and knowledge transmission. They must also develop the capacity to anticipate transformations, interpret weak signals, engage with uncertainty, and help society deliberate about desirable futures.
This first part begins by situating universities in this new landscape. The question is not simply how universities should adapt to change, but how they can become active agents in shaping futures. Artificial intelligence makes this question even more urgent. AI is transforming the conditions of learning, research, writing, creativity, assessment, professional life, and institutional decision-making. It requires universities to develop new forms of discernment, responsibility, and foresight.
The second foundation is conceptual. The book is rooted in the French tradition of prospective, associated with figures such as Gaston Berger, but it is written for an international audience for whom the term foresight is more immediately understandable. This part therefore clarifies the relation between prospective,strategic foresight, futures studies, futures literacy, and desirable futures. It explains why the expression foresight-driven university is used as the English formulation of what, in French, might be called an université prospective.
The third foundation is methodological. This book is not written from the standpoint of an external observer. It is written from the perspective of a participant-observer and practitioner-scholar who was directly involved in the experience analyzed. Such a position requires explicit methodological care. It involves reflexivity, acknowledgment of possible biases, and a clear distinction between institutional narrative, personal memory, and academic interpretation.
The book therefore adopts the form of a reflective study. It draws on research-action, participant-observation, institutional documents, publications, events, videos, interviews, and audiovisual archives. The aim is not to produce an abstract theory detached from lived experience, nor to present a simple institutional success story. The aim is to transform a situated university experience into a field of analysis from which other universities may draw lessons.
A distinctive methodological feature of this book is the role given to videos and archives. Videos are not treated as secondary illustrations. They are considered primary research materials. They preserve voices, concepts in formation, public debates, institutional moments, and traces of collective intelligence. They form part of the living memory of the experience and help document the emergence of foresight as a university capability.
Part I therefore prepares the reader to approach the Université Catholique de Lille experience not merely as a chronological story, but as a case of institutional learning. It provides the conceptual vocabulary, the intellectual background, and the methodological framework needed to understand the chapters that follow.
The three chapters of this part each play a specific role.
Chapter 1, Higher Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Systemic Uncertainty, explains why universities must rethink their missions in a world marked by AI, ecological transition, geopolitical instability, social fragmentation, and accelerated technological change.
Chapter 2, From French Prospective to International Foresight, clarifies the intellectual lineage of the book. It shows how the French tradition of prospective can be translated into the global vocabulary of foresight while preserving its humanistic and action-oriented depth.
Chapter 3, Research Design: A Reflective Study, presents the methodological basis of the book. It explains the role of research-action, participant-observation, practitioner-scholarship, documentary sources, audiovisual archives, and transferability.
Together, these three chapters establish the scientific basis for the model developed later in the book: the foresight-driven university. They show that such a university is not defined merely by a foresight office, a strategic plan, or a public event. It is defined by its ability to integrate anticipation, reflection, experimentation, documentation, civic engagement, and transformation into its institutional life.
Chapter 1 — Higher Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Systemic Uncertainty
Higher education is entering one of the most disruptive periods in its modern history. Universities are confronted with transformations that are not isolated, linear, or easily manageable. Artificial intelligence, ecological transition, geopolitical instability, demographic change, social fragmentation, transformations of work, and the acceleration of technological systems are converging. Together, these forces are reshaping the conditions under which universities teach, research, govern, cooperate, and contribute to society.
For a long time, universities could define themselves primarily through three great missions: the transmission of knowledge, the production of research, and the formation of students. These missions remain essential. But in the twenty-first century, they are no longer sufficient. The university is increasingly expected to help societies navigate uncertainty, interpret complexity, and prepare for futures that cannot be predicted with certainty but can be explored, discussed, and shaped.
This chapter argues that higher education must be rethought in terms offoresight capabilities. Universities do not simply need to adapt to change after it occurs. They need to develop institutional capacities to anticipate transformations, detect weak signals, question dominant assumptions, explore alternative futures, and contribute to the construction of desirable futures. Foresight is not an optional supplement to university strategy. It is becoming a core capability for universities facing systemic uncertainty.
Artificial intelligence makes this transformation particularly urgent. Since the public emergence of generative AI tools in late 2022, AI has moved rapidly from a specialized technological field into the everyday practices of students, teachers, researchers, administrators, and organizations. UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI in education and research emphasizes the need for human-centred approaches, ethical regulation, pedagogical design, data privacy, and long-term policy frameworks for education systems. Research on AI in education also shows that current expectations around AI are often accompanied by misunderstandings about what AI systems can actually do, as well as by narrow assumptions about the purposes of education. [pythonhosted.org][michelsalo...ogspot.com]
AI does not merely introduce new tools into universities. It changes the environment in which knowledge is produced, circulated, assessed, and legitimized. It affects writing, reading, translation, coding, research assistance, student evaluation, administrative processes, creativity, and decision-making. It also raises difficult questions about academic integrity, algorithmic bias, data governance, intellectual autonomy, student agency, and the future of expertise. A systems approach to AI transformation in higher education highlights that universities must understand AI not as a single technology to be adopted, but as a complex institutional transformation involving feedback loops, policy traps, new skills, research practices, and changing labour-market expectations.[shs.cairn.info]
The rise of AI therefore does not reduce the need for universities. On the contrary, it makes the university’s role more important. If information becomes more abundant, automated, and easily generated, then the value of universities may increasingly lie in their capacity to cultivate judgment, interpretation, critical thinking, ethical discernment, creativity, cooperation, and long-term responsibility. The question is no longer only how universities can use AI. It is how universities can help students, researchers, institutions, and societies understand and orient AI toward human, civic, ecological, and desirable futures.
This is why foresight becomes essential. Foresight helps universities move beyond reactive adaptation. It invites them to ask deeper questions: What forms of knowledge will matter in a world of intelligent systems? What skills will students need when many cognitive tasks are automated or augmented? What becomes of academic expertise when machines can generate plausible texts, images, analyses, and simulations? What forms of responsibility should universities assume when technologies transform society faster than institutions can regulate them? What futures are possible, probable, and desirable?
Higher education is also confronted with ecological and geopolitical uncertainty. Climate disruption, resource tensions, migration, conflicts, democratic fragility, digital sovereignty, and global inequalities are no longer external topics to be studied from a distance. They affect the mission, ethics, partnerships, campuses, research agendas, and social responsibilities of universities. In this context, universities must become places where complexity can be understood without being oversimplified, where long-term thinking can resist short-term pressures, and where technical innovation can be connected to questions of meaning, justice, and responsibility.
The future of work reinforces this challenge. Many professions are being transformed by automation, AI, platform economies, hybrid work, and global networks. Students need more than specialized technical knowledge. They need the ability to learn continuously, cooperate across disciplines, interpret uncertainty, work with intelligent systems, understand ethical dilemmas, and participate in collective decision-making. Universities must therefore prepare students not only for existing professions, but for professions, roles, and responsibilities that are still emerging.
This does not mean abandoning knowledge transmission. Rather, it means reinterpreting it. Universities must continue to transmit knowledge, but they must also teach students how knowledge is constructed, questioned, contextualized, and used. They must help students understand the limits of data, the social consequences of technologies, the ambiguity of future scenarios, and the difference between what is technically possible and what is socially desirable.
In this sense, the university’s mission becomes more civilizational. Artificial intelligence, ecological transition, biotechnology, digital platforms, and geopolitical instability are not only technical issues. They reshape the human condition, social organization, cultural imagination, and the meaning of education itself. Universities must therefore become spaces where societies can examine not only what is changing, but what should be preserved, transformed, or invented.
The concept of the foresight-driven university emerges from this context. A foresight-driven university is not simply a university that teaches futures studies or occasionally organizes future-oriented events. It is a university that develops foresight as a transversal capability. This means integrating anticipation into strategy, research, pedagogy, territorial engagement, innovation ecosystems, civic dialogue, international cooperation, and institutional transformation.
Such a university does not claim to predict the future. Prediction is too narrow a task for the complexity of the present moment. Instead, it seeks to expand the capacity of its communities to imagine alternatives, understand uncertainties, deliberate collectively, and act responsibly. It asks not only what is likely to happen, but also what futures should be desired, debated, and built.
This chapter therefore prepares the conceptual ground for the rest of the book. It shows why higher education must be rethought in the age of artificial intelligence and systemic uncertainty. It explains why traditional models of knowledge transmission are no longer sufficient by themselves. It introduces foresight as a necessary institutional capability. And it opens the central question that runs through the book: what kind of university is needed in the twenty-first century?
The answer proposed here is that universities must learn to anticipate, deliberate, and act. They must help society understand emerging transformations, but also cultivate the capacity to choose among them. They must become places where innovation is connected to ethics, where artificial intelligence is connected to human judgment, where knowledge is connected to responsibility, and where futures are not only predicted or feared, but collectively imagined and constructed.
In the following chapters, this argument will be developed through the Université Catholique de Lille experience. The book will show how foresight can move from an idea to an institutional practice, from innovation ecosystems to territorial engagement, from artificial intelligence to civilizational questions, and from expert reflection to civic dialogue around desirable futures.
Chapter 2 — From French Prospective to International Foresight
The title of this book uses the term foresight-driven university, notprospective university. This choice is not merely linguistic. It reflects a deeper issue: how can a French intellectual and practical tradition — la prospective — be translated into the international academic language of foresight without losing its philosophical, humanistic, and action-oriented depth?
This chapter clarifies the key terminology of the book. The experience analyzed here is rooted in the French tradition of prospective, but the book is written for an international audience. In English, the term foresight is more immediately understandable and more widely used in academic, organizational, and policy contexts. The expression strategic foresight is now common in management, futures studies, public policy, and higher education. By contrast, the wordprospective in English can be ambiguous, and may be understood simply as “potential” or “future,” as in “prospective student.”
The French word prospective carries a much richer meaning. It does not refer only to the future as an external object to be predicted. It refers to an attitude, a method, and a responsibility. French prospective emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a response to the limits of decision-making based only on the past. Gaston Berger, who played a central role in formalizing this tradition, argued that decision-makers needed to “see far,” “see wide,” and “analyze in depth” in order to act responsibly in a changing world. [michelsalo...ogspot.com]
Gaston Berger’s work is fundamental because he connected prospective thinking with a philosophical reflection on time, human action, and responsibility. His Phénoménologie du temps et prospective, published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1964, gathered texts on phenomenology, the human situation, time, and prospective. This explains why prospective, in the French sense, was never only a technical method. It was also a humanistic discipline concerned with freedom, intention, action, and the capacity to orient the future.[pythonhosted.org], [geeksforgeeks.org]
This humanistic origin matters for the present book. The question is not only how a university can anticipate future trends. The deeper question is how a university can help society exercise responsibility toward the future. In the French tradition, prospective does not reduce the future to prediction. It invites actors to think about the long term, to examine possible futures, to clarify desirable futures, and to transform present action accordingly.
This distinguishes foresight from prediction and forecasting. Prediction seeks to say what will happen. Forecasting often projects trends from available data. Planning organizes resources toward predefined objectives. Foresight, by contrast, explores uncertainty. It opens multiple futures, questions assumptions, identifies weak signals, builds scenarios, and supports collective decision-making under uncertainty. It is less about certainty than about lucidity, preparation, imagination, and responsibility.
In the French school, Michel Godet later developed prospective into a more operational and strategic discipline. His work on prospective stratégiqueconnected anticipation with strategy, scenarios, actors, and organizational action. His Manuel de prospective stratégique and later work with Philippe Durance helped formalize methods applicable to companies, territories, and institutions. This tradition is important for the book because the Université Catholique de Lille experience was not only conceptual. It was also institutional, territorial, and action-oriented. [michelsalo...ogspot.com],[michelsalo...ogspot.com]
At the same time, the international field of futures studies and foresightdeveloped its own vocabulary. Authors such as Bertrand de Jouvenel, Wendell Bell, Fred Polak, Peter Schwartz, Sohail Inayatullah, Andy Hines, and Peter Bishop contributed to the development of futures studies, scenario planning, strategic foresight, and methods for exploring alternative futures. These traditions are not identical to French prospective, but they share a common concern: how to use the future to better understand and transform the present.[releve.erudit.org], [shs.cairn.info]
The concept of futures literacy adds another important dimension. Futures literacy refers to the capacity to use the future as a resource for understanding the present, questioning assumptions, and expanding imagination. In the context of this book, futures literacy is particularly relevant because universities are not only research institutions. They are places of learning. A university that develops foresight capabilities also helps students, teachers, researchers, citizens, and partners become more capable of thinking with the future.
This is why the expression foresight-driven university is preferable toprospective university in English. The phrase prospective university would be too literal and potentially misleading. It might suggest a university for prospective students or a university that is merely future-oriented in a vague sense. Foresight-driven university, by contrast, indicates that foresight is an active guiding capability. It suggests that the university’s strategy, research, pedagogy, partnerships, civic engagement, and institutional transformation are shaped by the capacity to anticipate, explore, deliberate, and act.
The term driven is important. It does not mean that foresight mechanically determines the university. Rather, it means that foresight becomes a structuring energy within the institution. A foresight-driven university is not simply a university that studies the future. It is a university that uses foresight to organize learning, research, innovation, territorial engagement, civic dialogue, and responsible transformation.
This conceptual clarification also allows the book to preserve its French roots while addressing an international audience. In French, one could speak ofl’université prospective. This expression carries the philosophical and methodological depth of the French tradition. In English, however, the most accurate equivalent is the foresight-driven university. The two expressions are not literal translations. They are cultural and conceptual equivalents.
The ethical horizon of this translation is the idea of desirable futures. Foresight is not only about what may happen. It is also about what should be discussed, preferred, avoided, or built. In this book, desirable futures refer to futures that are debated collectively and evaluated in relation to human dignity, ecological responsibility, justice, knowledge, freedom, and the common good. This makes foresight not only a strategic capability, but also a civic and ethical practice.
This point is especially important for higher education. Universities are not neutral machines for producing skills. They are institutions that shape imagination, knowledge, professions, citizenship, and long-term responsibility. If universities develop foresight capabilities, they can help society move beyond short-term adaptation. They can become places where possible futures are explored, probable futures are critically assessed, and desirable futures are collectively debated.
The Université Catholique de Lille experience is therefore situated at the intersection of two traditions. On one side, it inherits the French tradition of prospective, with its emphasis on long-term responsibility, action, and humanistic reflection. On the other side, it enters the international language of foresight, futures studies, innovation ecosystems, artificial intelligence, and higher education transformation.
This bridge is central to the whole book. The concept of the foresight-driven university allows the experience to be understood beyond its French context. It makes the case intelligible for international readers without erasing its origins. It also opens a broader question: how can universities around the world develop foresight as a capability for navigating uncertainty, engaging with artificial intelligence, learning from innovation ecosystems, and contributing to desirable futures?
The chapter therefore establishes the conceptual bridge between French prospective and international foresight. It clarifies the vocabulary needed for the rest of the book. It explains why the title uses foresight-driven university. It shows that the aim is not only to describe an institutional experience, but to translate it into a conceptual framework that can speak to universities, researchers, practitioners, and civic actors internationally.
In the chapters that follow, this vocabulary will become practical. Foresight will appear not only as a concept, but as a set of institutional practices: the creation of IIPEI, the exploration of innovation ecosystems, Learning Expeditions, territorial engagement in the Hauts-de-France region, the response to artificial intelligence and crisis, the emergence of ECOPOSS, the development of IFRN, and the construction of a model of the foresight-driven university.
This chapter’s central argument is therefore clear: the future of universities cannot be understood only through the vocabulary of adaptation, innovation, or digital transformation. It also requires the language of foresight — a language capable of connecting anticipation, responsibility, imagination, and action.
Chapter 3 — Research Design: A Reflective Study
This chapter explains how this book produces knowledge. The Université Catholique de Lille experience is not approached here as a simple institutional chronology, nor as a personal recollection, nor as a detached external case. It is approached as a reflective study grounded in a situated university experience, enriched by participant-observation, research-action, documentary analysis, publications, public events, and audiovisual archives.
The methodological challenge of this book is clear: how can one produce rigorous knowledge from an experience in which the author was directly involved? This question is not secondary. It lies at the heart of the book. The author does not write as an external historian observing the Université Catholique de Lille from a distance. The author writes as a participant-observerand practitioner-scholar, directly engaged in the development of foresight, innovation ecosystems, ECOPOSS, audiovisual archives, and international foresight networks.
This position requires a specific form of methodological honesty. A participant-observer has access to intentions, decisions, tensions, conversations, events, uncertainties, and institutional dynamics that are often invisible from outside. But this proximity also creates risks: selective memory, interpretive bias, institutional loyalty, and the temptation to transform a complex experience into a success story. For this reason, the book does not claim neutral exteriority. It claims instead a form of situated reflexivity.
The aim is not to eliminate subjectivity, but to make the position of the observer explicit. The central methodological question is therefore not whether the author was involved, but how this involvement can be transformed into a disciplined form of inquiry. This book assumes that professional experience, when critically examined and documented, can become a source of knowledge. This is close to the tradition of the reflective practitioner, in which professional action becomes an object of learning, interpretation, and conceptualization.
The book is also informed by research-action. Research-action links knowledge and transformation. It does not separate analysis from intervention, or observation from learning. It starts from the idea that certain forms of knowledge emerge precisely through engagement with real situations, institutional experiments, collective processes, and practical problems. In this perspective, the Université Catholique de Lille experience is not only something to be described after the fact. It is a field in which knowledge was produced through action, dialogue, experimentation, failure, adaptation, and institutional learning.
This methodological orientation is particularly appropriate for a book on foresight. Foresight is itself action-oriented. It does not seek only to understand possible futures; it seeks to help actors prepare, deliberate, and transform. A purely external description would miss part of its nature. Foresight involves workshops, conversations, scenarios, expeditions, public events, institutional decisions, networks, and collective imagination. To study foresight in a university is therefore to study both ideas and practices, both concepts and situations, both discourse and action.
The book also draws upon the logic of the case study. A case study allows a complex phenomenon to be examined in its real-life context. It is particularly useful when the boundaries between the phenomenon and its context are not simple. In this book, foresight cannot be isolated from the university, the territory, the actors, the events, the videos, the publications, the institutional decisions, and the broader transformations of higher education. The case study method is therefore well suited to analyzing the emergence of foresight as an institutional capability. Case study research is widely used when the aim is to understand a real-world phenomenon in depth, with attention to context, complexity, and multiple sources of evidence. [pyqrcode.r...thedocs.io]
However, this is not only a case study in the conventional sense. It is a reflective case study. The reflective dimension is essential because the author’s position is not external to the case. The study therefore includes a double movement: first, the reconstruction of the experience; second, the interpretation of what this experience can teach. The objective is not to produce a universal law, but to identify transferable lessons for other universities.
The sources used in this book are multiple. They include institutional documents, publications, programs of events, conference materials, public debates, interviews, videos, web archives, personal notes, project documents, and collective memory. These materials are not all of the same nature. Some are formal and institutional. Others are performative, audiovisual, dialogical, or experiential. Together, they make it possible to reconstruct the evolution of a twelve-year university foresight journey.
A distinctive feature of this book is the role given to audiovisual archives. Videos are not treated as illustrations added to a written narrative. They are treated as primary sources. They preserve voices, gestures, contexts, concepts in formation, debates, atmospheres, and moments of collective intelligence. In many cases, the videos document not only what was said, but how ideas emerged, circulated, and were collectively shaped.
This matters because the experience studied here was not produced only through books or reports. It was produced through conferences, interviews, Learning Expeditions, public events, webinars, festivals, dialogues, and international conversations. The audiovisual archive is therefore part of the intellectual material of the case. It allows the book to connect written knowledge with living memory.
The use of videos also raises methodological questions. How should audiovisual material be interpreted? How can one distinguish between documentation, communication, memory, and evidence? How can videos be indexed, compared, and related to concepts, people, places, and events? These questions justify the creation of a specific appendix devoted to audiovisual archives, as well as an evidence matrix linking chapters, sources, events, videos, and analytical findings.
The book also uses publications as sources. The works produced during the experience — on innovation ecosystems, futures, foresight in action, and related topics — are treated both as outputs of the process and as traces of conceptual development. They show how ideas moved from events and conversations toward formalization, publication, and transmission. This is important because the book studies not only the events themselves, but the progressive construction of a body of knowledge.
The methodological approach therefore relies on triangulation. No single source is sufficient. Institutional documents must be read alongside videos. Publications must be related to events. Personal experience must be confronted with public records. Concepts must be tested against practices. This triangulation helps reduce the risks associated with participant-observation and strengthens the credibility of the interpretation.
The question of bias remains central. Because the author was involved in the experience, the book must avoid two symmetrical risks. The first risk is self-celebration: presenting the experience as a coherent success without tensions or limitations. The second risk is false neutrality: pretending that the author’s involvement did not shape the interpretation. The chosen path is reflexivity. The book acknowledges its situated perspective while seeking to make its sources, methods, limits, and interpretations explicit.
This is why the book includes a chapter on limits, tensions, and unfinished questions. A rigorous reflective study should not present the Université Catholique de Lille experience as a perfect model. It should analyze what worked, what remained fragile, what depended on institutional conditions, what depended on key actors, what was transferable, and what may not be easily reproduced elsewhere.
The concept of transferability is more appropriate here than abstract generalization. The book does not claim that every university should reproduce the same initiatives. The Université Catholique de Lille experience is situated in a specific institution, territory, culture, history, and set of opportunities. Other universities have different missions, resources, constraints, and ecosystems. The goal is therefore not to propose a formula, but to identify capabilities that can be adapted.
The central transferable idea is that a university can develop foresight as a transversal capability. This capability may take different forms depending on the institution. In one context, it may begin with a foresight institute. In another, it may emerge through a public festival, a digital archive, an innovation ecosystem strategy, an AI initiative, a territorial project, or an international network. What matters is not the replication of the same structures, but the development of capacities to anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize, and transform.
This methodological chapter therefore prepares the reader for the rest of the book. It explains why the book is written as a reflective study, why the author’s position is made explicit, why research-action is central, why videos and archives matter, and why transferability is more important than generalization.
It also clarifies the status of the Université Catholique de Lille experience. The experience is not treated as anecdotal evidence. It is treated as a structured field of inquiry. It offers a way to analyze how foresight can become institutional, territorial, civic, international, and educational. It allows the book to move from lived experience to academic interpretation, and from academic interpretation to transferable lessons.
The chapters that follow will apply this methodological framework. Chapter 4 will examine the creation of IIPEI as the birth of a foresight laboratory. Chapter 5 will analyze Learning Expeditions as field-based foresight. Chapter 6 will study territorial foresight in the Hauts-de-France region. Later chapters will examine artificial intelligence, crisis, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, civic foresight, IFRN, and the model of the foresight-driven university.
The methodological claim of this book can be summarized simply: a situated university experience, when critically documented, reflexively interpreted, and connected to broader academic debates, can become a source of transferable knowledge for higher education.
Part II — The Université Catholique de Lille Experience
The second part of this book enters the empirical heart of the study: the Université Catholique de Lille experience. After establishing the conceptual and methodological foundations of the book, the following chapters examine how foresight began to take institutional form within a university context.
The purpose of this part is not to present a chronological institutional history in a descriptive way. It is to analyze how a university progressively developed foresight as a capability through concrete initiatives, experimental structures, international exploration, territorial engagement, and collective learning.
The starting point is the creation of IIPEI, the International Institute for Foresight on Innovation Ecosystems. IIPEI played the role of a first foresight laboratory. It provided a space where the university could explore the relation between innovation, territory, companies, research, and long-term transformation. Through IIPEI, foresight became more than an intellectual interest. It began to take an institutional form.
This first step was important because foresight needs places, actors, methods, and legitimacy. A university cannot become foresight-driven only by declaring an intention. It must create conditions in which anticipation can be practiced, shared, documented, and connected to real institutional and territorial questions. IIPEI made this possible by introducing innovation ecosystems as a central object of research and action.
Innovation ecosystems became a key lens through which the university could understand emerging futures. Instead of considering innovation as the result of isolated inventions or individual entrepreneurs, the ecosystem approach made it possible to observe the role of universities, firms, public authorities, investors, researchers, cultural environments, talents, and territories. Innovation appeared as a systemic and relational phenomenon.
The second movement of this part concerns Learning Expeditions. These expeditions are analyzed as a method of field-based foresight. They made it possible to observe futures already in motion in international innovation ecosystems such as Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Copenhagen, Munich, Taipei, Lausanne, and other places. The goal was not to imitate these ecosystems, but to understand what conditions made them creative, adaptive, and generative.
Learning from global innovation ecosystems requires discernment. A university cannot simply import Silicon Valley, or any other model, into its own territory. Each ecosystem has its own history, institutions, culture, networks, forms of trust, and modes of governance. The value of Learning Expeditions lies therefore not in copying, but in comparison, interpretation, and reflective learning.
This global exploration then returns to the regional level. The Université Catholique de Lille experience is not only international. It is deeply territorial. The Hauts-de-France region becomes a field through which foresight is connected to concrete questions of regional transformation, health innovation, industry, openlabs, middleground dynamics, education, and institutional cooperation.
This return to the territory is essential. Foresight becomes meaningful when it is connected to real places, real actors, and real responsibilities. The university is not outside its territory. It participates in its transformation. It can connect research, companies, public institutions, students, citizens, and social actors around shared questions of future development.
The Hauts-de-France experience shows that foresight is not only a strategic or intellectual activity. It is also a territorial responsibility. It asks how a university can contribute to the future of its region, how it can help identify emerging opportunities, how it can support innovation ecosystems, and how it can serve as a platform for dialogue between actors who do not always meet naturally.
Part II therefore presents three stages in the emergence of foresight within the Université Catholique de Lille experience.
Chapter 4, IIPEI and the Birth of a Foresight Laboratory, examines the creation of the first institutional structure dedicated to foresight and innovation ecosystems.
Chapter 5, Learning from Innovation Ecosystems, analyzes the Learning Expeditions as a method for observing, comparing, and learning from global ecosystems of innovation.
Chapter 6, Territorial Foresight and the Hauts-de-France Region, studies how foresight becomes anchored in a regional context and how the university can act as a partner in territorial transformation.
Together, these three chapters show how foresight moves from concept to practice. They demonstrate that a foresight-driven university is not built in abstraction. It emerges through laboratories, encounters, journeys, territories, publications, videos, partnerships, and institutional learning.
This part also prepares the transition toward the broader questions addressed in Part III. Once the university has learned from innovation ecosystems and territorial engagement, the inquiry must expand toward civilizational futures. Artificial intelligence, crisis, resilience, civic foresight, and desirable futures will then become central. The movement of the book is therefore progressive: from institutional emergence, to ecosystem learning, to territorial responsibility, and finally to civilizational and civic transformation.
Chapter 4 — IIPEI and the Birth of a Foresight Laboratory
The creation of IIPEI — the International Institute for Foresight on Innovation Ecosystems — marks the starting point of the experience examined in this book. It is the moment when foresight began to take institutional form at the Université Catholique de Lille. Before IIPEI, foresight could be understood as an intellectual orientation, a strategic intuition, or a field of inquiry. With IIPEI, it became a concrete structure, a place of dialogue, a research-action platform, and the first step toward what this book calls a foresight-driven university.
The central question of this chapter is simple: how does a university begin to institutionalize foresight without reducing it to bureaucracy? This question is important because foresight cannot remain only an idea. If foresight is to transform an institution, it needs recognizable spaces, actors, programs, events, documents, archives, and methods. At the same time, foresight must remain open, exploratory, interdisciplinary, and connected to uncertainty. The challenge is therefore to create an institutional anchor without freezing the spirit of exploration.
IIPEI emerged from the conviction that universities have a specific role to play in understanding and shaping innovation ecosystems. Innovation was no longer understood only as a technological process, a corporate function, or the result of isolated invention. It increasingly appeared as an ecosystemic phenomenon involving universities, companies, entrepreneurs, investors, public authorities, territories, cultures, talents, infrastructures, and imaginaries. Contemporary research on innovation ecosystems defines them as evolving sets of actors, activities, artifacts, institutions, and relations that influence innovative performance. [michelsalo...ogspot.com]
This ecosystemic understanding of innovation was crucial for the Université Catholique de Lille. It made it possible to connect research, companies, territories, and institutional strategy. The university was no longer positioned only as a place of teaching and research. It could become a node in wider networks of innovation, learning, experimentation, and territorial transformation. IIPEI therefore opened a new question: how can a university observe, understand, and activate innovation ecosystems in order to anticipate emerging futures?
The term foresight laboratory is useful here. IIPEI was not a laboratory in the narrow sense of a technical or experimental facility. It was a laboratory in the broader sense: a place where actors could formulate questions, test hypotheses, organize encounters, compare ecosystems, document practices, and transform experience into knowledge. It was a laboratory of anticipation, dialogue, and institutional learning.
One of the distinctive features of IIPEI was its connection to research-action. The purpose was not only to study innovation ecosystems from a distance. It was to engage with them, visit them, compare them, organize events, produce publications, generate videos, and create learning situations. Knowledge was produced through action, and action was enriched by reflection. This is why IIPEI can be understood as the first methodological foundation of the broader experience.
IIPEI also made foresight institutionally visible. This visibility matters. In many universities, future-oriented reflection remains fragmented. It may exist in research groups, strategy documents, innovation centers, or occasional conferences. But it does not always become a recognized institutional capability. IIPEI gave foresight a name, a structure, a field of inquiry, and a public presence. It allowed the university to say: foresight is not peripheral; it is part of how the institution understands its role in society.
Leadership played an important role in this emergence. A foresight laboratory requires institutional trust, intellectual freedom, and the capacity to connect different worlds. It must bring together scholars, managers, entrepreneurs, public actors, students, artists, and territorial partners. It cannot be built only as an internal administrative unit. It must function as an interface between the university and its ecosystems.
Networks were another decisive element. IIPEI did not develop in isolation. It was connected to companies, territories, international innovation ecosystems, researchers, public institutions, and later to initiatives such as Learning Expeditions, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, and IFRN. This networked dimension is essential because foresight depends on the capacity to perceive weak signals and emerging transformations across institutional boundaries.
Publications were also important. They helped transform events, intuitions, discussions, and observations into transmissible knowledge. Without publication, an institutional experience can remain ephemeral. With publication, it becomes part of a shared corpus. In this sense, IIPEI was not only an organizer of activities. It contributed to the gradual formalization of knowledge on innovation ecosystems, foresight, and transformation.
Events played a similar role. Conferences, seminars, dialogues, and public moments allowed ideas to circulate. They also created communities of attention. A foresight laboratory does not only produce reports; it creates situations in which people can think together about emerging futures. These situations are themselves part of the method. They help transform foresight from an expert practice into a collective learning process.
The openness of IIPEI was therefore essential. A foresight laboratory must remain open to multiple actors because the future cannot be understood from a single disciplinary, institutional, or professional perspective. Innovation ecosystems are complex precisely because they involve diverse forms of knowledge, power, imagination, and agency. Universities, companies, public institutions, citizens, and territories all perceive different aspects of emerging futures.
This openness also prevented foresight from becoming purely technocratic. A foresight laboratory should not be reduced to trend analysis, strategic planning, or prediction. Its task is broader: to help actors explore possible futures, question assumptions, identify tensions, imagine alternatives, and decide more responsibly. In the case of IIPEI, the ecosystem approach helped preserve this openness because ecosystems are living, relational, and evolving systems.
The creation of IIPEI can therefore be interpreted as the first step toward the foresight-driven university. It did not yet define the complete model. But it established several of its future capabilities.
First, it developed the capacity to anticipate by placing future-oriented inquiry at the heart of university reflection.
Second, it developed the capacity to explore by opening the university to external innovation ecosystems.
Third, it developed the capacity to connect by linking research, companies, territories, and institutional strategy.
Fourth, it developed the capacity to experiment through research-action formats, events, and field-based learning.
Fifth, it began to develop the capacity to document through publications, videos, and archives.
These capabilities would later be expanded through Learning Expeditions, territorial foresight, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, IFRN, and the broader model of the foresight-driven university. But IIPEI provided the initial institutional seed.
The chapter also highlights a tension that runs throughout the book: foresight needs institutional anchoring, but it must not become bureaucratic. If foresight remains informal, it may disappear when people change roles or when institutional priorities shift. But if it becomes too formalized, it may lose its exploratory and creative power. The challenge is to create structures that support foresight without enclosing it.
This tension is especially important for universities. Universities are complex institutions with traditions, hierarchies, disciplines, procedures, and long histories. Introducing foresight into such an institution requires patience, legitimacy, political intelligence, and conceptual clarity. It also requires the ability to move between academic language, institutional strategy, public engagement, and practical experimentation.
IIPEI showed that a university could begin this process by choosing an object that was both academically relevant and strategically useful: innovation ecosystems. This object made it possible to connect theory and practice, local and global, research and action, university and territory. It opened the way for Learning Expeditions, international comparison, and regional engagement.
In this sense, IIPEI was not only a program. It was a formative moment. It helped the university learn how to think with the future. It created a first institutional space where foresight could become visible, discussable, and actionable. It showed that foresight could be linked to innovation without being reduced to technological acceleration. It also showed that innovation could be understood through ecosystems rather than through isolated projects.
The broader lesson is that a foresight-driven university does not appear suddenly. It is built progressively through experiments, structures, partnerships, concepts, archives, and communities. IIPEI was one of these foundational experiments. It made it possible to move from the idea of foresight to the practice of foresight within a university.
The chapter therefore concludes with a central proposition: foresight needs institutional anchoring without becoming bureaucratic. For a university, this means creating structures capable of supporting anticipation, exploration, and dialogue while remaining open to uncertainty, creativity, and external actors. IIPEI was the first such structure in the Université Catholique de Lille experience.
In the next chapter, the focus moves from the institutional birth of IIPEI to the method of Learning Expeditions. If IIPEI created the first foresight laboratory, Learning Expeditions expanded that laboratory into the world. They allowed the university to learn from innovation ecosystems not as abstract concepts, but as living environments where futures were already taking shape.
Chapter 5 — Learning from Innovation Ecosystems
The creation of IIPEI gave foresight an institutional anchor within the Université Catholique de Lille. But foresight cannot remain enclosed within an institution. If a university wants to understand emerging futures, it must leave its own walls, encounter other ecosystems, observe different cultures of innovation, and learn from places where new forms of technology, organization, entrepreneurship, knowledge, and social imagination are already taking shape.
This chapter analyzes Learning Expeditions as a method of field-based foresight. A Learning Expedition is not a study trip in the ordinary sense. It is not simply a visit to successful companies, laboratories, campuses, or innovation districts. It is a structured method of learning from ecosystems in context. It allows participants to observe how actors interact, how knowledge circulates, how trust is built, how institutions cooperate, how talent is attracted, how capital is mobilized, and how cultural assumptions shape innovation.
The central question of this chapter is therefore: how can universities learn from global innovation ecosystems without simply trying to copy them?
This question is essential because innovation ecosystems are often surrounded by mythology. Silicon Valley, for example, is frequently presented as the global model of innovation. It is associated with entrepreneurship, venture capital, digital platforms, universities, technological disruption, start-up culture, and a particular relationship to risk. Palo Alto, Stanford, Google, and Singularity University became key points of reference in many international conversations on innovation. Yet the danger is to confuse observation with imitation.
An innovation ecosystem cannot be reduced to a list of best practices. It is a living configuration of actors, institutions, infrastructures, cultural norms, capital flows, talent pools, narratives, and historical conditions. Contemporary research defines innovation ecosystems as evolving sets of actors, activities, artifacts, institutions, and relations that shape innovative performance. This definition is useful because it reminds us that ecosystems are relational, dynamic, and context-dependent. [michelsalo...ogspot.com]
Learning from Silicon Valley does not mean importing Silicon Valley. It means asking what makes such an ecosystem generative, and what cannot be transferred elsewhere. What role do universities play? How do entrepreneurs relate to investors? How is failure understood? How do large firms interact with start-ups? How are talent, research, capital, infrastructure, and culture combined? What is visible, and what remains hidden? What is admirable, and what should be questioned?
The Learning Expeditions associated with the Université Catholique de Lille experience were designed precisely to cultivate this kind of discernment. They allowed participants to observe innovation ecosystems not as abstract concepts, but as situated realities. In places such as Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, the future was not approached as a distant projection. It was encountered through laboratories, companies, campuses, conversations, incubators, public spaces, technological imaginaries, and entrepreneurial narratives.
This is why Learning Expeditions can be understood as a form of foresight. They reveal futures already in motion. They help participants identify weak signals, emerging practices, new organizational forms, technological shifts, and cultural changes. They also make visible the distance between discourse and reality. An ecosystem is never only what it says about itself. It must be observed in its contradictions, inequalities, infrastructures, limits, and tensions.
The chapter also extends beyond Silicon Valley. Other ecosystems — Copenhagen, Munich, Taipei, Lausanne, and others — offer different lessons. Copenhagen may invite reflection on design, sustainability, urban innovation, and civic culture. Munich may highlight relations between industry, engineering, applied research, and technological excellence. Taipei may open perspectives on digital industry, manufacturing, Asian innovation cultures, and technological sovereignty. Lausanne may illustrate another form of relation between research, education, science, quality of life, and institutional density.
These ecosystems do not tell the same story. Their diversity is precisely what makes them valuable. If Silicon Valley suggests one model of entrepreneurial acceleration, European and Asian ecosystems reveal other combinations of industry, public policy, education, design, infrastructure, and long-term institutional coordination. The aim of field-based foresight is not to rank ecosystems, but to understand what each one reveals about possible futures of innovation, education, work, technology, and society.
This approach differs from what might be called innovation tourism. Innovation tourism consists in visiting impressive places, collecting inspiring anecdotes, and returning home with slogans. Ecosystem learning is different. It requires preparation, questioning, observation, comparison, documentation, interpretation, and critical reflection. It asks participants to distinguish what is contextual from what is transferable.
For a university, this distinction is crucial. A university cannot simply copy the cultural codes, financial systems, or institutional arrangements of another place. But it can learn from the way an ecosystem creates density, trust, openness, experimentation, and circulation of knowledge. It can ask how its own territory might develop stronger connections between research, companies, students, public institutions, investors, citizens, and cultural actors.
Learning from innovation ecosystems therefore becomes a form of strategic intelligence. It helps universities understand the environments in which knowledge is transformed into action. It shows that innovation is not produced by universities alone, nor by companies alone, nor by public authorities alone. It emerges from the quality of relations among actors. The MIT Sloan description of innovation ecosystems emphasizes this interdependence among research institutions, entrepreneurs, corporations, investors, and governments within geographically anchored communities. [capgeris.com]
This relational understanding has important implications for higher education. If universities wish to contribute to innovation ecosystems, they must rethink their own role. They are not only providers of degrees or producers of research. They can become connectors, interpreters, conveners, experimenters, and long-term guardians of knowledge. They can help ecosystems avoid purely short-term technological acceleration by introducing ethical, educational, territorial, and civic dimensions.
In this sense, Learning Expeditions also transform the participants. They are not only about gathering information. They are about changing perception. Participants learn to see ecosystems as living systems. They begin to notice patterns: the role of informal networks, the importance of places where people meet, the circulation of stories, the presence of trust, the power of symbolic institutions, the relationship between talent and opportunity, and the ways in which culture shapes risk-taking.
This is why field observation is essential. Reports and statistics can describe an ecosystem, but they cannot fully capture its atmosphere, rhythm, density, and relational texture. A Learning Expedition allows participants to experience the ecosystem directly: to walk through places, listen to actors, compare narratives, observe spatial configurations, and sense the difference between institutional discourse and lived practice.
The chapter therefore treats Learning Expeditions as a method of embodied and situated foresight. The future is not only read in data. It is also perceived in places, conversations, tools, laboratories, institutional arrangements, and emerging behaviors. This does not mean that field experience replaces analysis. Rather, it enriches analysis by grounding it in concrete situations.
The limits of transferability remain central. What works in Silicon Valley may depend on decades of entrepreneurial culture, venture capital, military and technological history, immigration, Stanford’s role, legal frameworks, and tolerance for failure. What works in Munich may depend on industrial traditions, engineering excellence, regional policy, and relations between firms and universities. What works in Copenhagen may depend on design cultures, urban planning, sustainability values, and civic institutions. Each ecosystem must be interpreted in relation to its own history.
This is why the question is not: “How can we become Silicon Valley?” The better question is: what can our university and our territory learn from observing Silicon Valley and other ecosystems, while remaining faithful to our own context, values, and responsibilities?
For the Université Catholique de Lille, Learning Expeditions helped expand the horizon of the university. They connected the local institution to global transformations. They showed that the university could learn from the world while returning to its own territory with new questions. This movement — from local to global and back to local — is a key feature of the foresight-driven university.
The chapter also shows that innovation ecosystems are not only economic systems. They are educational environments. They teach universities how futures emerge through interactions among actors. They demonstrate that learning does not happen only in classrooms. It happens in laboratories, start-ups, city districts, networks, digital platforms, public institutions, and international encounters. A university that learns from ecosystems becomes more porous, more relational, and more capable of anticipating change.
The Learning Expeditions therefore contributed to several capabilities of the foresight-driven university.
They strengthened the capacity to explore by exposing the university to diverse global ecosystems.
They strengthened the capacity to connect by linking university actors with entrepreneurs, researchers, public leaders, and international partners.
They strengthened the capacity to interpret by requiring participants to distinguish between models to copy and lessons to adapt.
They strengthened the capacity to document by generating videos, notes, publications, and shared memories.
They strengthened the capacity to transform by bringing back insights that could influence institutional strategy, territorial engagement, and future initiatives.
Learning Expeditions also prepared the transition toward territorial foresight. Once the university had observed global innovation ecosystems, the next question became unavoidable: what about its own territory? What about Lille, the Métropole Européenne de Lille, the Hauts-de-France region, Eurasanté, openlabs, industry, health innovation, and regional transformation? Could the local territory itself be understood as an innovation ecosystem? Could the university become an active contributor to that ecosystem?
This is the question addressed in the next chapter. The movement from global Learning Expeditions to territorial foresight is essential. It prevents international exploration from becoming detached from local responsibility. It shows that the value of learning from the world is not to escape one’s territory, but to return to it with deeper intelligence, broader comparisons, and renewed responsibility.
The main argument of this chapter can therefore be summarized as follows:universities can learn from innovation ecosystems without imitating them when they treat them as fields of foresight rather than as models for replication. Learning Expeditions are valuable not because they provide ready-made solutions, but because they develop the university’s capacity to observe, compare, interpret, and act.
In the experience of the Université Catholique de Lille, this method helped transform foresight from an internal institutional practice into a global learning process. It opened the university to futures already emerging elsewhere. It also made clear that the ultimate purpose of such learning is not fascination with distant ecosystems, but the development of situated capabilities for transformation at home.
Chapter 6 — Territorial Foresight and the Hauts-de-France Region
After the exploration of global innovation ecosystems, the movement of the book returns to the territory. This return is essential. A university cannot become foresight-driven only by looking outward, however valuable international comparison may be. It must also ask what foresight means for its own region, its own communities, its own economic actors, its own students, and its own public responsibilities.
The central question of this chapter is therefore: how can a university connect global learning with local and regional transformation?
The Université Catholique de Lille experience shows that foresight becomes meaningful when it is connected to a territory. Global exploration through Learning Expeditions provides inspiration, comparison, and strategic intelligence. But these insights must eventually be translated into local responsibility. The question is not only what can be learned from Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Taipei, Lausanne, Copenhagen, or Munich. The question is also what these learnings make visible in Lille, in the Métropole Européenne de Lille, and in the Hauts-de-France region.
The Hauts-de-France region appears here as a living laboratory for territorial foresight. It is not simply a geographical context surrounding the university. It is an ecosystem of actors, histories, industries, institutions, vulnerabilities, capacities, and possible futures. Its transformations concern education, health, industry, employment, social cohesion, ecological transition, digital transformation, entrepreneurship, and regional attractiveness.
Territorial foresight begins from the idea that the future is not abstract. The future happens somewhere. It takes shape in places, infrastructures, economic systems, campuses, hospitals, laboratories, cultural institutions, companies, neighborhoods, and public policies. A territory is not only a background. It is a field of anticipation and action.
This chapter therefore studies the Hauts-de-France region as a space where foresight becomes concrete. The university’s role is no longer limited to observing global trends. It becomes a partner in regional transformation. It can help connect research, economic actors, public institutions, innovation platforms, students, entrepreneurs, and citizens around shared questions of future development.
One of the important elements of this territorial approach is the role ofopenlabs. Openlabs can be understood as spaces of experimentation, prototyping, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary learning. They help bridge the distance between research, innovation, education, companies, and society. They are not only technical spaces. They are relational spaces where different actors can meet around problems, possibilities, and emerging futures.
The chapter also gives attention to middleground dynamics. Between formal institutions and informal communities, between top-down strategy and bottom-up initiatives, the middleground plays a crucial role in innovation ecosystems. It is where translators, connectors, entrepreneurs, researchers, students, designers, and local actors create bridges. For territorial foresight, this middleground is essential because it allows futures thinking to circulate beyond official structures.
Incubation and entrepreneurship also play a role in this regional ecology. They show how ideas can move from research and imagination toward projects, organizations, and economic activity. But incubation is not only about start-ups. In a foresight-driven perspective, it is also about incubating social, educational, territorial, ecological, and civic innovations.
Health innovation offers another important entry point into the Hauts-de-France experience. Ecosystems such as Eurasanté illustrate how a region can organize cooperation around health, nutrition, research, entrepreneurship, public policy, and economic development. Health is not only a sector. It is a major field in which technological, social, ethical, demographic, and territorial futures intersect.
Industry is equally important. The Hauts-de-France region carries strong industrial histories and faces major transformations linked to digitalization, automation, ecological transition, energy, logistics, manufacturing, and labour-market change. Territorial foresight helps interpret these transformations not merely as economic adjustments, but as questions of regional future, skills, identity, resilience, and social cohesion.
The university can contribute to this process by serving as a connector. It can bring together actors who do not always speak the same language: researchers, companies, public authorities, students, civic organizations, cultural actors, and citizens. It can help create spaces where long-term questions become discussable. It can also help transform data, experience, and institutional knowledge into shared intelligence.
This connecting role changes the meaning of the university. The university is not only an educational provider delivering degrees. It is not only a research institution producing knowledge. It can also become a territorial actor: a place where the future of the region is studied, debated, imagined, and supported through concrete initiatives.
This does not mean that the university replaces public authorities, companies, or civic organizations. Rather, it offers a specific contribution: long-term thinking, research capacity, educational mission, ethical reflection, interdisciplinary dialogue, and the ability to convene diverse actors. These qualities make universities particularly well suited to territorial foresight.
The relation between global learning and local responsibility is one of the key tensions of this chapter. Learning Expeditions open the university to the world. Territorial foresight brings the university back to its own environment. The two movements are complementary. Without global learning, the university risks provincialism. Without territorial responsibility, global learning risks becoming detached, abstract, or merely aspirational.
The Hauts-de-France experience therefore raises a decisive question: how can international foresight strengthen regional transformation rather than distract from it?
One possible answer is that global ecosystems provide mirrors. They help a region see itself differently. By observing Silicon Valley, Munich, Copenhagen, Taipei, or Lausanne, actors in Hauts-de-France can better understand their own strengths, weaknesses, cultural patterns, institutional assets, and possible futures. International comparison becomes useful when it helps a territory interpret itself more intelligently.
This is where proximity becomes important. A territory is made of relations. Proximity allows trust to develop. Trust allows experimentation. Experimentation allows learning. Learning allows transformation. Territorial foresight depends on this chain. It cannot be reduced to strategic documents or external benchmarking. It requires repeated encounters, shared projects, mutual recognition, and the slow construction of collective intelligence.
Shared experimentation is therefore central. A university contributes to territorial foresight when it creates situations in which actors can test ideas together. These may take the form of openlabs, workshops, seminars, research-action projects, student initiatives, public events, entrepreneurial programs, health innovation projects, or civic dialogues. In each case, the aim is not only to think about the future, but to learn how to act toward it.
The university’s territorial role also has a pedagogical dimension. Students are not only future professionals. They are future citizens, researchers, entrepreneurs, designers, caregivers, engineers, teachers, decision-makers, and community members. When students engage with their territory, they learn that knowledge is situated. They learn that innovation affects real people and places. They learn that the future is not only global and technological, but also local, social, ecological, and human.
This chapter also shows that territorial foresight can help reconnect innovation and responsibility. Innovation ecosystems are sometimes described mainly in terms of growth, competitiveness, start-ups, patents, investment, or scale. Territorial foresight adds other questions: Who benefits from innovation? What kind of regional future is being built? How are social inequalities addressed? How are ecological transitions integrated? How are citizens included? How are long-term human needs taken into account?
In this sense, the territory transforms foresight into concrete institutional engagement. It prevents foresight from remaining abstract. It requires the university to ask how its research, teaching, partnerships, events, and networks contribute to the future of the place where it is rooted.
The Hauts-de-France region is therefore not only one chapter in the story of the Université Catholique de Lille. It is a test of the foresight-driven university. A university cannot claim to be foresight-driven if it does not engage with the futures of its own territory. The territory is where anticipation becomes responsibility.
This chapter contributes to the model of the foresight-driven university in several ways.
It strengthens the capability to connect, by linking university, companies, public institutions, researchers, students, and citizens.
It strengthens the capability to experiment, by showing the role of openlabs, incubation, health innovation, and shared projects.
It strengthens the capability to engage, by situating foresight in the life of a region.
It strengthens the capability to transform, by connecting long-term thinking with concrete territorial change.
It also prepares the transition to the next part of the book. Once foresight is connected to innovation ecosystems and territorial transformation, the inquiry must expand toward broader civilizational questions. Artificial intelligence, Big Data, transhumanism, digital humanism, crisis, resilience, and desirable futures will require the university to think beyond regional innovation alone.
The main argument of this chapter can therefore be summarized as follows:territorial foresight gives concrete responsibility to the foresight-driven university. It shows that foresight is not only about anticipating global trends. It is about serving places, people, and ecosystems.
The Hauts-de-France experience demonstrates that universities can become actors of territorial transformation when they connect knowledge, innovation, trust, proximity, experimentation, and long-term responsibility. In doing so, they help their regions not only adapt to change, but imagine and build desirable futures.
Part III — From Innovation to Desirable Futures
The third part of this book expands the focus from innovation ecosystems to broader questions of civilizational transformation. The previous part showed how the Université Catholique de Lille experience developed foresight through IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, and territorial engagement in the Hauts-de-France region. This part asks a deeper question: what happens when innovation is no longer only technological, economic, or territorial, but becomes civilizational?
Innovation ecosystems made it possible to understand how new ideas, technologies, organizations, and forms of cooperation emerge. Yet the transformations facing universities today go beyond innovation in the narrow sense. Artificial intelligence, Big Data, transhumanism, digital humanism, health technologies, ecological crises, geopolitical instability, and educational transformation all raise questions about the future of human beings, institutions, knowledge, and society.
Artificial intelligence occupies a central place in this part of the book. It is not treated only as a tool for teaching, research, administration, or productivity. It is approached as a major disruption in the organization of knowledge, learning, creativity, work, expertise, and responsibility. AI changes the conditions under which universities operate. It affects what students must learn, how teachers teach, how researchers work, how institutions govern, and how societies imagine their futures.
This is why the book moves from innovation ecosystems to what may be calledcivilizational futures. When artificial intelligence transforms knowledge, when Big Data transforms decision-making, when transhumanism questions the limits of the human, and when digital systems reshape social life, innovation becomes more than a matter of competitiveness or technological progress. It becomes a question of civilization.
The role of universities is therefore transformed. Universities cannot remain passive observers of technological acceleration. Nor can they simply adopt new tools without critical reflection. They must become places of discernment. They must help students, researchers, citizens, institutions, and territories ask what should be developed, what should be governed, what should be resisted, and what should be oriented toward desirable futures.
This part also analyzes crisis as a test of foresight capabilities. The Covid-19 crisis revealed how fragile, interconnected, and uncertain contemporary societies had become. It made visible the importance of anticipation, resilience, digital cooperation, collective intelligence, and institutional adaptability. For the Université Catholique de Lille experience, the crisis did not interrupt foresight; it transformed its forms.
The emergence of EcosystemsInMotion illustrates this transformation. What had previously been explored through physical Learning Expeditions became, under crisis conditions, a distributed digital conversation. Webinars, online dialogues, audiovisual archives, and international exchanges allowed the university to continue exploring ecosystems in motion across America, Asia, and Europe. The crisis accelerated the passage from field exploration to digital research-action.
This shift is important because it shows that foresight is not dependent on a single format. It can take the form of travel, seminars, conferences, videos, web dialogues, festivals, publications, or networks. What matters is the capacity to maintain inquiry, dialogue, and learning under changing conditions. Crisis can reveal the fragility of institutions, but it can also accelerate new forms of collective intelligence.
The third movement of this part is the civic and cultural opening of foresight through ECOPOSS. After IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, territorial foresight, and EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS marks a decisive transformation: futures thinking becomes public, cultural, artistic, democratic, and experiential. The future is no longer only discussed by experts, researchers, policy makers, or innovation actors. It becomes a shared space of imagination and debate.
ECOPOSS shows that desirable futures require more than analysis. They require public imagination. They require spaces where citizens, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, institutions, and decision-makers can meet, question, imagine, and experience possible futures together. A festival of futures can become more than an event. It can become a civic research-action device.
This part therefore explores the transition from innovation to desirable futures through three major moments.
Chapter 7, Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, and Civilizational Futures, examines how AI and related technological transformations reshape the mission of universities and raise fundamental questions about knowledge, humanity, education, and responsibility.
Chapter 8, Crisis, Resilience, and EcosystemsInMotion, analyzes how the Covid-19 crisis tested and transformed foresight practices through digital dialogue, distributed intelligence, and online research-action.
Chapter 9, ECOPOSS and Civic Foresight, presents the civic and cultural opening of foresight, showing how futures can become public, debatable, artistic, democratic, and experiential.
Together, these chapters show that foresight cannot remain confined to strategy, innovation, or institutional planning. It must also address the ethical, civic, cultural, and civilizational dimensions of transformation. A foresight-driven university must be able to connect technological intelligence with human discernment, crisis response with resilience, and expert analysis with public imagination.
The central argument of this part is that desirable futures require both intelligence and imagination. Intelligence is needed to understand complexity, technological change, systemic uncertainty, and institutional transformation. Imagination is needed to open alternatives, involve citizens, question dominant narratives, and give form to futures that are not only possible, but worth pursuing.
In this sense, the movement from innovation ecosystems to desirable futures is not a break with the earlier chapters. It is their deepening. Innovation ecosystems showed where futures begin to emerge. Artificial intelligence reveals how deeply those futures may transform knowledge and society. Crisis shows how fragile and adaptive institutions must become. ECOPOSS shows that futures must ultimately become shared, discussed, and collectively imagined.
Part III therefore prepares the final part of the book. After exploring innovation ecosystems, territorial foresight, artificial intelligence, crisis, and civic engagement, the book will be ready to synthesize the experience into a model: the foresight-driven university. This model will not be defined only by its capacity to innovate, but by its capacity to anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize, and transform in the service of desirable futures.
Chapter 7 — Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, and Civilizational Futures
Artificial intelligence occupies a central place in this book because it has become one of the defining transformations of higher education and of contemporary civilization. It is not merely a new technological tool among others. It changes the conditions under which knowledge is produced, transmitted, assessed, shared, and transformed into action. Since the public emergence of generative AI at scale, universities have been confronted with questions that affect teaching, research, evaluation, academic integrity, creativity, governance, and the very meaning of expertise. UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI in education and research emphasizes the need for a human-centred approach, ethical validation, data privacy, pedagogical design, and long-term policy frameworks. [pythonhosted.org]
This chapter therefore asks a central question: how does artificial intelligence transform the mission of universities?
The answer cannot be reduced to whether universities should use AI tools in teaching, research, or administration. The deeper issue is that AI modifies the environment in which universities operate. It affects the ways students learn, teachers teach, researchers produce knowledge, institutions govern themselves, and societies define intelligence, competence, creativity, and responsibility. Research on AI in education has shown that the expectations attached to AI are often accompanied by misunderstandings of current technological capabilities and by narrow assumptions about the purposes of education.[michelsalo...ogspot.com]
Artificial intelligence is thus both a technological disruption and an educational disruption. It changes tools, but it also changes practices. Students can now generate texts, summaries, translations, code, images, simulations, and analyses with unprecedented ease. Teachers must rethink assessment, feedback, authorship, originality, and the cultivation of judgment. Researchers can use AI to accelerate literature review, data analysis, hypothesis generation, modelling, and writing, but they must also confront questions of reliability, bias, opacity, and epistemic responsibility.
AI is also an institutional disruption. A systems approach to AI in higher education shows that universities must understand AI transformation as a complex process involving feedback loops, institutional investments, academic integrity challenges, changes in labour-market expectations, and the development of AI-complementary skills. AI does not enter universities as an isolated technology. It interacts with pedagogy, governance, research strategy, student expectations, administrative systems, economic pressures, and institutional reputation. [shs.cairn.info], [inno-aveni...efrance.fr]
This is why AI must be understood as a civilizational disruption. It does not only affect how universities function. It raises questions about what kind of civilization is being built through technology. When intelligent systems participate in writing, decision-making, diagnosis, design, prediction, creativity, surveillance, and learning, the question becomes broader than innovation. It becomes a question of human futures.
The connection between AI, Big Data, and algorithmic systems transforms the scale and speed of decision-making. Big Data allows societies to collect, process, and interpret massive amounts of information. AI systems can detect patterns, classify behaviours, automate tasks, personalize services, and generate content. But these capacities also raise questions about autonomy, privacy, bias, inequality, dependence, and control. Universities must therefore become places where these technologies are not only used, but critically understood.
Transhumanism extends the question further. If technologies no longer only assist human beings but aim to augment, modify, or redesign human capacities, then education enters a new terrain. What does it mean to educate human beings in a world where cognition, memory, attention, embodiment, health, and identity may be increasingly mediated by technological systems? What should universities preserve, question, or transform in such a context?
Digital humanism becomes important here. It refers to the effort to orient digital technologies toward human dignity, freedom, responsibility, creativity, and social meaning. In the context of higher education, digital humanism asks whether AI can be integrated into university life without reducing learning to optimization, knowledge to data, intelligence to computation, or students to measurable outputs. This question is directly connected to the idea of desirable futures.
The future of knowledge is also transformed. In classical university models, knowledge was associated with disciplinary expertise, libraries, laboratories, lectures, seminars, publications, and peer review. These forms remain essential, but they now coexist with algorithmically generated knowledge, automated synthesis, large language models, digital repositories, predictive analytics, and platform-based learning environments. The university must therefore teach not only knowledge, but also discernment about knowledge.
This is one of the most important educational consequences of AI. If information becomes abundant and automatically generated, then the university’s distinctive value may lie increasingly in interpretation, judgment, critique, ethical reasoning, contextual understanding, and the ability to ask better questions. AI can produce plausible answers. Universities must cultivate the capacity to evaluate, situate, question, and responsibly use those answers.
Health and neuroscience also belong to this civilizational horizon. AI is already transforming medical research, diagnosis, prevention, imaging, epidemiology, and personalized medicine. Neuroscience raises new questions about learning, attention, cognition, mental health, and human development. These fields connect technological innovation with ethical responsibility. They also show that the future of higher education cannot be separated from the future of the body, the brain, care, and the living.
Geopolitics adds another layer. AI is now a field of global competition, technological sovereignty, strategic dependence, and economic power. The geopolitics of chips, data, platforms, cloud infrastructures, cybersecurity, and AI regulation affects the future of universities. Universities depend on technological infrastructures that are often controlled by global corporations or shaped by national strategies. They must therefore think about AI not only pedagogically, but geopolitically.
In this context, innovation cannot be separated from civilizational reflection. Innovation is often presented as positive by default: more technologies, more speed, more disruption, more efficiency. But the university must ask a different question: innovation for what, for whom, and toward which futures? A foresight-driven university cannot simply celebrate innovation. It must examine its consequences, its values, its exclusions, and its long-term implications.
This chapter therefore introduces desirable futures as a necessary response to purely technological acceleration. A future may be technically possible without being socially desirable. A future may be economically profitable without being ethically acceptable. A future may be efficient without being humane. Desirable futures require collective deliberation about values, responsibilities, justice, sustainability, freedom, and the common good.
Artificial intelligence makes foresight more necessary, not less necessary. Some may assume that AI will improve prediction and therefore reduce the need for human foresight. This is a misunderstanding. AI may assist forecasting, modelling, simulation, and pattern detection. But foresight is not only prediction. Foresight involves interpretation, ethical judgment, imagination, dialogue, and collective choice. These dimensions cannot be delegated entirely to machines.
A university in the age of AI must therefore remain a place of discernment. It must help students and society distinguish between automation and understanding, optimization and wisdom, information and knowledge, possibility and desirability. It must prepare people not only to use AI, but to govern it, question it, orient it, and integrate it into human and civic purposes.
The Université Catholique de Lille experience is important in this regard because it did not approach innovation only through technology. From the study of innovation ecosystems to ECOPOSS and civic foresight, the trajectory progressively connected technological innovation with human, territorial, ethical, and civilizational questions. AI becomes a decisive moment in that trajectory because it reveals how deeply technological change now affects education, institutions, and futures.
This chapter contributes to the model of the foresight-driven university in several ways.
It strengthens the capability to anticipate, because AI requires universities to identify emerging transformations before they become institutional crises.
It strengthens the capability to explore, because AI opens new technological, educational, social, and ethical landscapes that universities must investigate.
It strengthens the capability to connect, because AI cannot be understood only by computer scientists. It requires dialogue among educators, philosophers, engineers, sociologists, artists, entrepreneurs, public authorities, students, and citizens.
It strengthens the capability to experiment, because universities must test new pedagogical, research, and governance practices in responsible ways.
It strengthens the capability to engage, because the future of AI concerns society as a whole, not only experts.
It strengthens the capability to transform, because AI forces universities to reconsider their mission, organization, pedagogy, research culture, and public responsibility.
The chapter’s central argument can therefore be stated clearly: AI is not only a technological innovation; it is a civilizational question that makes foresight indispensable for higher education.
Universities must not become passive adopters of AI systems designed elsewhere. They must become places where artificial intelligence is studied, interpreted, governed, humanized, and oriented toward desirable futures. They must help society understand not only what AI can do, but what should be done with AI.
The challenge of AI also prepares the next chapter. When a major crisis such as Covid-19 occurs, the capacity of universities to anticipate, adapt, communicate, and maintain collective intelligence is tested. AI reveals one form of systemic transformation; crisis reveals another. Together, they show why foresight must become an institutional capability rather than an occasional exercise.
In the age of artificial intelligence, the university’s task is not diminished. It is expanded. The university must educate intelligence in a world of intelligent machines. It must cultivate judgment in a world of automated outputs. It must preserve human responsibility in a world of algorithmic systems. And it must help society imagine, debate, and build futures that are not only innovative, but desirable.
Chapter 8 — Crisis, Resilience, and EcosystemsInMotion
The Covid-19 crisis marked a turning point in the Université Catholique de Lille experience. It interrupted many established practices, disrupted physical encounters, suspended travel, destabilized institutions, and revealed the vulnerability of systems that had often appeared stable. Yet it also confirmed one of the central insights of foresight: crises do not only create disruption. They reveal latent futures.
Before the crisis, the foresight journey of the university had already developed through IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, innovation ecosystems, and territorial engagement. These initiatives were based on movement, encounters, exploration, and dialogue. The pandemic suddenly challenged these modes of action. Physical travel became impossible. International visits were suspended. Public events had to be redesigned. Institutional attention shifted toward urgency, adaptation, and resilience.
The central question of this chapter is therefore: how can foresight practices adapt under conditions of crisis, uncertainty, and distance?
The Covid-19 crisis made systemic interdependence visible. Health, economy, education, transport, digital infrastructures, public policy, science, media, work, family life, and international relations were suddenly connected in ways that no single institution could fully control. What had previously been discussed in foresight seminars — complexity, uncertainty, resilience, weak signals, systemic vulnerability — became part of everyday experience.
In this sense, the crisis did not suspend foresight. It made foresight more necessary. The question was no longer whether institutions should think about uncertainty. Uncertainty had become unavoidable. Universities had to adapt their teaching, research, governance, communication, and social responsibilities in real time. They also had to understand that the crisis was not only a temporary emergency, but a revelation of deeper transformations already underway.
The crisis revealed hidden vulnerabilities. It showed the fragility of global supply chains, health systems, digital inequalities, educational routines, institutional coordination, and social cohesion. It also revealed latent futures: remote work, hybrid learning, digital collaboration, online conferences, new forms of international dialogue, and distributed knowledge communities. What had seemed marginal or experimental before the crisis suddenly became central.
For the Université Catholique de Lille foresight experience, this period required a methodological shift. The challenge was to maintain collective intelligence when physical presence was constrained. The question became: how can a university continue to explore futures when travel, meetings, and events are no longer possible in their usual forms?
The Rendez-vous de la prospective played an important role in this transition. They created spaces for maintaining dialogue, reflection, and continuity during a period of uncertainty. They allowed the university community and its partners to continue thinking collectively, even when institutional life was fragmented by distance. These moments were not simply online replacements for physical meetings. They became part of a new ecology of foresight.
This new ecology was based on digital dialogue. Webinars, online conversations, recorded exchanges, and distributed participation became tools for keeping foresight alive. They made it possible to connect people across places, time zones, disciplines, and organizations. They also changed the nature of participation. Digital formats could reduce certain barriers while creating others. They allowed wider access, but also required new forms of attention, facilitation, and documentation.
EcosystemsInMotion emerged in this context as a digital transformation of the earlier Learning Expeditions. If Learning Expeditions had allowed participants to visit innovation ecosystems physically, EcosystemsInMotion made it possible to continue exploring ecosystems through online dialogue. The method changed, but the intention remained: to understand ecosystems in transformation and to observe futures already in motion.
The title EcosystemsInMotion is significant. It suggests that ecosystems are not fixed objects. They move, adapt, react, transform, and reorganize under pressure. During the pandemic, innovation ecosystems across America, Asia, and Europe were all affected, but not in the same way. Their responses revealed differences in governance, culture, technology, resilience, public policy, digital infrastructure, health systems, and entrepreneurial capacity.
Comparing America, Asia, and Europe as ecosystems in motion made it possible to understand the crisis not only as a global event, but as a differentiated experience. Each region revealed distinct responses, strengths, weaknesses, and emerging trajectories. The comparison helped transform crisis observation into strategic intelligence. It allowed participants to ask: what does this crisis reveal about the future of innovation ecosystems? What forms of resilience are emerging? What new vulnerabilities are becoming visible?
In this sense, EcosystemsInMotion was not merely a webinar series. It was a form of digital research-action. It connected actors, generated knowledge, documented conversations, and created a shared archive of reflection under crisis conditions. Webinars became tools of distributed intelligence. They allowed the university to continue learning from ecosystems without physically traveling to them.
This transformation is important for the model of the foresight-driven university. It shows that foresight is not tied to one format. It can be practiced through travel, laboratories, seminars, publications, festivals, networks, or digital conversations. What matters is the capacity to maintain inquiry, interpretation, dialogue, and documentation in changing conditions.
The crisis also clarified the relation between resilience and learning. Resilience is not only the ability to resist shock. It is the capacity to learn, reorganize, and transform under pressure. A resilient university is not simply a university that returns to its previous state after a crisis. It is a university that uses crisis as an opportunity to understand itself differently and to develop new capabilities.
The Covid-19 period showed that foresight and resilience are closely linked. Foresight helps institutions prepare for uncertainty before it becomes crisis. Resilience helps institutions respond when uncertainty becomes unavoidable. Together, they support institutional learning. A foresight-driven university must therefore cultivate both anticipation and adaptability.
EcosystemsInMotion also reinforced the international dimension of the experience. Even when travel was impossible, international dialogue could continue. This is one of the lessons of the crisis: global learning does not always require physical mobility. Digital formats can create other forms of international presence. They can connect experts, researchers, entrepreneurs, institutional actors, and students across ecosystems.
However, digital dialogue also has limits. It cannot fully replace embodied experience, informal encounters, atmosphere, place-based observation, or the relational density of physical Learning Expeditions. A webinar can transmit ideas and conversations, but it cannot fully reproduce the experience of walking through a campus, visiting a laboratory, entering an innovation district, or sensing the social texture of a place.
The value of EcosystemsInMotion lies precisely in this tension. It did not abolish the need for field-based foresight. It complemented it. It showed that foresight can become hybrid: sometimes physical, sometimes digital, sometimes local, sometimes international, sometimes synchronous, sometimes archived. The crisis accelerated this hybridization.
The audiovisual dimension of EcosystemsInMotion is particularly important. The webinars and recorded dialogues became traces of thinking under crisis conditions. They documented not only conclusions, but also questions, hesitations, comparisons, and emerging interpretations. They preserved a moment in which actors were trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world.
This is why audiovisual archives matter. In times of crisis, knowledge is often produced in motion. Concepts are not fully stabilized. Interpretations evolve. Actors test hypotheses, compare experiences, and adjust their understanding. Videos preserve this process. They allow later analysis of how foresight was practiced under pressure.
The chapter therefore treats the audiovisual archive not as a secondary resource, but as an empirical source. It documents how the university maintained foresight during crisis, how international dialogue was organized, how ecosystems were compared, and how new forms of research-action emerged. It also contributes to the broader argument of the book: living memory is one of the capabilities of the foresight-driven university.
The Covid-19 crisis also prepared later developments. The move toward digital dialogue, wider publics, and distributed participation created conditions that would later resonate with ECOPOSS and IFRN. EcosystemsInMotion helped bridge the period between Learning Expeditions and broader civic and international foresight initiatives. It showed that the university could continue to connect actors and generate knowledge even when traditional formats were disrupted.
The chapter contributes to the foresight-driven university model in several ways.
It strengthens the capability to anticipate, because crisis reveals the importance of preparing for uncertainty before institutions are forced to react.
It strengthens the capability to adapt, even if adaptation is not one of the eight final capabilities, because adaptation is embedded in experimentation and transformation.
It strengthens the capability to experiment, by showing how new digital formats can emerge under pressure.
It strengthens the capability to document, through recorded webinars, videos, and digital archives.
It strengthens the capability to internationalize, by maintaining global dialogue despite physical distance.
It strengthens the capability to transform, because crisis forces institutions to rethink their practices, formats, and assumptions.
The central argument of this chapter is therefore clear: crisis can accelerate the development of foresight capabilities when institutions are able to transform disruption into learning, dialogue, and documentation.
This does not mean that crisis should be romanticized. Crises generate suffering, inequality, fatigue, institutional stress, and social vulnerability. The point is not that crisis is desirable. The point is that when crisis occurs, foresight allows institutions to interpret disruption, identify emerging futures, maintain collective intelligence, and learn from uncertainty.
For universities, this lesson is decisive. The future will not be stable. Higher education will continue to face technological, ecological, political, social, and economic disruptions. The question is not whether universities can avoid all crises. The question is whether they can develop the capabilities to understand, respond, learn, and transform.
In the Université Catholique de Lille experience, EcosystemsInMotion represents such a moment of transformation. It showed that foresight could survive the interruption of physical mobility. It showed that digital formats could support international dialogue. It showed that audiovisual archives could preserve the traces of collective intelligence. And it showed that crisis could become a catalyst for new institutional capabilities.
The chapter therefore prepares the transition to ECOPOSS. If EcosystemsInMotion transformed foresight under crisis conditions, ECOPOSS would open foresight to a broader civic and cultural public. The movement is significant: from physical Learning Expeditions to digital ecosystem dialogues, and then from expert conversations to public futures debates.
The crisis revealed the need for foresight. EcosystemsInMotion showed that foresight could adapt. ECOPOSS would show that foresight could become civic, cultural, and public. Together, these steps demonstrate how the Université Catholique de Lille experience moved progressively toward the idea of a foresight-driven university capable not only of observing futures, but of helping society imagine and debate them.
Chapter 9 — ECOPOSS and Civic Foresight
ECOPOSS represents a decisive turning point in the Université Catholique de Lille experience. After IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, territorial foresight, and EcosystemsInMotion, foresight moved beyond expert circles, institutional strategy, and international professional dialogue. With ECOPOSS, foresight became civic, cultural, public, and experiential.
The central question of this chapter is: can a futures festival become a civic laboratory for desirable futures?
The answer proposed here is yes, provided that the festival is not understood as a simple event. ECOPOSS is not only a sequence of conferences, debates, exhibitions, workshops, performances, and public encounters. It is a device for opening futures thinking to society. It creates a space in which citizens, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, institutional actors, public authorities, authors, and decision-makers can meet around a shared question:what futures do we want to imagine, debate, and build together?
This chapter presents ECOPOSS as the civic and cultural opening of foresight. In earlier chapters, foresight appeared through institutional anchoring, innovation ecosystems, Learning Expeditions, territorial engagement, artificial intelligence, and crisis adaptation. ECOPOSS adds another dimension: public imagination. It shows that thinking about the future cannot remain only in the hands of experts, strategists, technologists, or institutional leaders. The future concerns everyone.
A futures festival can become more than an event when it generates collective attention, shared language, public debate, and documented learning. In this sense, ECOPOSS can be analyzed as a civic foresight device. It transforms futures thinking into a public experience. It makes futures visible, debatable, cultural, and accessible. It allows different publics to encounter emerging questions not only through concepts, but also through books, art, dialogue, performance, science, workshops, and lived experience.
The civic dimension is essential. Civic foresight means opening foresight beyond specialized communities. It does not reject expertise, but it refuses to confine the future to experts alone. It recognizes that citizens, students, families, artists, entrepreneurs, local communities, and institutions all carry forms of knowledge, concern, imagination, and responsibility. A society cannot build desirable futures if futures are discussed only in closed professional spaces.
ECOPOSS therefore extends the movement initiated by IIPEI. IIPEI created a first institutional laboratory for foresight and innovation ecosystems. Learning Expeditions opened the university to global innovation environments. Territorial foresight reconnected global learning to the Hauts-de-France region. EcosystemsInMotion transformed foresight through digital international dialogue during crisis conditions. ECOPOSS takes another step: it opens foresight to the broader public.
This movement is not merely a change of audience. It changes the nature of foresight itself. When futures thinking becomes public, it must become more plural, more accessible, more embodied, and more dialogical. A public futures space cannot rely only on technical reports, strategic scenarios, or expert vocabulary. It must create formats in which different forms of intelligence can meet: scientific knowledge, artistic expression, lived experience, civic concern, entrepreneurial experimentation, and institutional responsibility.
This is why ECOPOSS brings together science, art, debate, books, and experience. Science helps clarify complexity and evidence. Art opens imagination and sensibility. Debate makes disagreement visible and productive. Books provide depth, memory, and transmission. Experience allows people to feel that futures are not abstract projections, but possible worlds that can be explored, questioned, and shaped.
The role of students is particularly important. Students are not only recipients of education. They are future professionals, citizens, researchers, entrepreneurs, teachers, caregivers, engineers, artists, public actors, and community members. A festival of futures gives students the possibility to encounter long-term questions in a living public space. It helps transform education from knowledge transmission into participation in collective futures thinking.
ECOPOSS also connects strongly with futures literacy. Futures literacy refers to the capacity to use the future as a way of understanding and acting in the present. In the context of ECOPOSS, futures literacy is not only taught. It is practiced. Participants are invited to compare possible futures, question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and discuss what futures could be desirable. The festival becomes a public pedagogy of anticipation.
The notion of public imagination is equally important. Societies are shaped not only by policies, technologies, and infrastructures, but also by the futures they are able to imagine. If imagination is colonized by fear, decline, technological determinism, or narrow economic narratives, then collective action becomes constrained. ECOPOSS creates a space where other images of the future can be explored: ecological futures, democratic futures, educational futures, technological futures, European futures, human futures, planetary futures.
The themes addressed by ECOPOSS reflect this ambition. Europe, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, wealth, humanity, the planet, travel, books, education, and civic engagement are not separate topics. They are interconnected dimensions of the future. Artificial intelligence raises questions about knowledge, work, democracy, ethics, and education. Geopolitics raises questions about power, sovereignty, conflict, and cooperation. Wealth raises questions about value, inequality, contribution, and social meaning. The planet raises questions about life, sustainability, responsibility, and interdependence.
In this sense, ECOPOSS shows that desirable futures cannot be reduced to technological innovation. A desirable future is not simply a more advanced future. It is a future that can be discussed in relation to human dignity, ecological responsibility, justice, freedom, knowledge, solidarity, and the common good. Desirability requires public deliberation. It cannot be defined by algorithms, markets, experts, or institutions alone.
This is why desirable futures must be made visible, debatable, and experiential.
They must be visible because people cannot discuss futures they cannot perceive.
They must be debatable because no single institution, discipline, or group owns the future.
They must be experiential because futures are not only intellectual objects. They involve emotions, bodies, environments, narratives, images, and ways of living.
ECOPOSS therefore functions as a kind of futures agora. In the ancient sense, an agora was a public space of encounter, exchange, debate, and civic life. ECOPOSS adapts this idea to contemporary conditions. It creates a place where the future becomes a matter of public conversation. It allows the university to serve not only as a producer of expertise, but as a convener of collective imagination.
This civic function transforms the role of the university. The university is no longer only a site of teaching and research. It becomes a public institution capable of hosting dialogue on long-term societal questions. It becomes a mediator between knowledge and society, between experts and citizens, between technological innovation and ethical reflection, between local territory and global futures.
This does not mean that ECOPOSS resolves all tensions. A futures festival faces several challenges. It must avoid becoming only a communication event. It must maintain intellectual depth while remaining accessible. It must include diverse publics without diluting the quality of inquiry. It must document what is produced so that public dialogue becomes part of a lasting memory. It must connect cultural experience with research, pedagogy, and institutional transformation.
These tensions are important because they determine whether a festival remains temporary or becomes a research-action device. If ECOPOSS only gathers people for a few days, its impact may be limited. But if it produces archives, videos, publications, educational resources, partnerships, concepts, and institutional learning, then it becomes part of the foresight capability of the university.
The audiovisual dimension is again central. ECOPOSS generates conferences, interviews, debates, and public moments that can be recorded, indexed, analyzed, and transmitted. These videos become part of the living memory of the experience. They allow the festival to continue beyond the event itself. They also allow future researchers, students, and citizens to revisit the questions, voices, and debates that shaped the public imagination of futures.
In this sense, ECOPOSS extends EcosystemsInMotion. EcosystemsInMotion showed how foresight could continue under crisis conditions through digital dialogue. ECOPOSS shows how foresight can become a public cultural experience. Both initiatives rely on dialogue, documentation, and distributed intelligence. But ECOPOSS adds a stronger civic and symbolic dimension. It makes futures accessible to wider publics.
ECOPOSS also extends Symbiogora. Symbiogora prefigured a community of dialogue, connecting intelligence, interdisciplinarity, and collective reflection. ECOPOSS gives this dialogical intuition a broader public form. It transforms the idea of collective intelligence into a civic event, a cultural festival, and a public pedagogy of futures.
The chapter contributes to the model of the foresight-driven university in several ways.
It strengthens the capability to engage, because it opens futures thinking to society.
It strengthens the capability to connect, because it brings together citizens, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, public institutions, and decision-makers.
It strengthens the capability to document, because it produces videos, archives, programs, public debates, and traces of collective imagination.
It strengthens the capability to experiment, because it tests new formats for public foresight.
It strengthens the capability to transform, because it redefines the university as a civic actor in the construction of desirable futures.
The main argument of this chapter can therefore be summarized as follows:ECOPOSS demonstrates that a university can become a civic agora for desirable futures when it opens foresight to public imagination, cultural experience, and democratic debate.
This is a crucial step in the trajectory of the book. The transition from IIPEI to ECOPOSS is not only a transition from research to event. It is a transition from expert foresight to civic foresight, from innovation ecosystems to desirable futures, from institutional experimentation to public imagination.
The chapter therefore prepares the final synthesis of the book. After IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, territorial foresight, artificial intelligence, crisis, EcosystemsInMotion, and ECOPOSS, the experience can now be interpreted as a broader model: the foresight-driven university. This model will be developed in the next chapter.
ECOPOSS shows that universities can help society do more than prepare for the future. They can help society imagine it, debate it, experience it, and choose among possible paths. In an age marked by artificial intelligence, ecological urgency, geopolitical instability, and social uncertainty, this civic function may become one of the most important responsibilities of higher education.
Part IV — Model and Lessons
The fourth part of this book brings together the different moments of the Université Catholique de Lille experience and extracts from them a set of transferable lessons. After the birth of IIPEI, the Learning Expeditions, the territorial engagement in the Hauts-de-France region, the digital transformation through EcosystemsInMotion, and the civic opening of foresight through ECOPOSS, the question becomes: what model emerges from this trajectory?
The purpose of this part is not to present a final synthesis as a simple conclusion. It is to transform the experience into a conceptual and practical framework. The initiatives examined in the previous chapters should not be understood as separate projects. They form a single movement: the progressive emergence of a university capable of integrating foresight into research, innovation, territory, civic engagement, international dialogue, documentation, and institutional transformation.
This movement begins with IIPEI, which gave foresight a first institutional anchor. IIPEI made it possible to connect the university with innovation ecosystems, companies, territories, and long-term strategic questions. It showed that foresight needs a visible structure, but also that such a structure must remain open, experimental, and connected to multiple actors.
The movement continued through Learning Expeditions, which opened the university to global innovation ecosystems. These expeditions showed that futures can be observed in places where new forms of knowledge, entrepreneurship, technology, organization, and culture are already emerging. They also demonstrated that the purpose of learning from ecosystems is not imitation, but interpretation.
The return to the Hauts-de-France region gave this global learning a territorial meaning. Foresight became more than an international exploration of innovation. It became a responsibility toward a region, its actors, its industries, its health ecosystems, its openlabs, its students, its institutions, and its possible futures. The territory transformed foresight into concrete engagement.
The Covid-19 crisis and EcosystemsInMotion added another dimension. They showed that foresight must be able to adapt under crisis conditions. When physical exploration became impossible, digital dialogue, webinars, videos, and distributed intelligence kept the foresight process alive. Crisis became a test of resilience and a catalyst for new forms of research-action.
With ECOPOSS, foresight entered a civic and cultural phase. The future became public, visible, debatable, experiential, and artistic. ECOPOSS showed that universities can become agoras for desirable futures, where citizens, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, institutions, and decision-makers meet to imagine and discuss what futures are worth building.
Finally, IFRN extends the experience toward internationalization. It suggests that local experimentation can become part of a broader global conversation on foresight in action. The university does not only learn from the world; it can also contribute to international networks of researchers, practitioners, leaders, and institutions working on desirable futures.
Taken together, these initiatives form the basis for the model proposed in this book: the foresight-driven university.
A foresight-driven university is not defined by one department, one event, one research center, one festival, or one strategy document. It is defined by a set of institutional capabilities. These capabilities allow the university to anticipate uncertainty, explore emerging futures, connect actors, experiment with new forms of action, document its learning, engage society, internationalize its experience, and transform itself.
The model developed in the final chapter is built around eight capabilities:
- Anticipate — the capacity to read long-term transformations, weak signals, systemic uncertainties, and emerging futures.
- Explore — the capacity to learn from innovation ecosystems, global experiences, territories, technologies, and social transformations.
- Connect — the capacity to link universities, companies, public institutions, researchers, students, citizens, artists, and territories.
- Experiment — the capacity to create research-action devices, laboratories, festivals, dialogues, expeditions, and learning situations.
- Document — the capacity to build living memory through publications, videos, archives, case notes, interviews, and audiovisual sources.
- Engage — the capacity to open futures thinking to society through civic foresight, public debate, cultural events, and educational formats.
- Internationalize — the capacity to connect local learning to global networks, comparative experiences, and international foresight communities.
- Transform — the capacity to move from ideas and visions to institutional, territorial, civic, and educational change.
These eight capabilities do not constitute a rigid formula. They should not be applied mechanically. They are better understood as a framework of interpretation and action. Each university will have to develop them according to its own history, culture, mission, territory, resources, and constraints.
This is why the question of transferability is central. The Université Catholique de Lille experience cannot simply be copied. It is situated in a specific institution, a specific region, a specific cultural context, and a specific period of transformation. But the lessons it offers can be adapted. Other universities may not create the same institute, the same festival, the same networks, or the same archives. Yet they can ask how they might develop similar capabilities in their own context.
The model also includes networks, publications, videos, and institutional memory. This is important because foresight is fragile if it is not documented. Without archives, many initiatives disappear. Without publications, ideas remain dispersed. Without videos, voices and debates are lost. Without networks, learning remains local. A foresight-driven university must therefore learn not only to act, but also to remember, transmit, and share what it has learned.
This part also addresses the limits and tensions of the experience. A rigorous model cannot present only achievements. It must also consider what remains fragile or unresolved. How can foresight survive changes in leadership? How can a university avoid turning foresight into bureaucracy? How can civic events produce lasting transformation rather than temporary visibility? How can impact be measured? How can audiovisual archives be transformed into scientific resources? How can international ambition remain connected to local responsibility?
These questions are not weaknesses. They are part of the academic value of the study. A useful model is not a perfect story. It is a framework that includes tensions, uncertainties, and conditions of transferability.
The final part also opens toward the possible creation of a House of Futures. Such a place would not be only a building. It could be a platform, a network, an archive, a laboratory, a civic space, and a pedagogical device. It would bring together research, education, foresight, audiovisual memory, artistic imagination, territorial transformation, and public dialogue. It would extend the movement that began with IIPEI and expanded through ECOPOSS and IFRN.
The House of Futures can therefore be understood as a possible horizon for the foresight-driven university. It would give durable form to the idea that universities must not only transmit knowledge, but also help society imagine, debate, and build desirable futures.
Part IV therefore has a double function. It synthesizes the Université Catholique de Lille experience, and it translates that experience into a model that other universities can discuss, adapt, and critique. It moves from narrative to framework, from institutional experience to transferable capabilities, from local experimentation to international conversation.
The central argument of this part is that foresight-driven higher education is both an academic and civic responsibility. It is academic because universities must develop knowledge, methods, concepts, archives, and models for understanding uncertainty. It is civic because universities must also help society deliberate about the futures it wants to inhabit.
The final chapter will therefore present the foresight-driven university as an adaptable model for higher education in the twenty-first century. It will show how the different elements of the experience come together: IIPEI as institutional anchor, Learning Expeditions as global exploration, Hauts-de-France as territorial responsibility, EcosystemsInMotion as digital resilience, ECOPOSS as civic foresight, IFRN as internationalization, and audiovisual archives as living memory.
Together, these elements suggest a new role for universities. They must not only preserve the past, explain the present, or prepare students for existing professions. They must also become institutions capable of anticipating transformations, cultivating collective intelligence, engaging society, and contributing to desirable futures.
The journey began with IIPEI as an institutional foresight laboratory. It expanded through Learning Expeditions and global innovation ecosystems. It returned to the Hauts-de-France region through territorial foresight. It confronted artificial intelligence as a civilizational challenge. It adapted to crisis through EcosystemsInMotion. It opened futures to society through ECOPOSS. It internationalized through IFRN. It preserved memory through publications, videos, archives, and networks.
Together, these elements suggest that a university can become foresight-driven when it develops eight capabilities: anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize, and transform.
The chapter’s central argument is therefore clear: the foresight-driven university is a model of institutional capabilities, not a fixed institutional form.
It invites universities to think beyond adaptation. It asks them to become places where knowledge, imagination, responsibility, technology, territory, and civic dialogue are brought together in the service of desirable futures.
Chapter 10 — Toward the Foresight-Driven University
Appendices
Appendix A — Timeline of the Université Catholique de Lille Experience
Appendix B — The 36 Case Notes
Appendix C — Glossary of Key Concepts
Appendix D — Methodological Note and Evidence Matrix
Appendix E — Audiovisual Archives A
ppendix F — General Bibliography and Resources
Indexes
Index of Concepts
Index of Persons
Index of Places and Ecosystems
Index of Videos and Audiovisual Sources
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