2026 07 10 The Foresight-Driven University V2 : A Reflective Study of Innovation Ecosystems, Artificial Intelligence, and Desirable Futures in Higher Education

 The Foresight-Driven University

A Reflective Study of Innovation Ecosystems, Artificial Intelligence, and Desirable Futures in Higher Education

Lessons from the Université Catholique de Lille Experience

Plan en 14 chapitres :

Front Matter

• Foreword

• Author’s Note — A Participant-Observer Perspective

• Executive Summary

• Acknowledgements

• 
  

Introduction — Why Universities Need Foresight

Part I — Foundations

Chapter 1 — Higher Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Systemic Uncertainty

Chapter 2 — From French Prospective to International Foresight

Chapter 3 — Research Design: A Reflective Study

Part II — Intellectual and Institutional Genesis

Chapter 4 — A Life Trajectory: Art, Systems, Foresight, and Integral Thinking

Chapter 5 — IIPEI and the Birth of a Foresight Laboratory

Part III — Learning from Innovation Ecosystems

Chapter 6 — Learning Expeditions as Field-Based Foresight

Chapter 7 — Global Innovation Ecosystem Signatures

Chapter 8 — From Global Ecosystems to Territorial Transformation: Symbiogora and Hauts-de-France

Part IV — From Embedded Foresight to Public Futures

Chapter 9 — Institutionalizing Foresight: The Direction de la Prospective

Chapter 10 — EcosystemsInMotion: Digital Research-Action in a Time of Crisis

Chapter 11 — ECOPOSS: Making Futures Public

Part V — Model, Planetary Governance, and Civilizational Discernment

Chapter 12 — The Foresight-Driven University Model

Eight Institutional Capabilities for Desirable Futures

Chapter 13 — Planetary Governance, IFRN, and International Benchmarks

Chapter 14 — Integral Ecology, EPISTEMA, and Planetary Transformation

Conclusion — From Foresight to Civilizational Discernment

Appendices

Appendix A — Timeline of the Université Catholique de Lille Experience

Appendix B — Case Notes

Appendix C — Glossary of Key Concepts

Appendix D — Methodological Note and Evidence Matrix

Appendix E — Audiovisual Archives

Appendix F — Index of Persons

Appendix G — General Bibliography, International Benchmarks, and Resources

Appendix H — Making the Book: AI-Assisted Reflection, Writing, and Knowledge Structuring

Front Matter

Foreword · Author’s Note · Executive Summary · Acknowledgements

Function in the book

This front matter prepares the reader, clarifies the authorial position, summarizes the argument and acknowledges the collective nature of the work.

Editorial status : Draft front matter prepared for integration into the working manuscript.

Position in manuscript : Inserted before the Introduction — Why Universities Need Foresight.

Transition : The front matter leads into the Introduction, which frames the central problem and research question of the book.

Foreword

This book appears at a moment when universities everywhere are being asked to rethink their role. The acceleration of artificial intelligence, the ecological transition, the fragmentation of public debate and the uncertainty of global governance are not isolated challenges. They are signs of a deeper transformation in the relationship between knowledge, society and the future.

The central intuition of this book is simple and demanding: universities cannot remain only institutions of transmission, research and adaptation. They must also become institutions of anticipation. They must learn to read weak signals, organize collective intelligence, open spaces of imagination, deliberate about desirable futures and act with responsibility in contexts where certainty is unavailable.

The expression foresight-driven university captures this ambition. It does not suggest that a university can predict the future. It suggests that a university can cultivate foresight as a shared capability: a way of seeing, learning, deciding and engaging the world. In this sense, foresight is not an auxiliary method added to strategy. It becomes part of the university’s vocation.

The experience of the Université Catholique de Lille gives this proposition a concrete institutional depth. The book follows a trajectory that begins with foresight practices and Learning Expeditions, passes through ecosystem learning, territorial transformation, digital research-action and public futures culture, and opens toward integral ecology, planetary governance and EPISTEMA. The value of this trajectory lies not in offering a fixed recipe, but in showing how a university can progressively learn to become more anticipatory, more reflexive and more responsible.

This book is therefore both a case and an invitation. It invites university leaders, researchers, teachers, students, territorial actors and foresight practitioners to consider the future not as an external horizon to be endured, but as a shared responsibility to be explored, debated and shaped.

At a time when higher education can easily be reduced to employability, rankings, technology adoption or institutional competition, this book reminds us that the university has a deeper role: to help society think, imagine and act in relation to what is not yet fully visible.

Author’s Note — A Participant-Observer Perspective

This book is written from within the experience it studies. It is not the work of an external observer describing the Université Catholique de Lille from a distance. It is the work of a participant-observer who has been involved in the emergence, development and interpretation of many of the initiatives discussed in these pages.

This position creates both a privilege and a responsibility. It is a privilege because it provides access to memory, intention, institutional texture, informal conversations, archives, journeys, experiments and intellectual continuities that may not be visible from outside. It is a responsibility because proximity can create blind spots, over-identification and narrative temptation. The book therefore treats reflexivity not as an ornament, but as a methodological necessity.

The aim is not to produce a celebratory institutional narrative. The aim is to transform a lived trajectory into a reflective study. This requires moving from memory to evidence, from experience to interpretation, and from interpretation to a model that can be discussed, criticized and transferred. The book therefore combines personal testimony, documentary work, institutional analysis, conceptual synthesis and evidence mapping.

The term participant-observer is used here in a broad and reflective sense. It acknowledges that the author is part of the field, while also affirming the need to examine that field with discipline. The book does not claim neutrality in the sense of detachment. It seeks rigor through explicit positioning, triangulation, documentation and critical distance.

This authorial position is especially relevant because the subject of the book is foresight. Foresight is not only a method applied to external objects. It is also a way of becoming aware of one’s assumptions, memories, expectations and responsibilities. Writing this book has therefore been part of the research-action process itself: a way of organizing evidence, clarifying concepts, testing coherence and preparing transmission.

The AI-assisted making-of included in the appendices extends this reflexive approach. It documents how artificial intelligence was used not as an invisible substitute for authorship, but as a tool for organization, drafting, comparison, synthesis and editorial acceleration under human direction. In this sense, the process of writing the book also reflects one of its central questions: how can human institutions use powerful technologies without abandoning judgment, responsibility and meaning?

Executive Summary

This book proposes the concept of the foresight-driven university as a response to the transformation of higher education in an age of artificial intelligence, systemic uncertainty, ecological transition and civilizational change. It argues that universities must move beyond adaptation and innovation alone. They must develop foresight as an institutional capability: the capacity to anticipate, interpret, deliberate and act in relation to plural and uncertain futures.

The central case is the Université Catholique de Lille. The book reconstructs a trajectory through which foresight gradually became more than a set of methods. It became a way of learning from the world, organizing institutional memory, engaging territories, building public debate, connecting international networks and formulating a model for higher education.

The book begins by explaining why universities need foresight. Artificial intelligence changes the conditions of knowledge. Ecological disruption changes the horizon of responsibility. Social fragmentation changes the conditions of trust. Geopolitical instability changes the meaning of international cooperation. Under these conditions, universities cannot simply prepare students for existing professions or optimize existing institutional routines. They must help persons and societies develop discernment, imagination and responsibility.

The conceptual foundation of the book is the translation between French prospective and international foresight. The French tradition of prospective brings a humanistic, ethical and action-oriented depth. The international language of foresight makes the argument accessible to wider academic, policy and institutional audiences. The book uses the expression foresight-driven university while preserving the deeper meaning of prospective.

Methodologically, the book is a reflective study written from a participant-observer perspective. It draws on lived experience, institutional documents, audiovisual archives, evidence mapping and conceptual synthesis. This position is acknowledged explicitly because proximity to the field is both an asset and a risk. The book seeks rigor through reflexivity, triangulation and documentary discipline.

The institutional trajectory unfolds through several key moments. IIPEI is presented as the birth of a foresight laboratory. Learning Expeditions are interpreted as field-based foresight. Ecosystem signatures become a method for reading places and innovation cultures. Symbiogora translates global ecosystem learning into territorial transformation. The Direction de la Prospective embeds foresight within university governance. EcosystemsInMotion develops a form of digital research-action. ECOPOSS makes futures public through civic, cultural and scientific engagement. IFRN internationalizes foresight research. EPISTEMA opens the civilizational and integral horizon of the model.

The book’s main contribution is the formulation of the foresight-driven university model. This model identifies foresight not as a peripheral activity, but as a transversal institutional capability connecting strategy, pedagogy, research, territorial engagement, public culture, digital documentation, governance and planetary responsibility.

The final argument is ethical and civilizational. Universities are not only knowledge organizations. They are places where societies learn how to understand complexity, transmit memory, cultivate discernment and imagine desirable futures. A foresight-driven university helps society become more capable of acting responsibly in relation to what is emerging.

 

 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a long collective journey. It has been shaped by conversations, institutions, travels, archives, experiments, friendships, disagreements, digital traces and shared commitments to the future of higher education.

I wish to acknowledge the Université Catholique de Lille, whose institutional history, humanistic tradition and openness to experimentation provided the living context for this work. The book is deeply connected to the people, teams and communities that made it possible to explore foresight not only as a concept, but as an institutional practice.

I acknowledge the role of IIPEI and the many contributors who participated in its development as a foresight laboratory. I also acknowledge the participants in Learning Expeditions whose encounters, questions and observations helped transform travel into field-based foresight and ecosystem learning.

I am grateful to the colleagues and partners involved in Symbiogora, EcosystemsInMotion and ECOPOSS. These initiatives demonstrated that foresight can become territorial, digital, public, cultural and civic. They showed that futures can be explored not only in expert circles, but through events, debates, archives, research-action and shared experiences.

I also acknowledge the international foresight community and the International Foresight Research Network. Their perspectives, questions and comparative frameworks helped situate the UCL experience within broader debates on futures studies, strategic foresight, futures literacy, planetary governance and higher education transformation.

Special thanks are due to the institutional leaders, researchers, teachers, students, artists, entrepreneurs, public actors and citizens whose participation nourished the trajectory described in this book. Their contributions are not always visible in a single citation, but they are present in the intellectual and institutional fabric of the work.

Finally, I acknowledge the role of Microsoft 365 Copilot as an AI-assisted editorial and research companion in the preparation of this manuscript. Its contribution was not authorship in the human sense, but assistance: helping to organize material, test structure, summarize evidence, compare versions, accelerate drafting and support the making-of of the book under human direction and responsibility.

This book is dedicated to all those who believe that universities can help societies face uncertainty not with resignation, but with intelligence, imagination, courage and care.

 

Introduction — Why Universities Need Foresight

Opening the case for the foresight-driven university in an age of artificial intelligence, systemic uncertainty, ecological transition and civilizational transformation.

Function in the book : This introduction frames the central problem, the purpose of the book and the need for a foresight-driven university.

Main contribution: It explains why universities must move beyond adaptation and develop anticipatory, ethical, systemic and public capacities.

Key sources to mobilize : Validated master plan; UCL / IIPEI trajectory; Direction de la Prospective; ECOPOSS; IFRN; Evidence Matrix; AI-assisted making-of appendix.

Transition : The introduction prepares Chapter 1, which develops the higher education challenge in the age of AI and systemic uncertainty.

I.1 — The future has become a university question

Universities have always had a relationship with the future. They educate students who will live and work in futures that do not yet exist. They produce knowledge whose consequences often unfold over decades. They preserve memory, transmit culture, challenge inherited assumptions and prepare societies to imagine other possibilities. Yet in the early twenty-first century, the future has become more than an implicit horizon of university life. It has become an explicit institutional question.

Artificial intelligence is transforming the conditions of knowledge production. Ecological disruption is transforming the horizon of responsibility. Social fragmentation is transforming the conditions of trust. Geopolitical instability is transforming the meaning of international cooperation. Digital platforms are transforming attention, memory and public debate. These transformations do not occur separately. They interact, accelerate and amplify one another. Together, they create a world in which universities cannot remain merely reactive institutions.

The question is therefore not only what universities should teach about the future. The deeper question is how universities themselves can become capable of anticipating, interpreting and shaping transformation. This book proposes one answer: universities need foresight not as a peripheral tool, but as an institutional capability.

I.2 — Beyond adaptation: the need for anticipatory institutions

Many universities respond to change through adaptation: new programmes, digital platforms, strategic plans, sustainability commitments, international partnerships and innovation projects. These responses are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Adaptation often begins after change has already become visible. Foresight begins earlier. It asks what may be emerging before it is fully recognized, what assumptions guide current decisions, what possibilities are being ignored and what kind of future an institution is helping to make possible.

An anticipatory institution does not claim to control the future. It develops the capacity to work with uncertainty. It learns to read weak signals, compare scenarios, involve stakeholders, listen to territories, connect disciplines, experiment responsibly and deliberate about desirable futures. It recognizes that the future is not a single destination but a field of possibilities shaped by values, technologies, institutions, conflicts and choices.

For universities, this anticipatory capacity is especially important because universities are both observers and actors of transformation. They study the world, but they also form the people, concepts, technologies and narratives through which the world changes.

I.3 — Why the university cannot be reduced to innovation

The language of innovation has become central in higher education. Universities are asked to innovate pedagogy, research, governance, entrepreneurship, digital tools and partnerships. Innovation is vital, but innovation alone does not answer the question of direction. A university can innovate without asking whether the innovation contributes to human development, ecological responsibility, justice, wisdom or the common good.

Foresight adds a different dimension. It asks not only how to innovate, but why, for whom, with what consequences and toward what desirable future. It situates innovation within broader ethical, social, ecological and civilizational horizons. It helps universities avoid becoming accelerators of change without discernment.

A foresight-driven university therefore does not reject innovation. It deepens innovation by connecting it to anticipation, responsibility and meaning.

I.4 — The case of the Université Catholique de Lille

This book explores the possibility of the foresight-driven university through the experience of the Université Catholique de Lille. The book does not present this experience as a perfect model or as a finished doctrine. It presents it as a living trajectory: a sequence of initiatives, experiments, institutions, journeys, conversations, archives and concepts through which foresight gradually became more visible, more structured and more transferable.

These elements will be introduced progressively throughout the book. The trajectory includes IIPEI as a foresight laboratory, Learning Expeditions as field-based inquiry, ecosystem signatures as a way of reading places, Symbiogora as territorial translation, the Direction de la Prospective as institutional embedding, EcosystemsInMotion as digital research-action, ECOPOSS as public futures culture, IFRN as international research networking, and EPISTEMA as a deeper civilizational horizon.

The value of this case lies in its cumulative nature. It shows that foresight is not only a method used in workshops. It can become a way of learning from the world, organizing institutional memory, engaging territories, building public debate, connecting international research and formulating a university model.

I.5 — From French prospective to international foresight

The book is written in English for an international readership, but its intellectual roots are partly French and European. The French term prospective carries a humanistic, action-oriented and ethical depth that cannot be reduced to prediction or planning. Internationally, the term foresight is more widely recognized in academic, policy and organizational contexts. The book therefore uses the expression foresight-driven university while preserving the deeper meaning of prospective.

This translation is not merely linguistic. It is conceptual. It requires distinguishing prediction from foresight, strategic foresight from institutional foresight, and technical anticipation from civilizational discernment. Chapter 2 will address this translation directly. The introduction simply signals why the translation matters: the future must be treated neither as a forecast to consume nor as a slogan to repeat, but as a shared responsibility.

I.6 — A reflective and evidence-oriented book

This book is written from a participant-observer perspective. It is based on a lived institutional trajectory, but it does not seek to replace evidence with memory. The method of the book is reflective: it transforms experience into a case, the case into concepts, and the concepts into a transferable model. This requires documentary discipline, triangulation, audiovisual archives, metadata, evidence mapping and explicit reflexivity.

The book therefore combines narrative, institutional analysis, conceptual synthesis and methodological transparency. It recognizes that proximity can be a strength because it provides access to intentions, conversations and institutional texture. It also recognizes that proximity requires discipline because memory must be tested, contextualized and related to documents.

Chapter 3 will present this research design in detail. The introduction prepares that methodological move by clarifying that the book is neither a conventional institutional report nor a purely theoretical essay. It is a reflective study of institutional transformation.

The central question of the book is therefore how a university can become foresight-driven in a way that is intellectually rigorous, institutionally embedded, ethically grounded and transferable beyond its original context.

I.7 — Structure of the book

After this introduction, the book unfolds in fourteen chapters. Chapter 1 establishes why higher education needs foresight in an age of artificial intelligence and systemic uncertainty. Chapter 2 clarifies the conceptual bridge between French prospective and international foresight. Chapter 3 presents the reflective research design. Chapter 4 introduces the authorial and epistemological trajectory. Chapter 5 reconstructs IIPEI as the birth of a foresight laboratory.

The following chapters move from field-based learning to institutionalization: Learning Expeditions, ecosystem signatures, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion and ECOPOSS. The final chapters formulate the foresight-driven university model, internationalize it through planetary governance, IFRN and benchmarks, and deepen it through integral ecology and EPISTEMA.

The book also includes appendices, indexes, evidence mappings and an AI-assisted making-of. These materials do not stand outside the research process. They document how the book itself became part of a reflective and technologically augmented research-action process.

I.8 — Purpose and invitation

The purpose of this book is not to prescribe a single future for universities. It is to invite universities to become more capable of working with futures responsibly. The foresight-driven university is a proposal, a model and a conversation. It asks what universities must become if they are to remain relevant, trustworthy and transformative in a period of profound uncertainty.

The invitation is addressed to university leaders, researchers, teachers, students, foresight practitioners, public actors, territorial partners and citizens. It is also addressed to institutions that sense that adaptation is no longer enough. The question is not whether the future will affect universities. The question is whether universities will learn to participate consciously, ethically and creatively in the making of futures.

Chapter 1 begins by examining this need in the context of artificial intelligence and systemic uncertainty, where the meaning of knowledge, learning and institutional responsibility is being transformed.

This is why universities need foresight.

 

 

Part I  Foundations

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Universities face a transformative period due to artificial intelligence, systemic uncertainty, and ecological transition. This book proposes the concept of a foresight-driven university, which anticipates, interprets, and shapes uncertain transformations. It explores how universities can cultivate foresight through anticipatory culture, formation for discernment, and connecting technological innovation with ecological responsibility and social justice.

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Chapter 1 — Higher Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Systemic Uncertainty

Chapter 2 — From French Prospective to International Foresight

Chapter 3 — Research Design: A Reflective Study

Chapter 1

Higher Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Systemic Uncertainty 

Why universities must become foresight-driven institutions in a period of technological acceleration, ecological pressure and civilizational uncertainty. 

Function in the book 

This opening chapter establishes the civilizational problem that makes a foresight-driven university necessary. 

Main contribution 

It frames artificial intelligence, systemic uncertainty and ecological transition as a combined challenge for higher education. 

Key sources to mobilize 

UCL strategic materials; IIPEI archive; Direction de la Prospective documents; ECOPOSS materials; Evidence Matrix; selected international higher education and AI policy references. 

Transition 

The next chapter clarifies the conceptual language of prospective and foresight before the book presents its reflective research design. 

1.0 — Introduction: the university at a threshold 

Universities are entering a period in which the conditions of knowledge, learning and institutional legitimacy are being transformed simultaneously. Artificial intelligence changes how information is produced, searched, summarized, recombined and evaluated. Ecological disruption changes the ethical horizon of knowledge. Social fragmentation changes the expectations placed on institutions. Geopolitical instability changes the meaning of internationalization. Together, these forces create a context in which higher education cannot be guided only by inherited routines, short-term adaptation or incremental reform. 

This book begins from the hypothesis that the university of the future cannot be understood only as a digital university, an innovative university, an entrepreneurial university or a sustainable university. These labels each identify an important dimension, but none is sufficient on its own. The deeper challenge is whether the university can learn to anticipate, interpret and shape transformations whose consequences are uncertain, systemic and value-laden. This is why the book proposes the idea of the foresight-driven university. 

A foresight-driven university is not an institution that claims to predict the future. It is an institution that organizes itself so that the future becomes a shared object of inquiry, debate, experimentation and responsibility. It develops capacities to detect weak signals, interpret systemic change, learn from innovation ecosystems, connect local and global knowledge, involve stakeholders and formulate desirable futures. The experience of the Université Catholique de Lille provides the living case through which this proposition is explored. 

1.1 — Artificial intelligence as epistemic disruption 

Artificial intelligence is not merely another educational technology. It affects the ecology of knowledge itself. Search, writing, coding, translation, design, data analysis and administrative work can now be augmented or partially automated. This changes the meaning of expertise, the rhythm of learning and the criteria by which knowledge is produced and trusted. Universities must therefore ask not only how AI tools can be used, but what kind of human intelligence should be cultivated when machine intelligence becomes pervasive. 

The central question is not whether universities should accept or reject artificial intelligence. The central question is how universities can transform AI into an occasion for deeper education. If AI accelerates access to answers, the university must strengthen the capacity to formulate questions. If AI produces fluent text, the university must strengthen judgment, interpretation and responsibility. If AI expands analytical power, the university must strengthen ethical discernment, transdisciplinary synthesis and attention to consequences. 

This is why AI reinforces rather than diminishes the need for foresight. Technological acceleration creates both opportunities and blind spots. A foresight-driven university must learn to observe AI as a technological system, a pedagogical challenge, a research infrastructure, a governance issue and a civilizational question. 

1.2 — Systemic uncertainty and the limits of linear planning 

Universities have often relied on planning frameworks that assume relative stability: demographic projections, labour-market trends, budget cycles, accreditation processes and disciplinary structures. These instruments remain useful, but they are insufficient when change becomes systemic. Systemic uncertainty means that transformations interact across domains: technology affects employment, employment affects education, education affects social cohesion, social cohesion affects governance, and governance affects the capacity to respond to ecological and geopolitical risk. 

In such a context, linear planning can create a false sense of control. It can help an institution optimize known processes while missing emerging disruptions. Foresight does not replace planning; it enlarges it. It introduces scenarios, weak signals, strategic conversations, experiments and reflexive learning. It allows an institution to ask not only what is likely, but what is possible, what is plausible, what is desirable and what should be avoided. 

The University therefore needs an anticipatory culture. Such a culture cannot be confined to a single office. It must circulate through leadership, pedagogy, research, partnerships, territorial engagement and international cooperation. 

1.3 — From knowledge transmission to formation for discernment 

The traditional university has often been described through three missions: teaching, research and service to society. These missions remain essential, but they must be reinterpreted in a period of uncertainty. Teaching cannot be limited to the transmission of stabilized knowledge. Research cannot be limited to disciplinary production. Service cannot be limited to external impact. The deeper mission is formation: helping persons and communities develop the capacity to understand complexity, deliberate ethically and act responsibly. 

This formation includes intellectual skills, but it also includes reflexivity, imagination, courage, attention, judgment and responsibility. A university that prepares students only for existing professions risks preparing them for a world that is already disappearing. A university that forms students for discernment helps them navigate futures that are not yet fully visible. 

The foresight-driven university therefore links anticipation to formation. It does not ask students and researchers to become futurists in a narrow professional sense. It asks the whole academic community to become more capable of using the future as a way to understand the present and transform action. 

1.4 — The ecological and civilizational horizon 

Artificial intelligence cannot be separated from the ecological and civilizational horizon. Digital infrastructures consume resources; technological cultures reshape attention; innovation can accelerate extraction as well as regeneration. At the same time, ecological transition cannot be addressed only through technical solutions. It requires changes in values, institutions, economic models, lifestyles and forms of cooperation. 

For Catholic and humanistic higher education, this horizon is particularly important. The question is not only how to produce competent graduates, but how to contribute to integral human development and the common good. A foresight-driven university must therefore connect technological innovation with ecological responsibility, social justice, spiritual depth and planetary governance. 

This connection prepares the later movement of the book toward integral ecology and EPISTEMA. The final horizon is not simply institutional adaptation. It is the possibility that the university becomes a place of civilizational learning. 

1.5 — Why foresight must become institutional 

Many universities organize strategic projects, innovation labs, sustainability offices, international partnerships and digital transformation programmes. These initiatives are valuable, but they often remain fragmented. The concept of a foresight-driven university proposes an integrative principle. Foresight can connect strategy, pedagogy, research, territorial engagement, public debate, documentary evidence and international networking. 

At UCL, the elements of such an approach emerge progressively: IIPEI as a foresight laboratory; Learning Expeditions as field-based inquiry; ecosystem signatures as a way of reading places; Symbiogora as territorial translation; the Direction de la Prospective as institutional embedding; EcosystemsInMotion as digital research-action; ECOPOSS as public futures culture; IFRN as international research networking; and EPISTEMA as a deeper civilizational frame. 

The importance of this sequence is that foresight becomes more than a method. It becomes an institutional capability: the capacity of a university to see earlier, learn faster, interpret more deeply and act more responsibly. 

1.6 — Research question of the book 

The guiding question of the book can now be formulated: how can a university become foresight-driven in a way that is academically rigorous, institutionally useful, ethically grounded and transferable to other contexts? This question is not answered abstractly. It is explored through a reflective study of a lived institutional trajectory at the Université Catholique de Lille. 

The book does not present a universal recipe. It develops a model through narrative, evidence, comparison and conceptual synthesis. The ambition is to show how a university can gradually develop foresight across multiple layers: culture, method, governance, ecosystem learning, digital research-action, public engagement and planetary responsibility. 

This research question also explains the structure of the book. The opening chapters establish the problem, the vocabulary and the research design. The following chapters reconstruct the intellectual and institutional genesis of the experience. Later chapters formulate the model and its broader implications. 

1.7 — Contribution of the book 

The contribution of this book is threefold. First, it contributes to higher education by proposing the foresight-driven university as an institutional model for a period of AI and systemic uncertainty. Second, it contributes to foresight studies by showing how foresight can move from strategic method to institutional culture and public pedagogy. Third, it contributes to the documentation of the UCL experience by transforming a lived trajectory into a structured, transferable and evidence-oriented account. 

The book also contributes methodologically because it is written from a participant-observer perspective. The author is not an external analyst of the experience. The author is one of its protagonists. This proximity is a strength because it gives access to memory, intention and institutional texture; it is also a risk because it requires explicit reflexivity. That methodological issue will be addressed directly in Chapter 3. 

The aim is not to celebrate an institution uncritically. The aim is to understand what can be learned from a specific experience when that experience is interpreted with conceptual discipline and documentary care. 

1.8 — Transition to Chapter 2 

Before the research design can be presented, one conceptual problem must be clarified. The book uses the English expression foresight-driven university, but the intellectual lineage of the project is deeply connected to the French tradition of prospective. This raises a translation challenge: how can prospective be translated into foresight without losing its humanistic, ethical and action-oriented meaning? 

Chapter 2 addresses this question. It establishes the conceptual bridge between French prospective and international foresight. It distinguishes foresight from prediction and forecasting, explains why futures literacy matters, and prepares the methodological discussion that follows in Chapter 3. 

Chapter 2 

From French Prospective to International Foresight 

How can the French tradition of prospective be translated into the international language of foresight without losing its humanistic depth? 

Function in the book 

This chapter establishes the conceptual bridge between French prospective and international foresight. 

Main contribution 

It preserves the humanistic, ethical and action-oriented depth of prospective while translating the vocabulary into a language accessible to international readers. 

Key sources to mobilize 

Gaston Berger; French prospective; futures studies; strategic foresight; futures literacy; UCL / IIPEI / IFRN documents; Evidence Matrix. 

Transition 

The next chapter explains how this conceptual framework is converted into a reflective research design based on participant-observation, research-action and documentary triangulation. 

2.0 — Introduction: naming the future without reducing it 

The word chosen to describe a practice of the future is never neutral. In French, prospective carries a dense intellectual history. It evokes not only scenarios, forecasts or strategic planning, but also an attitude toward the future: to look far, to look wide, to analyze deeply, to take risks, and to place the human being at the centre of action. In English, the word foresight is more widely recognized in international academic, policy and organizational contexts. It is associated with strategic anticipation, futures thinking, horizon scanning, scenario work, policy resilience and institutional preparedness. 

This chapter asks how the French tradition of prospective can be translated into the international language of foresight without losing its humanistic depth. The question matters because this book is written for an international readership, but it emerges from a French and European intellectual lineage. The experience of the Université Catholique de Lille cannot be understood only through the managerial vocabulary of innovation or the technical vocabulary of strategy. It also belongs to a tradition in which the future is not merely predicted, but imagined, debated, constructed and ethically oriented. 

The chapter therefore performs a work of translation. It clarifies the difference between prediction, forecasting, futures studies, strategic foresight, futures literacy and prospective. It explains why this book uses the expression foresight-driven university rather than prospective university. It also shows why the French term prospective must remain present beneath the English expression foresight: because the UCL experience is not simply about better planning; it is about a university learning to become more lucid, more responsible and more creative in the face of civilizational uncertainty. 

2.1 — The French tradition of prospective: an attitude before a method 

The French tradition of prospective is often associated with Gaston Berger, who helped give the term its modern meaning in the late 1950s. What is important for this book is not only the word itself, but the attitude that the word carries. Prospective is not reducible to a technique for estimating probabilities. It is an orientation of the mind and of action. It begins with the recognition that the future is open, that it cannot be passively awaited, and that human beings have a responsibility to participate in its construction. 

This is why prospective differs from a merely extrapolative understanding of the future. Forecasting often extends trends from the present into the future. Prospective asks a deeper question: what futures become possible if actors change their assumptions, values, institutions, technologies and relationships? A university guided by prospective must therefore do more than monitor trends. It must help learners, researchers, territories, companies and citizens develop the capacity to formulate hypotheses, test alternatives, imagine desirable directions and evaluate consequences. 

This humanistic dimension is central for the present book. In the UCL experience, foresight is not used only to defend an institution against uncertainty. It is used to open spaces of collective imagination, dialogue and responsibility. IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, Symbiogora, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS and IFRN all inherit, in different ways, this active conception of the future. They assume that the future is neither a fatality nor a purely technical problem. It is a field of human responsibility. 

Editorial principle: Throughout this book, prospective is treated as a humanistic and action-oriented tradition. Foresight is the international vocabulary through which that tradition is communicated. 

2.2 — Prediction, forecasting, foresight and prospective 

These distinctions are not rigid borders. In practice, responsible foresight often combines trend analysis, scenario construction, horizon scanning, weak-signal detection, participatory dialogue and normative reflection. The key point is that the future is not treated as a single object to be predicted. It is treated as a space of possibilities, tensions, responsibilities and choices. 

For a university, this distinction is decisive. If the future were simply predictable, the university would only need to adapt its programmes to expected needs. But if the future is open, contested and shaped by human choices, then the university must become a place where possible futures are explored, ethical questions are debated and collective capacities are cultivated. This is the background of the expression foresight-driven university. 

2.3 — Why “foresight-driven university” rather than “prospective university”? 

The expression prospective university would be meaningful in French, but it would be ambiguous in English. It might suggest a future university, a potential university, or a university under consideration. The expression foresight-driven university is clearer for an international audience. It indicates that the university is not merely interested in the future, but is structurally guided by foresight as an institutional capability. 

The adjective driven is important. It does not mean that foresight mechanically determines all decisions. It means that foresight becomes one of the organizing principles of institutional life. A foresight-driven university learns to integrate anticipation into strategy, pedagogy, research, partnerships, civic engagement, documentation and governance. Foresight is not a peripheral service; it becomes an embedded capacity. 

At the same time, the French meaning of prospective must not disappear. If foresight is understood only as strategic preparedness, it risks becoming a technical tool. The UCL experience shows something broader: foresight as exploration, encounter, learning, transmission, public culture and civilizational discernment. The English title therefore translates the project internationally, while the book preserves the French humanistic depth of prospective. 

2.4 — From strategic foresight to institutional foresight 

Strategic foresight is often used by governments, companies and international organizations to prepare for uncertainty, challenge assumptions, test strategies and build resilience. This book does not reject that use. On the contrary, the Direction de la Prospective at UCL demonstrates that foresight can support strategy, decision-making, cross-functional cooperation and institutional positioning. 

However, a university is not only a strategic organization. It is also a pedagogical, scientific, cultural, ethical and civic institution. For this reason, foresight in a university cannot be reduced to planning, risk management or market intelligence. It must also serve learning, research, formation, public debate and the common good. The UCL experience is distinctive because it gradually expanded foresight across several dimensions: exploration through IIPEI, territorial translation through Symbiogora, digital research-action through EcosystemsInMotion, civic engagement through ECOPOSS, and international research networking through IFRN. 

Institutional foresight therefore refers to the capacity of a university to embed anticipation into the way it sees, learns, connects, experiments and transforms. It is less a department than an institutional posture. A department can help organize it; a president can support it; a network can extend it; but the deeper question is whether the university gradually becomes capable of thinking and acting through futures. 

2.5 — Foresight, futures literacy and the democratization of futures 

The international language of futures has increasingly emphasized the idea that people and institutions can learn to use the future. Futures literacy is important for this book because it shifts the future from expert prediction to collective capacity. People do not only receive ideas about the future from specialists; they learn to recognize how images of the future shape present choices, fears, desires and possibilities. 

This is directly connected to ECOPOSS. If foresight remains only inside expert communities, it risks reinforcing distance between institutions and society. If foresight becomes public, cultural, artistic and pedagogical, it can help citizens develop agency in relation to the future. ECOPOSS embodies this shift by turning futures into experiences: books, cinema, debates, exhibitions, workshops, scientific conferences and public encounters. It shows that a university can become a civic infrastructure for futures literacy. 

The translation from prospective to foresight therefore has a democratic dimension. It is not simply the translation of a French word into English. It is the movement from a tradition of humanistic anticipation toward a broader culture of futures capability. A foresight-driven university should not monopolize the future; it should help society become more capable of imagining, debating and building futures. 

2.6 — Desirable futures as ethical horizon 

The book does not treat all futures as equivalent. Foresight opens the plurality of possible futures, but the project of the foresight-driven university requires an ethical horizon. This is why the notion of desirable futures is central. A desirable future is not simply a preferred scenario or a positive narrative. It is a future that can be discussed in relation to justice, sustainability, human development, ecological responsibility, technological responsibility and the common good. 

In the UCL experience, desirable futures are not abstract ideals. They appear through concrete devices: Learning Expeditions that reveal possibilities already emerging in places; Symbiogora as a territorial learning community; EcosystemsInMotion as digital research-action; ECOPOSS as public debate and imagination; IFRN as international foresight research; and integral ecology as a civilizational horizon. Desirability is not imposed from above. It is explored through encounters, controversies, documents, images, memories and experiments. 

This ethical dimension also distinguishes the foresight-driven university from a merely innovation-driven university. Innovation can accelerate change without asking whether change is desirable. Foresight must ask what kinds of futures should be made possible, what risks should be avoided, what values should guide decisions and what forms of life are worth cultivating. 

2.7 — From foresight to civilizational discernment 

As the book progresses, the meaning of foresight broadens. It begins as a way to anticipate uncertainty. It becomes a method for learning from innovation ecosystems. It then becomes an institutional function, a digital research-action process, a public culture of the future and an international network. Finally, in the last chapter, it becomes a form of civilizational discernment through the concept of EPISTEMA. 

This does not mean that every foresight process must become theological or philosophical. It means that in periods of deep transformation, the future cannot be understood only at the level of trends. Artificial intelligence, ecological crisis, planetary governance, technological acceleration and social fragmentation do not merely change tools or institutions. They reveal deeper assumptions about the human being, knowledge, nature, progress, responsibility and the sacred. A university that claims to be foresight-driven must be able to work at this deeper level. 

The conceptual bridge built in this chapter therefore prepares the whole book. French prospective provides the humanistic depth. International foresight provides the shared academic and policy language. Futures literacy opens the pedagogical and civic dimension. Desirable futures provide the ethical horizon. EPISTEMA will later provide the civilizational depth. 

2.8 — Implications for the rest of the book 

This chapter establishes five implications for the chapters that follow: 

• First: foresight is not prediction. It is an organized relationship to uncertainty, plurality and choice. 

• Second: the French tradition of prospective must be preserved because it keeps the human being, responsibility and action at the centre. 

• Third: the international term foresight is necessary because the book addresses a global audience and situates UCL in international networks. 

• Fourth: futures literacy and civic foresight are essential because a foresight-driven university must help society use the future collectively. 

• Fifth: desirable futures require ethical discernment; innovation alone is not enough. 

2.9 — Transition to Chapter 3 

Having clarified the conceptual language of the book, the next question is methodological. How can a participant-observer produce rigorous and transferable knowledge from a lived university experience? How can documents, publications, videos, events, institutional archives, field notes and memories be organized into a reflective study? 

Chapter 3 answers these questions by presenting the research design of the book. It explains why the UCL experience is treated as a reflective case study, how research-action informs the method, why audiovisual archives are considered primary sources, and how the Evidence Matrix helps maintain credibility, traceability and interpretive discipline. 

Chapter 3

Research Design: A Reflective Study

Participant-observer inquiry, research-action, audiovisual archives, and transferability

 Central Question How can a participant-observer produce rigorous and transferable knowledge from a lived university experience?

3.1 Introduction — why methodology matters

This book is not written from outside the experience it studies. It is based on a lived institutional trajectory: the emergence of the International Institute for Foresight on Innovation Ecosystems, the development of Learning Expeditions, the creation of the Direction de la Prospective, the digital research-action format of EcosystemsInMotion, the public culture of the future embodied by ECOPOSS, the internationalization through IFRN, and the later deepening through integral ecology and EPISTEMA.

For that reason, the methodological challenge is not simply to describe a case. The challenge is to transform a lived experience into rigorous, shareable and transferable knowledge without pretending that the author was external to the process. The author was not a distant researcher observing an institution from the outside. The author was an actor, initiator, witness, interpreter, archivist and theorist of the experience. This chapter therefore clarifies how such a position can produce knowledge while acknowledging its limits.

The chapter presents the book as a reflective study grounded in participant-observation, research-action, documentary triangulation, audiovisual evidence and conceptual synthesis. The aim is not statistical generalization. The aim is transferability: to identify institutional capabilities, methodological patterns and conceptual lessons that other universities may adapt to their own histories, territories and futures.

3.2 A reflective study, not an institutional report

The book is not an official institutional report on the Université Catholique de Lille. It does not attempt to provide an exhaustive administrative history, a performance evaluation or a promotional account. It is a reflective study of an institutional experience, written from the point of view of someone who participated in its emergence and later sought to understand its broader meaning.

This distinction matters. An institutional report would primarily ask: what was done, by whom, when, and with what results? A reflective study asks a deeper question: what does this experience reveal about the changing role of universities in an age of artificial intelligence, planetary transformation and civilizational uncertainty? The factual sequence remains essential, but it is interpreted within a larger inquiry about the future of higher education.

The reflective approach allows the book to move between narrative, analysis and model-building. It can describe events, interpret their meaning, compare them with other institutional experiments, and extract a model of the foresight-driven university. The Université Catholique de Lille experience is therefore treated both as a singular story and as a generative case.

3.3 Participant-observer and practitioner-scholar posture

The author’s position can be described as participant-observer and practitioner-scholar. A participant-observer is involved in the process being studied while also developing a reflective distance from it. A practitioner-scholar produces knowledge from practice, but does not reduce knowledge to practice alone. The value of this posture lies in access, memory, interpretation and embodied understanding. Its risk lies in proximity, affective investment and possible bias.

In this book, proximity is not hidden. It is made explicit. The author participated in the creation of IIPEI, the design of Learning Expeditions, the development of foresight-related publications, the animation of international networks and the structuring of projects such as EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS and IFRN. This involvement gives the book access to internal documents, conversations, memories, audiovisual archives and institutional dynamics that would be difficult for an external observer to reconstruct.

At the same time, the book must not confuse proximity with proof. Personal memory is treated as one source among others. It must be compared with documents, dates, programmes, reports, public webpages, videos, books, organigrams, job descriptions, statutes and event materials. The discipline of the book therefore consists in transforming lived memory into documented reflection.

3.4 Research-action as method

Research-action is central to the experience studied in this book. The initiatives described here were not designed only to observe reality. They were designed to learn from reality while contributing to its transformation. The Learning Expeditions did not merely benchmark ecosystems; they changed the way participants understood innovation, universities, territories and futures. EcosystemsInMotion did not merely discuss global ecosystems; it created a distributed research-action format during the Covid period. ECOPOSS did not merely present futures; it turned futures into a public, civic and cultural experience.

Research-action is therefore both a method and a posture. It assumes that knowledge emerges through interaction, experimentation, feedback and transformation. It also assumes that the researcher is part of the system being studied. In the UCL experience, this meant that foresight was not only analyzed; it was practiced. It was institutionalized, tested, filmed, debated, staged, narrated and revised.

This approach is especially relevant for universities because universities are not neutral observers of transformation. They are themselves transformed by artificial intelligence, ecological transition, demographic change, geopolitical uncertainty and evolving social expectations. A university that studies the future is also a university whose own future is at stake.

3.5 Sources and documentary corpus

The book relies on a diversified corpus. No single source is sufficient. The strength of the research design comes from the combination of multiple types of evidence: published books, internal documents, public programmes, travel reports, strategic presentations, web sources, video archives, institutional organigrams, event brochures and reflective manuscripts.

Source family

Examples

Use in the book

Institutional documents

Job description, action plans, strategic presentations, organigrams, statutes.

Evidence for institutionalization and governance.

Learning Expedition materials

Palo Alto, China, Togo-Benin, Copenhagen, New York, Scandinavia.

Evidence for field-based foresight and ecosystem learning.

Event programmes

Ethics & Transhumanism, Beyond Humanism, RRI, ECOPOSS, EcosystemsInMotion.

Evidence for public and academic events.

Publications

Innovation Ecosystems, Futures, Futures in Action, theoretical manuscripts.

Conceptual and analytical foundations.

Audiovisual archives

IIPEI interviews, EcosystemsInMotion sessions, ECOPOSS traces.

Primary sources of living memory.

Web and public sources

UCL webpages, ECOPOSS pages, LinkedIn/professional profiles.

Complementary validation of public roles and events.

3.6 Audiovisual archives as primary sources

One distinctive feature of the UCL / IIPEI experience is the importance of audiovisual documentation. The video interviews are not decorative illustrations. They are primary sources. They preserve voices, arguments, gestures, intellectual contexts, institutional moments and the evolution of a network over time. They also make visible the relational and dialogical character of the research.

Treating video as a primary source changes the nature of the evidence. The archive is not only textual. It is conversational, embodied and situated. It contains expert interviews, seminar traces, travel restitutions, public presentations and digital events. This is why the book includes an Audiovisual Archives appendix: the videos form part of the empirical basis of the research.

At the same time, audiovisual sources require a careful metadata discipline. Each video should ultimately be associated with a speaker, date, location, theme, institutional context, source link, related chapter, related concept and evidence status. Without such metadata, the archive risks remaining an accumulation. With metadata, it becomes a research infrastructure.

3.7 Triangulation and evidence discipline

Because the author is close to the experience studied, the book requires an explicit evidence discipline. The central principle is triangulation. Major claims should be supported, when possible, by more than one type of source: memory should be checked against documents; documents should be checked against dates; public webpages should be compared with internal programmes; personal interpretation should be distinguished from verified evidence.

The Evidence Matrix in Appendix D is therefore not a secondary administrative tool. It is part of the research design. It identifies which document supports which chapter, what type of source it is, what concepts it confirms, and what remains missing or uncertain. The matrix is a safeguard against overinterpretation and false precision.

This evidence discipline also allows the book to distinguish between confirmed facts, partially documented events, memory-based interpretations and items still to be collected. Such distinctions are essential for a reflective study because they make the limits of knowledge visible instead of hiding them.

3.8 Bias, proximity and reflexivity

A participant-observer perspective has strengths and weaknesses. Its strength is depth of access. Its weakness is the possibility of selective memory, over-identification with the project, or underestimation of difficulties. Instead of claiming impossible neutrality, the book adopts reflexivity: it makes the author’s position visible and treats it as part of the research design.

Reflexivity means asking: what can be seen precisely because the author was involved? What might be missed because the author was involved? Which interpretations are supported by documents? Which remain hypotheses? Which elements need external validation? In this sense, the book does not seek to erase subjectivity; it seeks to discipline it.

This is also why the book gives attention to limits: dependence on key actors, institutional continuity, measurement of impact, fragility of archives, incomplete metadata, and the challenge of turning experimental initiatives into durable structures. These limits are not weaknesses to hide; they are part of the learning process.

3.9 Transferability rather than universal generalization

The book does not claim that every university should reproduce the UCL experience. The experience is historically, territorially, personally and institutionally situated. It emerged from a specific constellation: the Université Catholique de Lille, the IIPEI, a network of partners, a history of learning expeditions, regional dynamics in Hauts-de-France, the creation of ECOPOSS, and a particular authorial trajectory linking art, systems thinking, foresight and integral ecology.

The goal is therefore not universal generalization. The goal is transferability. Other universities may ask what can be translated into their own context: the creation of a foresight function, the use of learning expeditions, the building of audiovisual memory, the organization of civic futures festivals, the connection between local territory and global governance, or the integration of inner development and integral ecology.

Transferability requires abstraction from experience without erasing experience. This is precisely the function of the model developed in Chapter 12. The model does not say: imitate UCL. It says: here are institutional capabilities that can be adapted elsewhere.

3.10 From method to narrative architecture

The methodology shapes the architecture of the book. The book begins with the reasons universities need foresight, then clarifies the intellectual tradition of prospective and foresight, then presents the research design. Only after this methodological grounding does the book enter the UCL experience itself: the author’s trajectory, the birth of IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, ecosystem signatures, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion and ECOPOSS.

The final part of the book then moves from experience to model, from model to planetary governance, and from planetary governance to EPISTEMA. This structure reflects the methodological movement of the research: lived experience becomes documented corpus; documented corpus becomes conceptual architecture; conceptual architecture becomes transferable model; and the model is finally deepened into a reflection on civilizational transformation.

3.11 Chapter conclusion — a disciplined reflective inquiry

This chapter has established the methodological basis of the book. The book is a reflective study written from a participant-observer and practitioner-scholar perspective. It uses research-action, documentary triangulation, audiovisual archives and conceptual synthesis to transform a lived institutional experience into transferable knowledge.

The methodological wager is that a university experience can become intellectually rigorous when it is documented, reflected upon, compared, bounded by evidence and interpreted with humility. The Université Catholique de Lille experience is not presented as a finished model, but as a living case from which the model of the foresight-driven university can be extracted.

The next chapter turns to the author’s intellectual and existential trajectory. Before IIPEI became an institutional laboratory, there was a longer path through art, systemic thinking, the Evolution Grid, the Fields of Reality, the Club de Budapest, Université Intégrale and Design Me a Planet. Understanding this trajectory is necessary because the foresight-driven university did not begin as an administrative programme. It emerged from a way of seeing, connecting and transforming worlds.

Part II — Intellectual and Institutional Genesis

Chapter 4

A Life Trajectory: Art, Systems, Foresight, and Integral Thinking

Central Question

How can an author’s life trajectory become a legitimate source of knowledge for understanding the transformation of a university?

This chapter introduces the intellectual, artistic, systemic, and integral trajectory that precedes the creation of IIPEI at the Université Catholique de Lille. It explains why the foresight-driven university cannot be understood solely as an institutional project. It is also the outcome of a long epistemological journey: from art to systems thinking, from creative practice to civilizational foresight, from management to integral ecology, and from personal inquiry to institutional experimentation.

The purpose of this chapter is not to offer a conventional biography. It is to clarify how a lived trajectory can become a mode of knowledge. The author’s experience matters because the book is written from a participant-observer perspective: the person who analyses the UCL experience is also one of the actors who helped shape it. The challenge, therefore, is to transform personal memory into reflective knowledge, and lived experience into transferable insight.

Four movements organize this chapter. The first is artistic: the formation of a way of seeing, sensing and composing the world. The second is systemic: the emergence of the Evolution Grid and the Fields of Reality as tools for reading civilizational change. The third is integral: the encounter with the Club of Budapest, Ervin Laszlo, the Université Intégrale and the search for a dialogue between science, art and spirituality. The fourth is institutional: the gradual preparation of the conditions that would later make IIPEI and the UCL foresight trajectory possible.

4.1 From art to perception: learning to see futures before naming them

The first layer of the trajectory is artistic. Art is not treated here as decoration, aesthetic supplement or personal background. It is a way of knowing. To grow up among images, forms, colours and artistic practices is to learn that reality is not given once and for all. It can be framed, reframed, composed, deconstructed and reimagined.

This artistic formation matters for foresight because the future is never only calculated; it is also perceived. Before it can be modelled, a future must be sensed. Before it can be debated, it must be made visible. Art develops precisely this capacity: the ability to detect emerging forms, to perceive weak signals in sensibility, to recognize the symbolic charge of places, and to imagine alternative configurations of reality.

This is why the later work on innovation ecosystems, public futures and ECOPOSS cannot be separated from the earlier artistic matrix. The question of desirable futures is also a question of imagination. The public culture of the future requires not only data and scenarios, but images, stories, places, rituals and experiences capable of mobilizing collective attention.

4.2 From art to systemic foresight

The second movement is systemic. The shift from artistic perception to systemic foresight begins when creative intuition becomes a framework for reading civilizational transformations. The Evolution Grid plays a central role in this transition. It proposes that human history can be understood through successive dominant activities: hunting-gathering, agriculture-rearing, industry-trade, and creation-communication.

Each wave is more than an economic stage. It corresponds to a specific relationship to tools, power, exchange, thought, communication, organization and time. The move from industry-trade to creation-communication is therefore not merely a technological change. It marks a deeper transformation in the way societies produce value, relate to information, organize power, communicate, and define the role of individuals.

This framework later becomes essential for understanding why universities must change. Many universities still carry organizational forms inherited from the industrial era: disciplinary silos, hierarchical structures, standardized curricula and linear transmission of knowledge. Yet students, technologies, economies and ecosystems increasingly belong to the creation-communication age, where knowledge circulates through networks, interaction, creativity, interdisciplinarity and digital mediation.

4.3 Fields of Reality: from formal structures to turbulent relations and deep assumptions

The Fields of Reality deepen this systemic reading by distinguishing three interdependent levels: the Formal, the Turbulent and the Void. The Formal refers to visible institutions, structures, rules, strategies, buildings, documents and programmes. The Turbulent refers to relationships, affects, conflicts, trust, fear, desire, enthusiasm and collective energy. The Void refers not to emptiness as absence, but to the deepest assumptions, values, beliefs and ultimate meanings that orient a person or a civilization.

This triadic framework is crucial for the foresight-driven university. Institutional change often fails when it remains at the formal level only. A university can create a department, launch a programme or publish a strategy and still leave its deeper assumptions unchanged. Conversely, durable transformation requires work across the three fields: structures must change, relationships must be reconfigured, and the underlying vision of knowledge, education, responsibility and the human person must be transformed.

This is one of the reasons why the UCL experience cannot be read only as a succession of projects. IIPEI, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, IFRN and EPISTEMA each operate at different levels of reality. Some create formal structures. Some activate relationships. Some challenge the deepest assumptions through which the university understands its role in society.

4.4 The Club of Budapest and the integral turn

The third movement is integral. The encounter with Ervin Laszlo and the Club of Budapest gave an international and philosophical resonance to the systemic work already under way. The Club of Budapest was not simply another foresight network. It was a space where scientists, artists, philosophers, spiritual figures, entrepreneurs and cultural innovators could address the transformation of planetary consciousness.

This encounter helped move foresight beyond strategic planning toward civilizational inquiry. It reinforced the idea that technological, ecological and social crises cannot be solved only through better instruments. They require a shift in consciousness, values and worldview. In this sense, the Club of Budapest prepared an essential dimension of the future UCL work: foresight as a bridge between knowledge, consciousness and action.

The convergence between the Evolution Grid, the Fields of Reality, General Evolution Theory and planetary consciousness contributed to what can be called an integral epistemology of complexity. This epistemology does not reduce the world to a single discipline or level of analysis. It seeks to connect systems, narratives, values, technologies, organizations, cultures and spiritual horizons.

4.5 Université Intégrale: an experimental prehistory of the foresight-driven university

The Université Intégrale represents another decisive layer of the pre-UCL trajectory. Between 2008 and 2013, it created an experimental platform where systemic thinking, integral philosophy, ecology, education, health, enterprise, politics, art, resilience, co-evolution and planetary futures were explored together.

It was not yet an institutional university in the formal sense. It was more an intellectual and experiential prototype: a place for transdisciplinary dialogue, a laboratory for connecting science, art, spirituality and social transformation. Its limitations were also instructive. It showed the power of events and dialogue, but also the need for institutional anchoring, research capacity, teaching structures, documentation, partnerships and continuity.

In this sense, the Université Intégrale can be read as a prefiguration of the foresight-driven university. It carried the philosophical and cultural intuition. The later UCL experience would give this intuition an institutional field, a campus, an archive, partnerships, Learning Expeditions, public events, and eventually a strategic function.

4.6 Design Me a Planet and the planet as a collective work of art

The project Design Me a Planet adds a further dimension: the idea that the planet itself can be approached as a collective work of art. This is not an aesthetic metaphor alone. It is a civilizational proposition. If industrial modernity treated the planet primarily as a resource, the emerging ecological and creative age must learn to treat the planet as a shared composition, a common responsibility and a field of collective imagination.

This idea anticipates several later developments. ECOPOSS transforms futures into public experiences. Integral ecology insists that everything is connected. EPISTEMA asks what deep assumptions shape a civilization’s understanding of reality. In each case, the question is no longer only how to manage the future, but how to imagine, compose and inhabit it responsibly.

Design Me a Planet therefore belongs in the genealogy of the foresight-driven university because it places art, ecology, open innovation, democracy and planetary responsibility in the same field. It suggests that universities must help societies not only solve problems, but also reimagine the world they want to inhabit.

4.7 From personal trajectory to institutional possibility

The trajectory described in this chapter matters because it prepares the conditions for IIPEI. Without the artistic formation, the work on futures might have remained technical. Without the systemic frameworks, the analysis of innovation ecosystems might have remained descriptive. Without the integral networks, the project might have lacked spiritual and civilizational depth. Without the Université Intégrale, there would have been no prior experimental culture of transdisciplinary dialogue. Without Design Me a Planet, the later public imagination of ECOPOSS would have been less grounded.

The creation of IIPEI at the Université Catholique de Lille therefore did not emerge from nowhere. It institutionalized a longer trajectory. It offered a university context in which art, systems, foresight, innovation, ecology and transformation could be tested through research-action, Learning Expeditions, video archives, partnerships and public events.

This is also why the author’s trajectory is not an external preface to the UCL experience. It is part of the method. The book’s knowledge emerges from a life lived at the intersection of psychogenesis and sociogenesis: the transformation of individual consciousness and the transformation of collective forms.

4.8 Methodological implications for the book

This chapter also clarifies the methodological posture of the book. A reflective study based on a participant-observer perspective requires intellectual honesty about the author’s involvement. The author is not outside the process. The author’s concepts, networks, projects, memories and initiatives are part of the material being analyzed.

This does not weaken the book if it is handled rigorously. On the contrary, it can strengthen the book by making explicit the relationship between experience and interpretation. The key is to distinguish lived memory from documented evidence, personal interpretation from institutional fact, and transferable concepts from singular biography.

For this reason, the dossier relies on timelines, evidence matrices, case notes, glossaries, audiovisual archives and indexes. These instruments do not eliminate subjectivity, but they make it accountable. They allow the author’s trajectory to become a structured source rather than an unexamined narrative.

Synthesis

Chapter 4 shows that the foresight-driven university is rooted not only in institutional strategy, but in a long epistemological trajectory linking art, systemic thinking, integral philosophy, planetary responsibility and embodied research-action. This trajectory prepares the emergence of IIPEI as the first formal laboratory of the UCL foresight experience.

4.9 Transition to Chapter 5

The next chapter turns from this intellectual and personal genealogy to the institutional moment when it became operational: the birth of IIPEI. If Chapter 4 explains the deeper sources of the project, Chapter 5 shows how these sources began to take form within the Université Catholique de Lille as a foresight laboratory for innovation ecosystems.

Chapter 5

IIPEI and the Birth of a Foresight Laboratory

Central Question: 

How does a university begin to institutionalize foresight without turning it into bureaucracy?

Thesis of the chapter. IIPEI marks the first institutional crystallization of the Universite Catholique de Lille foresight trajectory. It transformed a set of intellectual intuitions about creative strategy, innovation ecosystems and collaborative foresight into a research-action laboratory connecting companies, universities, territories, experts, videos, publications and Learning Expeditions. Its importance lies not only in what it studied, but in the method it invented: learning from living ecosystems in order to help a university become more anticipatory, open, relational and transformative.

5.1 From an intuition to an institutional experiment

The International Institute for Foresight on Innovation Ecosystems, known throughout the project as IIPEI, appears in the trajectory of the Universite Catholique de Lille as the first concrete institutional experiment through which foresight became visible, organized and actionable. Before IIPEI, the project existed as an intellectual constellation: creative strategy, systemic thinking, collaborative innovation, the Evolution Grid, the Fields of Reality, the Club of Budapest, Universite Integrale and the conviction that the future of organizations could no longer be understood through linear planning alone. With IIPEI, these intuitions entered a university environment and began to operate as a research-action device.

The central question was not simply how to observe innovation. The question was how to understand the conditions under which innovation emerges from ecosystems: places, cultures, institutions, companies, laboratories, investors, public actors, artists, entrepreneurs, universities and communities. Innovation was no longer treated as the result of a single invention or a closed corporate process. It was understood as a relational, territorial, cultural and systemic phenomenon.

This was the decisive shift. IIPEI did not seek to create another expert unit producing reports from a distance. It sought to create a living laboratory where foresight could be practiced through inquiry, travel, interviews, seminars, video archives, books, corporate dialogue and institutional learning. In that sense, IIPEI was the first step toward what this book later calls the foresight-driven university.

5.2 The conceptual matrix: from creative strategy to innovation ecosystems

The conceptual matrix that preceded IIPEI was already visible in the work on creative strategy and innovation ecosystems developed around In Principio. This matrix formulated a crucial idea: contemporary innovation increasingly depends on the capacity to connect heterogeneous actors around shared futures. The example of the iPhone, often used in this early material, illustrated the difference between a simple technological invention and an ecosystemic innovation: hardware, software, design, intellectual property, telecommunication networks, application developers, symbolic branding, user experience and business models all interact to create value.

The implication for foresight was profound. If innovation becomes ecosystemic, then the university cannot study innovation only through isolated technologies, patents or enterprises. It must learn to read the relations between actors, cultures, narratives, infrastructures and values. It must understand how places generate conditions for improbable encounters, distributed creativity and co-innovation.

This conceptual move also explains why foresight became central. An ecosystem does not innovate only because its actors possess resources. It innovates when its actors begin to share orientations, questions and horizons. Collaborative foresight becomes a way of activating the ecosystem because it gives actors a shared field of attention. In this sense, IIPEI emerged from the conviction that foresight is not only an analytical tool; it is an ecosystem-building practice.

5.3 The public birth of IIPEI

The public emergence of IIPEI took place in the immediate context of the Universite Catholique de Lille transformation. The project was launched in the autumn of 2014, during a period when the university was increasingly concerned with innovation, transition, territorial responsibility and the need to connect academic life with the transformations of society. The World Forum Lille sequence and the early design-thinking sessions helped give the project its first institutional visibility.

The early formulation of IIPEI described it as an institute dedicated to research-action on innovation ecosystems and innovation. This definition is important. IIPEI was not conceived as a conventional research center separated from action. It was designed as a place where research, field inquiry, partner dialogue and strategic learning would mutually reinforce one another. The institute brought together academics, experts, companies and socio-economic actors in order to help them rethink business models, practices and future orientations.

The institution therefore had a double function. Internally, it opened a space within UCL where foresight could become organized, documented and sustained. Externally, it created a meeting place where companies and partners could engage with global transformations through the lens of innovation ecosystems. This double function made IIPEI both a research device and a bridge between the university and society.

5.4 A laboratory rather than a bureaucracy

The challenge of institutionalizing foresight is that the process can easily become bureaucratic. Once foresight enters an institution, it may be reduced to planning documents, strategic slogans, horizon-scanning notes or yearly reports. IIPEI avoided this reduction by remaining experimental, relational and mobile. Its institutional form was deliberately light enough to travel, meet, film, compare, synthesize and convene.

This is why IIPEI should be interpreted as a foresight laboratory rather than as a department in the administrative sense. Its work was not primarily to administer foresight, but to make foresight happen: through encounters, interviews, Learning Expeditions, seminars, publications, and strategic conversations with partner organizations. The institute functioned as a living interface between knowledge and transformation.

The term laboratory is useful because it emphasizes experimentation. IIPEI tested formats: video interviews, international trips, seminars, corporate sponsorship, comparative mapping of ecosystems, public restitution, collaborative research and later digital hybridization. It also tested a specific posture: to approach the world as a set of living ecosystems already carrying fragments of the future.

5.5 The audiovisual method: building living memory

One of the most original aspects of IIPEI was the systematic use of video. The archive eventually grew into hundreds of filmed interviews with experts, practitioners, academics, entrepreneurs, futurists, artists and institutional actors. This audiovisual archive was not a secondary illustration of the research. It was itself a primary research material.

The videos gave the project several advantages. First, they preserved the voice, vocabulary and embodied presence of actors at a given moment in time. Second, they allowed the university to build a memory of evolving debates on innovation, complexity, territories, energy, health, industry, artificial intelligence, ecology and education. Third, they created a pedagogical resource that could be reused in seminars, courses, books and future research.

In the model of the foresight-driven university, documentation is a capability in its own right. A university that wants to work with futures must not only organize events; it must preserve traces. It must create archives that allow future readers, researchers and students to understand how certain questions emerged, evolved and transformed. IIPEI anticipated this requirement by treating video as a form of living institutional memory.

5.6 Companies, sponsors and the co-design of foresight

IIPEI also developed through relationships with companies and socio-economic partners. This point matters because it shows that university foresight was not imagined as an academic activity alone. It was a shared field of inquiry between university and organizations confronted with uncertainty. Partner companies were not simply funders. They were participants in a broader learning process.

The early meetings with companies helped co-design the institute and clarify its practical value. Companies were interested in understanding how innovation ecosystems could transform their own strategic positions, business models, partnerships and internal cultures. IIPEI responded by offering not ready-made recipes, but access to global learning, expert perspectives, comparative insights and a method for asking better questions about the future.

This co-design logic is important for the foresight-driven university model. A university becomes foresight-driven not by withdrawing into academic expertise, but by creating spaces where businesses, territories, students, researchers and public actors can learn together. IIPEI was one of the first places where this logic became operational at UCL.

5.7 Palo Alto as the first field test

The Palo Alto and Silicon Valley Learning Expedition of January 2015 was the first major field test of the IIPEI method. It translated the institute’s conceptual ambition into an embodied experience: rather than merely describing ecosystems from afar, participants entered one of the most influential innovation environments in the world. Stanford, Palo Alto, the Institute for the Future, Google, Tesla, venture capital, start-up culture, entrepreneurship education and design thinking became elements of a living investigation.

This expedition was decisive because it showed that an innovation ecosystem is not reducible to its institutions or technologies. Silicon Valley also has rituals, myths, values, contradictions, spatial arrangements, educational practices, failure narratives and symbolic infrastructures. The field method therefore had to be anthropological as well as strategic.

Palo Alto also established several methodological principles that would remain central: preparation before travel, immersion during the journey, Chatham House-style trust, debriefing, interpretation, and translation of learning into institutional or organizational action. The Learning Expedition was not tourism. It was a structured form of field-based foresight.

5.8 The first comparative grammar: Palo Alto, Munich, Copenhagen

The first IIPEI sequence quickly moved from Palo Alto to other ecosystems such as Munich and Copenhagen. This created the beginning of a comparative grammar. Palo Alto was interpreted through digital acceleration, risk-taking, venture capital, start-up culture and networked innovation. Munich offered another signature: industrial depth, quality, precision, engineering, Mittelstand culture and long-term technological excellence. Copenhagen introduced yet another signature: sustainability, design, happiness, trust, urban livability and social innovation.

This comparative approach was essential. It prevented the project from turning Silicon Valley into a universal model. Instead, IIPEI learned to ask what makes each ecosystem singular. The goal was not to copy Palo Alto, Munich or Copenhagen, but to understand how different cultures organize innovation differently. This is the origin of the later concept of ecosystem signature.

For a university, this is a crucial lesson. Learning from the world does not mean imitation. It means developing the capacity to read differences. It means understanding why a practice that works in one context may fail in another, and why each territory must invent its own mode of transformation.

5.9 From IIPEI to a broader UCL foresight trajectory

IIPEI did not remain an isolated initiative. Over time, its methods, networks and questions fed into a broader UCL foresight trajectory. The institute contributed to the emergence of publications on innovation ecosystems, to the production of video archives, to the design of international explorations, to territorial applications such as Symbiogora, and later to initiatives such as EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS and IFRN.

This continuity is important. IIPEI should not be seen as a closed chapter, but as a matrix. It generated concepts, relationships, archives and practices that later changed form. When physical Learning Expeditions became difficult during the Covid period, the logic evolved into EcosystemsInMotion. When global ecosystem learning needed to serve territories, it informed Symbiogora. When public futures became central, it helped prepare ECOPOSS. When international foresight networks needed institutional form, the trajectory continued through IFRN.

Thus, IIPEI is the institutional seed from which several later branches grew. It demonstrates how a small foresight laboratory can become the generator of a much larger ecosystem of practices.

5.10 Limits and fragilities

The importance of IIPEI should not hide its fragilities. Like many exploratory institutional initiatives, it depended heavily on a small number of actors, personal networks, available resources and the capacity to maintain attention over time. Its strength was flexibility; its vulnerability was continuity. Its richness was relational; its challenge was formalization.

Another limit concerns documentation. Although the audiovisual archive is exceptionally valuable, it requires metadata, indexing, preservation, access rules and editorial interpretation. A living memory becomes useful only if it is structured. Without such structuring, the archive risks remaining an immense but underused reservoir.

A third limit concerns transferability. The IIPEI method can inspire other universities, but it cannot simply be copied. It depends on institutional culture, leadership, local partnerships, available networks and the willingness to combine academic work with experimentation. IIPEI’s lesson is therefore not a procedure to reproduce, but a set of principles to adapt.

5.11 Lessons for the foresight-driven university

The birth of IIPEI offers several lessons for the model developed later in this book.

·       First, foresight needs a place. It must be anchored somewhere in the institution if it is to become more than individual intuition.

·       Second, foresight must remain open. A foresight laboratory should connect academics, companies, territories, futurists, artists, students and public actors.

·       Third, foresight learns through ecosystems. The future is not only in documents; it is already being prototyped in places, practices, cultures and networks.

·       Fourth, foresight requires memory. Videos, publications, blogs, reports and archives are not peripheral; they are part of the research infrastructure.

·       Fifth, foresight must avoid becoming bureaucracy. It needs institutional anchoring, but also mobility, experimentation and relational freedom.

These lessons explain why IIPEI stands at the beginning of the UCL foresight experience. It was the place where the university began to learn how to look outward, document what it saw, connect actors and transform observation into strategic reflection.

5.12 Transition to Chapter 6

IIPEI created the laboratory. The next step was methodological: how could the university learn from places where futures were already emerging? The answer came through Learning Expeditions. These journeys transformed foresight from an abstract exercise into a field-based practice of immersion, comparison and interpretation.

Chapter 6 therefore examines Learning Expeditions as one of the central methods through which the Universite Catholique de Lille experience learned from the world while gradually developing its own model of the foresight-driven university.

Evidence base for this chapter

This chapter is based on the documentary corpus already consolidated in the project dossier, including the In Principio presentation on creative strategy and innovation ecosystems, the IIPEI introductory blog and video, the 2015 synthetic presentation of the Institute, the Futurissima Palo Alto / California Learning Expedition documents, the WorldFuture 2015 programme, the protocol chronology, and the 2024 strategic retrospective of UCL foresight activities. In the final manuscript, these sources should be linked to Appendix D — Evidence Matrix and Appendix E — Audiovisual Archives.

Part III The Foresight-Driven University Learning from Innovation Ecosystems

Chapter 6 — Learning Expeditions as Field-Based Foresight
How can universities learn from living ecosystems without reducing them to transferable recipes?
 
Central question
How can universities learn from innovation ecosystems through immersion, interpretation and research-action without merely copying them?

 

6.0 — Introduction: from observation to field-based foresight

The previous chapter presented IIPEI as the birth of a foresight laboratory at the Université Catholique de Lille. This chapter examines the method that gave this laboratory its empirical substance: the Learning Expedition. In the UCL trajectory, Learning Expeditions were not designed as innovation tourism, nor as simple benchmarking exercises. They were conceived as structured immersions in places where futures were already being prototyped, contested, embodied or narrated.

A Learning Expedition becomes field-based foresight when it allows a university to read a place as a living system. It does not ask only what technologies, business models or institutions are visible. It asks what combination of culture, values, infrastructures, actors, narratives, rituals, education, capital, imagination and social relations makes a given ecosystem capable of generating futures.

The method therefore lies at the intersection of foresight, anthropology, strategy, pedagogy and research-action. Participants prepare before departure, encounter actors on site, compare interpretations, document what they observe, debrief during and after the journey, and translate insights into institutional or organizational learning. The point is not to imitate Silicon Valley, Copenhagen, China, Africa, New York or Scandinavia. The point is to understand what each ecosystem reveals about possible futures and about the conditions under which a university can learn from the world.

6.1 — Why Learning Expeditions matter for a foresight-driven university

Most universities study the future through reports, conferences, academic publications or strategic documents. These formats remain necessary, but they often separate knowledge from experience. A Learning Expedition changes the mode of inquiry: the university enters into contact with places, people, institutions, streets, campuses, companies, museums, foundations, public authorities and cultural atmospheres. The future is no longer abstract; it becomes spatial, relational and experiential.

For a foresight-driven university, this matters for four reasons.

1.         Learning Expeditions expose institutional actors to weak signals that are difficult to perceive from within their own organizational routines.

2.         They create shared experience among participants, which makes later strategic dialogue more concrete and embodied.

3.         They help distinguish what is universally relevant from what is locally specific, avoiding both naive imitation and provincial isolation.

4.         They generate archives, interviews, reports and narratives that can nourish teaching, research, institutional strategy and public debate.

In this sense, Learning Expeditions are not peripheral to the UCL experience. They are one of the methodological foundations of the foresight-driven university. They transform foresight into a way of moving, meeting, observing, comparing and learning.

6.2 — The Futurissima / Palo Alto matrix

The January 2015 Futurissima California World Innovation Tour constitutes the foundational matrix of the method. Organized around Palo Alto, Stanford, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the journey was designed as a structured seminar in the field. It combined preparation, visits, conversations, debriefings and strategic translation. The Valley was approached not as a myth to admire, but as a dense ecosystem to interpret.

The Palo Alto journey brought together several dimensions that would later become characteristic of the UCL approach: Stanford and entrepreneurship education; the Institute for the Future and practical foresight; venture capital and startup culture; Google, Tesla and technological ambition; art, museums and cultural imagination; science-fiction and the future of narratives; science-religion dialogue and complexity; Chatham House-style learning spaces; and the production of innovation blueprints after the journey.

Key lesson from Palo Alto

Silicon Valley was not treated as a model to copy, but as a living ecosystem whose signature had to be understood: speed, networks, risk, venture capital, experimentation, storytelling, entrepreneurship education and the capacity to turn technological ambition into cultural legitimacy.

 

The methodological lesson was decisive: a university can learn from an ecosystem if it studies not only its outputs but also its cultural operating system. The Valley does not produce innovation only because of technologies or money. It produces innovation through a particular ecology of talent, capital, institutions, permission, failure, narratives and global ambition.

6.3 — Learning Expedition as pedagogy

A Learning Expedition is also a pedagogy. It transforms participants from passive observers into active interpreters. Before the journey, participants prepare through readings, biographies, questions and expectations. During the journey, participants meet actors, listen, observe, compare and debrief. After the journey, participants translate what they have learned into concepts, reports, videos, strategic questions or institutional projects.

This pedagogical structure is close to an inverted or active learning model. The field is not a supplement to knowledge; it becomes one of the places where knowledge is produced. Participants do not simply consume presentations. They must formulate questions, connect impressions, identify patterns, test assumptions and interpret contradictions.

This is why the Learning Expedition matters for higher education. It suggests that universities should not train students and leaders only through classroom transmission. They should also train them to read ecosystems, understand cultural contexts, document transformations, and act responsibly within complex environments.

6.4 — A comparative grammar of ecosystems

The first IIPEI journeys progressively built a comparative grammar of innovation ecosystems. Palo Alto was framed as a digital and entrepreneurial acceleration ecosystem. Munich was associated with industrial excellence, perfectionism and engineering culture. Copenhagen was interpreted through happiness, design, sustainability and social trust. These early contrasts created a crucial methodological insight: each ecosystem has a signature.

The purpose of comparison is not to rank ecosystems simplistically. It is to understand how different configurations produce different futures. A foresight-driven university must therefore learn to compare without flattening. It must ask: What is specific here? What is transferable? What is not transferable? What does this place reveal about the future of technology, education, territory, work, governance, ecology or meaning?

6.5 — China: learning from a civilizational ecosystem

The China Learning Expedition of 2017 marked a turning point. It showed that Learning Expeditions could not be limited to the study of innovation hubs in the economic or technological sense. China required another scale of interpretation: civilization, metamorphosis, art, spirituality, philanthropy, ecological civilization, education, state strategy, territorial transformation and Sino-European dialogue.

The journey also deepened the methodology. The field was no longer only observed; it was experienced as a process of transformation. The China report explicitly moved toward embodied, intercultural and performative research-action. The researcher and participants were not external to the process. They were transformed by the encounters, the cultural differences, the spiritual references and the scale of the questions raised.

This lesson is essential for the book: an innovation ecosystem can also be a civilizational ecosystem. It may reveal not only new technologies or business models, but different assumptions about long-term development, ecological responsibility, education, philanthropy, governance and the relationship between tradition and future.

6.6 — Africa: endogenous innovation and decolonizing the imaginary

The Togo-Benin mission in 2019 extended the IIPEI learning logic beyond the dominant geographies of global innovation. The mission documented African innovation as hybrid, community-based, informal, spiritual, entrepreneurial and ecological. Woelab, Togocell, Tmoney, KYA-Energy, Plan Togo, UCAO and the Songhai Centre all revealed that innovation can emerge through combinations that are invisible to conventional rankings.

This mission raised a decisive epistemological question: should African futures be framed through imported categories of development, or through endogenous concepts such as harmony, forgiveness, community, immanent justice and collective contribution? The answer suggested by the mission is that foresight must also decolonize the imaginary. It must avoid turning every territory into a delayed version of Western modernization.

For a foresight-driven university, this is a central lesson. Learning from the world means learning from plurality. It means recognizing that futures do not emerge only from the most powerful technological centers. They also emerge from rural economies, youth entrepreneurship, spiritual traditions, women’s networks, ecological practices, mobile infrastructures and local forms of resilience.

6.7 — Corporate learning: the Decathlon Copenhagen journey

The Decathlon Copenhagen Learning Journey of May 2019 demonstrated that the Learning Expedition method could be transferred from university foresight to corporate transformation. Copenhagen became a laboratory for strategic acculturation: retail, urban design, sustainability, behavioral economics, inclusion, art, leadership, Bildung and the future of sport were interpreted together.

The journey was not meant to deliver a predefined strategy to Decathlon. It was designed to shift perception, open questions, create shared language and help an internal team think beyond immediate operational routines. This confirms a broader principle: the Learning Expedition is a method for transforming the questions that organizations ask themselves.

In this sense, Learning Expeditions can support universities, companies and territories because they work on the same deep level: they change the frame through which actors perceive their future.

6.8 — New York and planetary governance

The New York Learning Journey extends the method toward planetary governance. Through Columbia, Fordham, the United Nations, the Earth Institute, the French diplomatic network, the Holy See mission, City College and Cornell Tech, the journey connects higher education with SDGs, diplomacy, ethics, law, technology, civic leadership and global responsibility.

New York functions as a planetary learning ecosystem. It is not only a city; it is a concentration of global institutions, academic networks, diplomatic spaces, religious actors, foundations, media and technological organizations. A foresight-driven university learns from such a place because future norms, responsibilities and imaginaries are negotiated there.

This journey prepares the later argument of Chapter 13: foresight-driven universities must not only learn from innovation hubs; they must learn from the places where planetary governance is debated and institutionalized.

6.9 — Scandinavia, Turku, Stockholm and inner development

The Scandinavian Learning Expedition remains a key field to consolidate further. It connects several themes that are central to the book: Nordic models, sustainability, future studies, welfare, trust, education, ecological transition, the University of Turku, the Finland Futures Research Centre, Stockholm and the Inner Development Goals. It also extends the learning horizon toward the Arctic Circle and planetary boundaries.

This expedition is important because it links external transition with inner development. The SDGs define many outer goals for transformation, but the IDGs point toward the capacities required to implement them: being, thinking, relating, collaborating and acting. Scandinavia therefore becomes a bridge between futures studies, sustainability and human development.

Further documentation will be needed to fully develop this section, but its place in the argument is already clear: Learning Expeditions can reveal not only ecosystem signatures, but also developmental cultures capable of linking social trust, ecological responsibility and inner transformation.

6.10 — Learning Expeditions as research-action

Across these examples, the Learning Expedition emerges as a research-action format. It does not separate inquiry from transformation. The act of observing becomes an act of learning; the act of learning becomes a basis for institutional change; the documentation of the journey becomes part of a broader archive of foresight.

The method contains several recurring steps:

5.         Preparation: identifying questions, actors, places, readings and expectations.

6.         Immersion: visiting institutions, meeting practitioners, experiencing the ecosystem.

7.         Dialogue: organizing conversations, interviews and debriefings.

8.         Documentation: producing notes, videos, reports and synthetic learning materials.

9.         Interpretation: identifying patterns, contradictions, signatures and strategic lessons.

10.    Translation: converting insights into institutional, pedagogical, territorial or organizational action.

This is why the audiovisual archive is so important. Videos are not illustrations added after the fact. They are traces of encounters, situated thinking and living memory. They allow the Learning Expedition to remain active beyond the journey itself.

6.11 — Limits and risks of the method

The Learning Expedition method is powerful, but it also has limits. It can become superficial if it is reduced to visits without preparation or without post-journey interpretation. It can become mimetic if participants believe that what works in one ecosystem can simply be copied elsewhere. It can become elitist if access is limited to a small circle of leaders. It can become undocumented if insights remain oral and do not enter institutional memory.

For this reason, the method requires discipline: explicit questions, careful selection of interlocutors, daily debriefings, written and audiovisual traces, comparative interpretation, ethical attention to context, and a commitment to translation rather than imitation.

The challenge is not only to travel. The challenge is to learn responsibly from places without reducing them to stereotypes or extracting lessons without reciprocity.

6.12 — Lessons for the foresight-driven university

Learning Expeditions show that a foresight-driven university must be able to learn outside itself. The campus is no longer the only site of knowledge. Cities, territories, companies, museums, foundations, ministries, spiritual centers, startups, universities abroad, fablabs, ecovillages and international organizations become part of the university’s extended classroom.

The method develops at least five capabilities that will be formalized later in the model chapter: exploration, connection, documentation, experimentation and transformation. It also prepares the transition toward ecosystem signatures: if each journey reveals a particular configuration of culture, institutions, values, technologies and narratives, then the next task is to learn how to read these configurations systematically.

This is the purpose of the next chapter. Having examined Learning Expeditions as a method of field-based foresight, Chapter 7 turns to the interpretive framework that emerged from them: reading the world through ecosystem signatures.

 

Chapter 7

Reading the World Through Ecosystem Signatures
Global Innovation Ecosystems as Living Configurations of Culture, Technology, Territory and Meaning

Central question
How can a university learn from innovation ecosystems without merely copying them, and how can it read each ecosystem as a singular configuration of culture, technology, institutions, values and futures in motion?

 

7.0 — Introduction: from Learning Expeditions to ecosystem signatures

The previous chapter presented Learning Expeditions as a method of field-based foresight. Such expeditions are not innovation tourism. They are structured forms of inquiry through which a university learns by entering living ecosystems, meeting actors, observing practices, comparing narratives, documenting weak signals and translating insights into institutional learning.

This chapter now asks what was learned through these explorations. Its central argument is that an innovation ecosystem cannot be understood only through rankings, start-up counts, patents, venture capital flows, research expenditure or technological infrastructure. These indicators are useful, but they are not enough. A place becomes truly intelligible when one grasps its ecosystem signature: the distinctive pattern through which culture, institutions, economy, imagination, values, social relations, technologies, territory and history combine to generate particular forms of innovation.

The Université Catholique de Lille experience did not seek to copy Silicon Valley, Copenhagen, Munich, China, New York, Togo-Benin or Scandinavia. Instead, the learning process consisted in reading each ecosystem as a singular world. Each place became a mirror, a question and a resource for institutional transformation. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to clarify the notion of ecosystem signature and to show how it helped transform global observation into comparative foresight knowledge.

7.1 — Why ecosystem signatures matter

Innovation policy often uses a language of comparison: more start-ups, more unicorns, more patents, more incubators, more talent, more research funding, more international visibility. Such comparison is necessary, but it can easily become reductive. It risks treating ecosystems as if they were interchangeable machines whose components could be transferred from one territory to another.

The IIPEI approach began from a different intuition: the deepest source of an ecosystem is not only its infrastructure, but its culture. Innovation emerges from combinations of trust, permission, failure, aesthetics, institutional density, values, stories, rituals, education, leadership, capital, public policy, social imagination and symbolic identity. These combinations are never identical from one place to another.

An ecosystem signature is therefore the distinctive way a place generates possible futures. It is not a brand slogan. It is a pattern of life. It helps explain why Palo Alto does not innovate like Munich, why Copenhagen does not transform like Silicon Valley, why China cannot be interpreted only through Western start-up categories, and why African innovation ecosystems require endogenous concepts rather than imported development models.

Working definition

An ecosystem signature is the singular configuration of cultural values, institutional arrangements, technological capacities, economic models, social relations, symbolic narratives and territorial conditions through which an ecosystem generates innovation and transformation.

 

7.2 — Dimensions of an ecosystem signature

To read an ecosystem signature, the research cannot stop at visible outputs. It must examine the deeper architecture of the place. Across the Learning Expeditions and documentary work, several dimensions progressively emerged as especially important:

·       Historical depth: the long memories, founding institutions, crises and narratives that shape a place.

·       Cultural values: the implicit norms around risk, trust, excellence, happiness, cooperation, discipline, spirituality, responsibility or failure.

·       Institutional density: the relationships among universities, companies, public actors, foundations, civil society, investors and cultural institutions.

·       Technological orientation: the types of technologies that structure the ecosystem and the imaginaries attached to them.

·       Modes of learning: how people learn, experiment, fail, transmit, mentor, prototype and scale.

·       Economic logic: whether value is generated through capital, industry, design, public services, community, sustainability, data, platforms or social innovation.

·       Social and ethical tensions: inequalities, exclusions, ecological costs, fragilities, contradictions and blind spots.

·       Symbolic imagination: the stories through which the ecosystem understands its own past and projects its own future.

These dimensions also make it possible to compare ecosystems without flattening them. The goal is not to rank the world, but to learn how different places make different futures thinkable.

7.3 — Three early signatures: digital acceleration, perfectionism and happiness

The first IIPEI explorations helped formulate a simple but powerful triad: Palo Alto as the capital of digital acceleration, Munich as the capital of perfectionism, and Copenhagen as the capital of happiness. This typology should not be read as a definitive classification. It was a learning device: a way to grasp the distinct cultural grammars through which different ecosystems produce innovation.

 

This triad was important because it shifted the focus from “best practices” to “ecosystem logics.” The question was not: how can UCL become Silicon Valley? The question was: what does Silicon Valley reveal about the future of knowledge, entrepreneurship, networks and digital civilization? What does Munich reveal about the persistence of industrial excellence? What does Copenhagen reveal about the integration of sustainability, design, trust and collective well-being?

7.4 — Silicon Valley: the signature of acceleration and permission

Silicon Valley became the first major field of immersion because it concentrated many traits of the creation-communication era: interactive technologies, venture capital, start-up culture, Stanford, design thinking, moonshot ambition, digital platforms, rapid prototyping, a culture of pitch and iteration, and the legitimation of failure as learning.

Its signature is not simply technological. It is anthropological and symbolic. Silicon Valley authorizes the future. It creates an environment in which individuals and organizations are encouraged to test improbable combinations, scale quickly, attract capital, narrate ambition and transform technical possibility into global platforms. This is why it became such a powerful learning ecosystem for IIPEI.

But the lesson is not imitation. Silicon Valley also reveals tensions: social inequality, housing pressure, technological utopianism, attention capture, platform power, ecological externalities and the danger of reducing society to innovation metrics. A foresight-driven university must learn from the vitality of the Valley while keeping ethical, social and ecological discernment.

7.5 — China: the signature of civilizational metamorphosis

The China Learning Expedition shifted the method further. China could not be read only as an economic power, manufacturing platform or technological competitor. The journey revealed China as a civilizational ecosystem in metamorphosis, where contemporary art, Taoist references, philanthropy, ecological civilization, territorial transformation, education and Sino-European dialogue intersected.

Its ecosystem signature lies in the scale and speed of transformation, but also in the depth of civilizational continuity. China forced the research to move beyond Western categories of innovation. It raised questions of ecological civilization, intercultural co-learning, planetary governance, spiritual heritage, foundations, soft technology and the capacity of a society to reinterpret ancient references within a global technological transition.

This is why the China journey became a turning point in the methodology. It transformed ecosystem learning into embodied, intercultural and performative research-action. The researcher was not merely observing an external object; the journey itself became a process of transformation.

7.6 — Africa: the signature of endogenous innovation and decolonized futures

The Togo-Benin mission expanded the framework beyond the dominant geographies of innovation. It showed that African innovation ecosystems cannot be understood only by applying Western indicators of technological maturity or start-up performance. Their signature is hybrid, relational, spiritual, informal, communal and often frugal.

The mission revealed a constellation: Woelab and technological democracy, Togocell and mobile leapfrogging, KYA-Energy and solar entrepreneurship, Plan Togo and social innovation, UCAO and Catholic higher education, Songhai and integrated ecological development, Ouidah and historical memory, local spiritual traditions and the need to decolonize the imaginary of development.

The African ecosystem signature therefore raises a decisive question for the foresight-driven university: can universities learn from futures that do not follow the linear path of industrial modernization? Can they recognize harmony, community, forgiveness, informal economies, ecological resilience and spiritual depth as resources for future-making?

7.7 — New York and Scandinavia: governance, learning and planetary responsibility

New York introduces another type of signature: planetary governance. The city brings together universities, the United Nations, diplomacy, foundations, the Holy See, civic leadership, law, technology and global civil society. Unlike Silicon Valley, New York does not only prototype technologies; it stages the institutional negotiation of planetary futures.

Scandinavia, by contrast, opens a different horizon: trust, education, sustainability, social coherence, futures studies, welfare models, ecological responsibility, inner development and the capacity to connect innovation with societal well-being. The Nordic signature is especially important because it links external transformation with interior capacities, a connection later reinforced by the Inner Development Goals.

Together, New York and Scandinavia show that innovation ecosystems cannot be reduced to economic performance. Some ecosystems matter because they produce governance frameworks. Others matter because they cultivate trust, education, responsibility and social imagination. Both are essential for the future of universities.

7.8 — From comparison to discernment

The notion of ecosystem signature changes the act of comparison. It prevents the university from becoming a passive consumer of benchmarks. Instead of asking which ecosystem is “best,” the foresight-driven university asks what each ecosystem reveals about the future: what is emerging there, what is fragile, what is transferable, what is culturally specific, what is ethically problematic and what could inspire institutional transformation elsewhere.

This form of comparison is closer to discernment than to benchmarking. It requires attention to values, contradictions, contexts and hidden assumptions. It also requires humility: no ecosystem contains the whole future. Each one reveals a partial future, a possible path, a warning, a question or a resource.

7.9 — Lessons for the foresight-driven university

The analysis of ecosystem signatures provides several lessons for the foresight-driven university:

1.    A university should learn from places where futures are already being prototyped.

2.    It should compare ecosystems without reducing them to rankings.

3.    It should read culture, values and institutions as carefully as technologies and business models.

4.    It should remain attentive to the dark sides of innovation ecosystems.

5.    It should translate insights into its own mission rather than copy external models.

6.    It should build a living memory of field observations through writings, videos, interviews and case notes.

7.    It should connect global learning with territorial responsibility.

8.    It should maintain ethical, civic and ecological discernment in all forms of international benchmarking.

These lessons prepare the transition to the next chapter. Once the university has learned to read ecosystem signatures around the world, the decisive question becomes territorial: how can this knowledge help local actors understand and transform their own ecosystems?

7.10 — Transition to Chapter 8: from ecosystem signatures to territorial transformation

The study of global ecosystem signatures created a powerful comparative intelligence. Yet foresight cannot remain a global observation exercise. If it is to become transformative, it must return to territories, institutions and actors capable of using this knowledge. The challenge is to translate global ecosystem learning into local and regional capacity-building.

This is the role of Symbiogora. The next chapter shows how the research on global innovation ecosystems became a territorial learning community, helping actors move from admiration of external models toward the understanding, activation and transformation of their own ecosystems.

Editorial bridge

Chapter 7 reads the world through ecosystem signatures. Chapter 8 asks how this global learning can be translated into territorial transformation through Symbiogora and the Hauts-de-France experience.

 

 

Chapter 8 — Symbiogora: From Global Ecosystem Learning to Territorial Transformation

Central Question

How can global learning from innovation ecosystems be translated into territorial capacity-building and shared transformation?

Chapter thesis. Symbiogora marks the moment when the IIPEI research on global innovation ecosystems becomes a territorial pedagogy of transformation. It translates international ecosystem learning into a learning community for territorial actors, helping them understand, activate and transform their own ecosystems rather than merely imitate external models.

8.0 — Introduction: why Symbiogora matters

The preceding chapters showed how the Université Catholique de Lille experience learned from innovation ecosystems through travel, comparison, interviews, seminars and field-based foresight. Palo Alto, Copenhagen, Munich, China, Africa, New York and other learning geographies gave the university access to different ecosystem signatures. Yet global learning creates a decisive question: what happens when the knowledge gathered from the world comes back to territories?

Symbiogora answers this question. It represents the moment when the exploration of global innovation ecosystems becomes a method for territorial learning. Instead of treating Silicon Valley, Copenhagen, Munich or China as models to copy, Symbiogora asks how territories can become more conscious of their own dynamics, resources, blockages, communities, futures and capacity to act.

This chapter therefore protects Symbiogora as a central link in the book. It is not a peripheral initiative. It is the bridge between IIPEI’s world exploration and the later institutional and civic developments of UCL: the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS and the foresight-driven university model. If IIPEI learned from global ecosystems, Symbiogora asks how territories can learn about themselves as ecosystems.

8.1 — From global benchmark to territorial responsibility

The early IIPEI work was organized around the observation of innovative ecosystems across the world. The first learning expeditions explored the cultural, economic, educational and organizational signatures of places where innovation seemed especially dynamic. This global benchmark was valuable, but it also carried a risk: the risk of turning living ecosystems into abstract recipes. A territory cannot become Silicon Valley by copying the surface features of Silicon Valley. Nor can a university or a region reproduce Copenhagen, Munich, Taipei or Stanford without understanding the deeper cultural, historical and relational conditions that make each ecosystem singular.

Symbiogora emerges from this realization. Its implicit critique is that territorial actors do not need ready-made models imported from elsewhere. They need the capacity to understand their own ecosystem. They need to identify what already exists, what is latent, what is fragmented, what needs to be connected, and what kind of future their territory can realistically and desirably pursue.

The movement is therefore double:

19.    First, global ecosystem learning expands perception. It shows that innovation takes many forms and depends on culture, values, institutions, density, openness, capital, talent, trust, public policy and narrative.

20.    Second, territorial translation turns this expanded perception into capacity-building. It helps local actors read their own situation differently and act together more intelligently.

This is why Symbiogora is essential. It prevents global benchmarking from becoming mimicry and transforms it into territorial responsibility.

8.2 — Symbiogora as a territorial learning community

Symbiogora can be understood as a learning community dedicated to actors of territorial ecosystems. Its purpose is to create a space where public, private, academic, civic and intermediary actors can learn together how territorial ecosystems function and how they can be strengthened. The emphasis is therefore not only on strategy, but on collective learning.

A territorial learning community differs from a conventional seminar or consultancy intervention. It does not merely transmit expert knowledge from the outside. It creates conditions for participants to compare experiences, name their problems, discover patterns, build shared language, and recognize themselves as co-actors of an ecosystem.

In this sense, Symbiogora translates three IIPEI intuitions into territorial practice:

·       Innovation is ecosystemic: it emerges from relations among heterogeneous actors rather than from isolated organizations.

·       Foresight is collaborative: territories need shared anticipatory capacity, not only expert reports.

·       Transformation is learned: actors must develop the ability to read, connect and activate their own ecosystem over time.

The word Symbiogora itself suggests an agora of symbiosis: a place where territorial actors can learn to cultivate more cooperative, mutually beneficial and future-oriented relationships. This resonates directly with the later idea of the foresight-driven university as an institution that connects rather than commands, catalyzes rather than controls, and helps ecosystems become conscious of their own potential.

8.3 — Key actors and institutional positioning

Symbiogora is associated with a constellation of actors already important in the IIPEI and territorial foresight trajectory. Michel Saloff-Coste brought the global ecosystem research and the foresight perspective. Vincent Gollain brought expertise in territorial attractiveness, economic development and place marketing. Olivier Réaud brought the logic of collective intelligence, facilitation and collaborative dynamics. Éric Seulliet and La Fabrique du Futur connected Symbiogora to broader networks of prospective, open innovation and living labs.

This combination is important. Symbiogora is not merely a foresight initiative, nor only a territorial marketing initiative, nor only a facilitation method. It lies at the intersection of these three fields:

·       Foresight: because territories must anticipate change and imagine desirable futures.

·       Territorial development: because ecosystems are embedded in places, economies, institutions and narratives.

·       Collective intelligence: because transformation requires actors to learn and act together.

The project therefore enriches the UCL experience by demonstrating that foresight cannot remain at the level of international exploration. It must return to territories and help them build their own collective capacity.

8.4 — The concept of territorial translation

The central concept of this chapter is territorial translation. It describes the process by which insights from global innovation ecosystems are not copied, but translated into the specific context of a territory. Translation is not duplication. It requires interpretation, adaptation and discernment.

A territory has its own history, institutions, industries, universities, social tensions, cultural resources, political structures, infrastructures and imaginaries. What works in one ecosystem may fail in another if transferred mechanically. Territorial translation therefore asks: what is the equivalent function of a practice in another context? What local resources could play a similar role? What relationships are missing? What narratives prevent cooperation? What assets are underestimated?

This way of thinking is highly relevant for the foresight-driven university. A university cannot simply import best practices from global benchmarks. It must learn how to translate external insights into its own mission, territory and culture. Symbiogora anticipates this principle by making translation itself a collective learning process.

8.5 — From territorial attractiveness to ecosystem capacity-building

Territorial development has often been framed through attractiveness: how can a territory attract investors, companies, talents, tourists, students or institutions? This remains important, but Symbiogora suggests a deeper movement. The future of territories depends not only on attractiveness, but also on ecosystem capacity-building.

Ecosystem capacity-building means developing the ability of territorial actors to understand their interdependencies, identify their common challenges, share foresight, mobilize resources, create trust and design collective action. It is less about selling the territory from the outside and more about increasing the territory’s internal capacity to learn and transform.

This shift is important because transformation cannot be outsourced. Consultants, universities and experts can help, but the territory itself must become capable. Symbiogora’s value lies in creating learning conditions where territorial actors recognize that they are not simply stakeholders around a project, but co-producers of an ecosystem.

8.6 — Hauts-de-France as territorial context

The Hauts-de-France region provides an important context for understanding the territorial dimension of the UCL foresight trajectory. The region combines industrial history, social challenges, entrepreneurial energy, health innovation, logistics, agroindustry, higher education, cultural resources and ecological transition issues. This makes it a natural terrain for territorial foresight.

The UCL experience is not only international. It is also rooted in Lille, the Hauts-de-France region, and a dense network of regional actors. The RRI 2019 programme, the Industry of the Future event, HÉMiSF4iRE, ECOPOSS, regional innovation ecosystems and possible partnerships with the Banque des Territoires all point in the same direction: the university is a territorial actor. Its foresight work has meaning only if it contributes to the transformation of the places in which it is embedded.

Symbiogora therefore helps close a loop. The university learns from the world, but it returns to its territory. The territory becomes not simply the location of the university, but a partner in future-making.

8.7 — Symbiogora and the foresight-driven university

Symbiogora contributes directly to the model of the foresight-driven university in at least five ways.

21.    It shows that foresight must be territorialized. Futures thinking becomes meaningful when it is connected to places, actors and concrete transformation challenges.

22.    It shows that ecosystem learning is not only external. A community must learn to see itself as an ecosystem.

23.    It shows that universities can function as catalysts of collective intelligence among territorial actors.

24.    It shows that foresight requires translation between scales: global, national, regional, metropolitan and local.

25.    It shows that innovation ecosystems are not only objects of study; they can become methods of collective learning.

These contributions prepare several later developments. The Direction de la Prospective will institutionalize foresight inside UCL. EcosystemsInMotion will digitalize and internationalize ecosystem dialogue. ECOPOSS will open futures to the public. IFRN will extend the network internationally. But Symbiogora occupies a specific place: it is the territorial hinge.

8.8 — Risks and limits

Symbiogora is conceptually powerful, but it also reveals several challenges. The first is documentation. Compared with IIPEI, EcosystemsInMotion or ECOPOSS, the Symbiogora archive still needs consolidation: founding documents, programme materials, participant lists, case outputs and follow-up evidence are required to strengthen the historical account.

The second challenge is continuity. A learning community depends on regular meetings, facilitation, trust and visible value for participants. Without sustained animation, a community can remain a promising concept rather than an operational long-term device.

The third challenge is evaluation. How does one measure the effect of a territorial learning community? By number of participants? projects created? partnerships strengthened? narratives changed? territorial confidence increased? As with foresight more generally, the most important changes may be cultural and relational, therefore difficult to quantify.

The fourth challenge is political. Territorial ecosystems include competition, institutional mandates, power asymmetries and conflicting interests. A learning community must create enough trust to allow cooperation without denying conflict.

8.9 — Lessons for territorial foresight

Symbiogora offers several lessons for universities seeking to become foresight-driven.

26.    Do not copy ecosystems; learn from their principles and translate them carefully.

27.    Treat territories as learning ecosystems, not merely as administrative spaces.

28.    Combine foresight, territorial development and collective intelligence.

29.    Help actors develop shared language before expecting shared strategy.

30.    Document processes, not only results, because territorial learning often occurs through conversations, comparisons and reframing.

31.    Use the university as a trusted convener capable of bringing heterogeneous actors into dialogue.

These lessons reinforce the broader thesis of the book: a foresight-driven university is not only a university that studies the future. It is a university that helps ecosystems become capable of learning and transforming themselves.

8.10 — Transition to Chapter 9: from territorial learning to embedded foresight

Symbiogora shows how global ecosystem research can be translated into territorial learning. But the next step is institutional. If the university wants to support such territorial and societal transformation over time, foresight itself must become embedded within the university’s strategic architecture.

This is the role of the Direction de la Prospective. It takes the exploratory and territorial lessons of IIPEI and Symbiogora and gives them an institutional form. The next chapter therefore examines how foresight became not only a method of exploration, but an embedded function within the Université Catholique de Lille.

Part IV The Foresight-Driven University From Embedded Foresight to Public Futures

Chapter 9 — Embedding Foresight: The Direction de la Prospective

Central Question :
How can foresight become an embedded institutional function within a university without lousing its exploratory, creative and transformative power?

Chapter thesis. The Direction de la Prospective marks the moment when foresight at the Université Catholique de Lille ceased to be only an exploratory research practice and became an embedded institutional function. It connected strategy, monitoring, Learning Expeditions, territorial foresight, public futures, international networks and governance support within a single operational architecture.

9.0 — Introduction: From exploration to institutional embedding

The creation and structuring of the Direction de la Prospective represents a decisive step in the Université Catholique de Lille experience. With IIPEI, foresight had become exploratory, international and ecosystemic. Through Learning Expeditions, video interviews, publications, seminars and global benchmarks, the university began to learn from the places where emerging futures were already being prototyped. With the Direction de la Prospective, this exploratory practice became more deeply embedded in the strategic life of the institution.

This chapter examines the fragile but decisive passage from foresight as a project to foresight as an institutional capability. It asks how a university can create a foresight function without reducing foresight to bureaucracy. The challenge is subtle. If foresight remains only personal, informal or event-based, it risks disappearing with the people who carry it. If foresight becomes too administrative, it may lose the imagination, openness and transdisciplinary energy that make it valuable. The UCL experience shows that the task is not to freeze foresight into a rigid structure, but to embed it as a living interface between strategy, learning, experimentation, public engagement and transformation.

The Direction de la Prospective is therefore not treated here as a mere organizational unit. It is treated as an institutional experiment: a way to translate journeys, research-action, ecosystem observation, civic dialogue and international networking into a transversal capacity of the university.

9.1 — From IIPEI to the Direction de la Prospective

IIPEI constituted the first laboratory. It allowed the university to explore innovation ecosystems, build relationships with companies and territories, organize Learning Expeditions, produce audiovisual interviews, and develop a comparative understanding of global innovation cultures. But IIPEI also revealed a deeper possibility: foresight could become more than an institute dedicated to innovation ecosystems. It could become a strategic function serving the evolution of the university itself.

The passage from IIPEI to the Direction de la Prospective should therefore be understood as a change in institutional depth. IIPEI opened the world to the university. The Direction de la Prospective brought this world-reading capacity back into the university’s own strategic metabolism. The question was no longer only: what can be learned from Silicon Valley, Copenhagen, China, Africa or New York? The question became: how can such learning transform the university’s governance, projects, partnerships, public role and long-term responsibility?

This transition did not cancel IIPEI. On the contrary, it extended its logic. The Direction de la Prospective inherited the ecosystemic, international and collaborative DNA of IIPEI, while placing it within the broader framework of university development and strategy. It became a bridge between exploration and decision, between external benchmarks and internal transformation, between future-oriented ideas and institutional action.

9.2 — Foresight as a strategic university function

The Direction de la Prospective gave foresight a formal institutional address. Its function was not to predict the future, nor to produce isolated scenario exercises. Its purpose was to organize strategic attention: to identify changes that could affect the university, to connect internal actors around long-term issues, to support governance, and to maintain interfaces with external partners at local, national and international levels.

Several dimensions define this strategic function:

·       Strategic monitoring: identifying technological, economic, social, territorial, ecological and international transformations relevant to the university.

·       Decision support: providing concepts, signals, analyses, scenarios and comparative insights that can help leadership deliberate under uncertainty.

·       Transversality: connecting schools, faculties, support functions, research centers, students, international relations, ethics, innovation and campus transformation.

·       External interfaces: linking the university to companies, territories, public institutions, foresight organizations, foundations and international networks.

·       Capitalization: documenting learning through reports, videos, books, events, archives, blogs and syntheses.

In this sense, the Direction de la Prospective anticipates the later model of the foresight-driven university. It does not merely add foresight to the university. It asks how foresight can become a transversal organ of institutional intelligence.

9.3 — The 2021 internal action plan: from vision to portfolio

The internal action plan of 2021 is a key document because it shows foresight becoming a portfolio of projects. It moves beyond general ambition and organizes a concrete roadmap. This roadmap connects EcosystemsInMotion, hybrid world tours, Learning Journeys, territorial foresight, ECOPOSS, an International School of Foresight, a think tank for the Métropole Européenne de Lille, the Tour de France des régions, and strategic reporting to university leadership.

This action plan reveals that the Direction de la Prospective was conceived as an integrative platform. It was not a single project; it was an architecture of projects. It was not only research; it was also pedagogy, public events, international learning, territorial engagement, strategic monitoring and institutional acculturation.

9.4 — Governance and leadership: foresight as a supported institutional experiment

Foresight becomes institutionally meaningful only when it is connected to governance. In the UCL experience, this connection depended on a constellation of leadership roles rather than on one isolated individual. Michel Saloff-Coste provided the intellectual, methodological and network-based continuity. Jean-Marc Assié provided the strategic anchoring within Development and Strategy. Patrick Scauflaire’s role was decisive in linking foresight to the broader institutional vision of a university at the heart of transitions.

The governance dimension is important for a reason often underestimated in foresight work: anticipation is not only a cognitive activity. It is also a political and organizational function. A university may produce excellent futures thinking, but if this thinking is not connected to decision-making, resource allocation, project design, communication and leadership attention, it remains peripheral. The Direction de la Prospective sought to avoid this peripheralization by establishing regular dialogue with university governance and by linking foresight to concrete projects.

This governance anchoring also reveals a fragility. Embedded foresight requires champions, but it cannot depend only on champions. It must progressively move from personal energy to institutional memory, from informal networks to documented processes, from exceptional events to durable capabilities. This tension runs through the whole chapter.

9.5 — The internal ecosystem of foresight

The Direction de la Prospective was not conceived as a solitary unit. Its effectiveness depended on its ability to connect an internal ecosystem. The action plan and related documents show a constellation involving HÉMiSF4iRE, ETHICS, LIVE TREE, international relations, communication, faculties, the creative campus, digital services, students, chaplaincy, companies and external partners.

This internal ecosystem matters because foresight cannot be monopolized by one office. If foresight is to become a university capability, it must circulate through multiple functions: research, teaching, innovation, campus life, student engagement, international development, ethics, ecological transition and public events. The Direction de la Prospective therefore works less like a command center than like a connector, translator and catalyst.

Three forms of internal connection are especially important:

1.         Interdisciplinary connection: linking schools, faculties, researchers and domains of expertise that often remain separated.

2.         Operational connection: relating foresight to projects, events, trips, publications, videos, workshops and institutional programs.

3.         Cultural connection: helping the university develop a shared language of future-oriented responsibility.

These forms of connection prepare the later model of the foresight-driven university. They show that embedded foresight is not only about planning. It is about building a culture of attention, dialogue and transformative learning within the institution.

9.6 — Foresight as institutional interface

One of the strongest lessons of the Direction de la Prospective is that foresight functions as an interface. It connects the university to the world, but it also connects the world back to the university. The same movement appears repeatedly throughout the UCL trajectory: learning from global ecosystems, returning to territorial responsibility, opening public debate through ECOPOSS, connecting to planetary governance through New York and IFRN, and finally deepening the whole trajectory through integral ecology and EPISTEMA.

The Direction de la Prospective sits at the intersection of several interfaces:

·       University and territory: through Hauts-de-France, Symbiogora, RRI, the Métropole Européenne de Lille and regional foresight projects.

·       University and companies: through IIPEI sponsors, Decathlon, strategic foresight missions and innovation ecosystem learning.

·       University and civil society: through ECOPOSS, public futures, books, cinema, debates and citizen participation.

·       University and international networks: through Learning Expeditions, WorldFuture, CIFS, New York, IFRN and global benchmarks.

·       University and spiritual-ethical horizons: through integral ecology, Catholic social thought, the Holy See, and the critique of the technocratic paradigm.

The Direction de la Prospective therefore embodies a crucial idea: the university of the future must not be closed upon itself. It must become porous, relational and interpretive. It must learn to read the world and help the world deliberate about its futures.

9.7 — From strategic foresight to foresight acculturation

A foresight function cannot only produce analyses for leadership. It must gradually acculturate the institution. Foresight acculturation means helping people acquire habits of long-term thinking, scenario awareness, systemic imagination, ethical discernment and comfort with uncertainty. It is not enough to ask university actors to attend a seminar on the future. They need repeated exposure to future-oriented practices: workshops, expeditions, public debates, interviews, publications, student involvement, artistic experiences and documented reflection.

The Direction de la Prospective contributed to this acculturation in several ways. The first was by producing events and encounters that made future issues visible. The second was by organizing or preparing Learning Journeys and international exchanges. The third was by connecting foresight to public formats such as ECOPOSS. The fourth was by documenting debates and interviews in audiovisual form. The fifth was by supporting the idea of an International School of Foresight, which would translate foresight into education and training.

This acculturation function is essential. Without it, foresight remains the concern of specialists. With it, foresight becomes a shared institutional habit.

9.8 — Limits, tensions and fragilities

The institutionalization of foresight is not simple. The UCL experience reveals several tensions that should be named rather than hidden.

First, there is a tension between exploration and administration. Foresight requires openness, uncertainty, experimentation and imaginative risk. Institutions require calendars, budgets, reporting, responsibilities and accountability. The challenge is to make administration serve exploration, rather than letting administration neutralize it.

Second, there is a tension between personal leadership and institutional continuity. The foresight trajectory was strongly carried by individuals, networks and personal energy. This gave it vitality, but also created fragility. A foresight-driven university must gradually transform personal networks into transmissible institutional memory.

Third, there is a tension between visibility and depth. Events such as ECOPOSS or EcosystemsInMotion create visibility, but the deeper work of foresight concerns culture, assumptions, strategy and long-term transformation. The institution must not confuse public presence with deep change.

Fourth, there is a tension around impact measurement. How does one measure the effect of foresight? By number of participants? videos? publications? projects launched? strategic decisions influenced? cultural shifts? Foresight produces both visible outputs and invisible changes in perception. The latter are harder to evaluate, but often more important.

Fifth, there is a tension between local responsibility and planetary ambition. UCL’s foresight work connects Hauts-de-France to Silicon Valley, China, Africa, New York, IFRN, SDGs, IDGs and integral ecology. Such breadth is powerful, but it requires careful narrative discipline to remain coherent.

9.9 — Lessons for the foresight-driven university

The Direction de la Prospective offers several transferable lessons for other universities.

4.         Foresight needs an institutional home, but not a silo. It must be identifiable while remaining transversal.

5.         Foresight must connect strategy and imagination. If it becomes only administrative, it loses its force; if it remains only imaginative, it loses its institutional effect.

6.         Foresight must be documented. Publications, videos, timelines, evidence matrices and archives transform events into institutional memory.

7.         Foresight must connect scales: campus, territory, company, city, nation, international networks and planet.

8.         Foresight must be public. A university cannot keep future thinking restricted to leaders and experts; it must open futures to students, citizens and society.

9.         Foresight must work on inner and outer transformation. The future cannot be addressed only by strategic plans; it also requires values, attention, discernment and capacities of transformation.

These lessons anticipate the eight capabilities articulated later in Chapter 12. The Direction de la Prospective does not yet fully realize the foresight-driven university model, but it provides one of its most concrete prototypes.

9.10 — Transition to Chapter 10: from embedded foresight to digital research-action

The Direction de la Prospective created the institutional conditions for a new form of foresight work. But the Covid-19 crisis forced this work to transform again. Physical Learning Expeditions became impossible. International travel was interrupted. Yet the need for global comparison, dialogue and ecosystem learning did not disappear. On the contrary, crisis made it more urgent.

EcosystemsInMotion emerged in this context as a digital and hybrid continuation of the IIPEI logic. It translated the Learning Expedition into a distributed research-action format, bringing together experts, companies, academics, diplomats and institutional actors around regions of the world. If the Direction de la Prospective embedded foresight within the university, EcosystemsInMotion showed how embedded foresight could become digitally distributed under crisis conditions.

The next chapter examines this turn: the passage from institutional foresight to digital research-action in a time of systemic disruption.

Draft status and source base

This chapter is based on the consolidated project corpus developed for The Foresight-Driven University, especially the documents concerning the Direction de la Prospective, the internal action plan of 25 March 2021, the job description of Michel Saloff-Coste, the 2024 strategic retrospective, the IIPEI chronology, and the surrounding documentation on EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, Symbiogora and IFRN. In the final manuscript, each factual statement should be cross-referenced to Appendix D — Evidence Matrix and Appendix A — Timeline.

 

Chapter 10 EcosystemsInMotion: Digital Research-Action in a Time of Crisis

Draft chapter for The Foresight-Driven University

 

Central Question

How can crisis accelerate the development of foresight capabilities and transform international learning into digital research-action?

 

Chapter Thesis. EcosystemsInMotion marks the moment when the Université Catholique de Lille transformed the impossibility of physical travel during the Covid period into a digital and collaborative world tour of innovation ecosystems. It converted crisis into method: a distributed research-action process connecting universities, companies, diplomats, public actors, futurists, artists and civil society around the question of how innovative ecosystems become transforming ecosystems.

10.1 From mobility to distributed learning

The Learning Expeditions of IIPEI were initially built on physical presence. They required immersion in places, encounters with actors, visits to campuses, companies, cultural sites and urban ecosystems, and collective debriefings through which participants transformed observation into strategic insight. Palo Alto, Munich, Copenhagen, China, Togo-Benin, Decathlon in Copenhagen and New York all shared this pedagogy of movement: to learn from a future in motion, one had to enter the places where that future was already being prototyped.

The Covid crisis interrupted this logic at its most basic level. Travel, meetings, conferences and field immersion became difficult or impossible. Yet the interruption did not end the method. Instead, it forced a methodological shift: if the university could no longer travel physically to the world, it had to bring the world into a distributed digital space. EcosystemsInMotion was born from this reversal. It turned the constraint of immobility into an opportunity for collective intelligence.

This shift is important for the book because it shows that foresight capabilities are not only developed under ideal conditions. They are also produced under pressure, when institutions must invent new formats to maintain attention, dialogue and learning in a period of uncertainty. EcosystemsInMotion therefore belongs to the history of resilience: it is a crisis-born transformation of the Learning Expedition method.

10.2 From innovative ecosystems to transforming ecosystems

The title EcosystemsInMotion is significant. It does not describe ecosystems as fixed models to be benchmarked. It describes them as dynamic, unstable, evolving and transforming. The central question was no longer simply: what makes an ecosystem innovative? The question became: how do innovative ecosystems respond to systemic crises, and under what conditions can they become engines of wider transformation?

This shift from innovative ecosystems to transforming ecosystems is one of the conceptual advances of the UCL experience. The earlier IIPEI work had already shown that innovation emerges from dense interactions among universities, companies, investors, cultures, infrastructures, policies, talents and informal networks. EcosystemsInMotion added another layer: innovation ecosystems must now be evaluated according to their capacity to contribute to social, ecological, territorial and civilizational transformation.

In this sense, the programme did not reduce innovation to startups, technology or competitiveness. It asked whether innovation ecosystems could help societies move toward more sustainable, inclusive, digital, decarbonized and ecologically responsible forms of civilization. EcosystemsInMotion therefore connects Chapter 5 on innovation ecosystems with later chapters on public futures, planetary governance and integral ecology.

10.3 The architecture of the virtual world tour

The programme was organized as a virtual world tour. Its logic was geographical, thematic and civilizational at the same time. The America day reconnected the UCL trajectory to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, Burning Man and Stanford. It brought together questions of American culture, innovation ecosystems, strategy, data ethics, digital identity and responsible digital leadership.

The Asia day expanded the inquiry toward China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Asia-Europe relations. Its materials brought together soft technology, ecological civilization, foresight strategy, diplomacy, Catholic universities, AI in education, hybrid learning, creative industries and intercultural dialogue. Asia was not treated as a homogeneous block; it appeared as a plurality of civilizational, technological, educational and cultural futures.

The Europe and Africa strands extended the world tour toward additional regional perspectives. Even where documentation still requires consolidation, their presence in the roadmap is important: EcosystemsInMotion was conceived as a genuinely worldwide inquiry, not as a bilateral comparison between Europe and the United States. It aimed to create a comparative conversation among several regions of the world and to ask what each could teach about transformation.

10.4 Digital research-action as a method

EcosystemsInMotion was not merely a webinar series. Its logic was closer to digital research-action. It connected preparation, invitation, dialogue, documentation, video, synthesis and restitution. The method mobilized experts and practitioners across countries, sectors and disciplines. It crossed academic, business, diplomatic, cultural and civic perspectives. It also created traces: programmes, biographies, recordings, digital booklets, syntheses and future archives.

The word research-action is essential. Research-action does not observe transformation from the outside. It participates in the construction of shared understanding and in the activation of networks. Through EcosystemsInMotion, UCL did not only collect information about ecosystems. It created a temporary global learning space in which actors could compare perceptions, formulate questions, interpret crises and identify possible directions for action.

Digital research-action also modified the temporality of the Learning Expedition. Physical expeditions are intense, located and embodied. Digital expeditions are distributed, replayable, easier to archive and potentially more inclusive. They lose some of the sensory depth of place, but gain the possibility of assembling geographically dispersed actors into a common conversation. The foresight-driven university needs both modes.

10.5 Distributed intelligence and audiovisual memory

One of the most important continuities between IIPEI and EcosystemsInMotion is the role of audiovisual memory. Since the early years of IIPEI, filmed interviews and recorded conversations had been central to the method. EcosystemsInMotion extended this logic into the digital environment. The programme was not only a live experience; it was also an archive in formation.

This matters because foresight is fragile. Ideas emerge in conversations, but they disappear quickly if they are not documented, indexed, revisited and connected to later work. Videos, biographies, programmes, digital event pages and syntheses become a living memory of foresight. They allow the university to transform temporary encounters into durable knowledge resources.

The audiovisual dimension also changes the epistemology of the project. The archive is not only textual; it includes voices, gestures, sequences, interactions and situated ways of speaking about the future. In a foresight-driven university, video is not an illustration added after the fact. It is a primary source and a form of institutional memory.

10.6 Crisis as accelerator of institutional learning

The Covid period revealed a paradox. Crisis limits action, but it can also accelerate institutional learning. EcosystemsInMotion shows how constraints can force method, clarify priorities and create new formats. The impossibility of travel produced the need for a virtual world tour. The fragmentation of attention created the need for structured digital conversations. The uncertainty of the period made foresight more necessary, not less.

This lesson is directly relevant to higher education. Universities often treat crises as disruptions to be managed until normality returns. The UCL experience suggests another possibility: crisis can become a learning accelerator if it is converted into a structured inquiry. The foresight-driven university is not protected from uncertainty; it develops capabilities to learn within uncertainty.

EcosystemsInMotion therefore anticipated one of the eight capabilities later formalized in Chapter 12: transformation. Transformation means not only changing external programmes, but changing the way the institution learns, documents, connects and interprets the world under pressure.

10.7 The role of actors, networks and interdisciplinarity

The richness of EcosystemsInMotion came from the diversity of its participants. The America and Asia sessions involved foresight practitioners, university leaders, strategists, diplomats, entrepreneurs, artists, researchers, innovation specialists, representatives of Catholic higher education, SDG-oriented actors and experts in artificial intelligence, design, education and public policy.

This diversity was not decorative. It reflected a core assumption of ecosystem thinking: no single discipline, institution or actor can understand systemic transformation alone. The future of ecosystems is produced through interactions among technological, cultural, economic, political, ecological and spiritual dimensions. To study them, the university must convene unlikely conversations.

In this sense, EcosystemsInMotion extended the principle of the improbable encounter already present in IIPEI and In Principio. Digital space did not eliminate this principle; it gave it another form. The platform became a meeting point for distributed expertise and cross-cultural interpretation.

10.8 Limits and fragilities

EcosystemsInMotion also reveals several limitations. Digital formats can increase access, but they can also reduce the depth of embodied experience. A virtual visit cannot replace the atmosphere of a campus, the density of a city, the informal conversation after a meeting or the sensory intelligence of place. The digital world tour therefore should not be interpreted as a replacement for Learning Expeditions, but as a complementary form.

A second limitation concerns documentation. If recordings, syntheses, metadata and participant lists are not systematically archived, much of the value of the programme can be lost. The more distributed the method becomes, the more important evidence discipline becomes. This is why the audiovisual archive, evidence matrix and index of persons are not technical appendices; they are conditions for the durability of the knowledge produced.

A third limitation concerns continuity. Crisis-born projects can be powerful but temporary. Their impact depends on whether they are later connected to institutional strategy, teaching, research, public engagement and international networks. ECOPOSS, IFRN and the foresight-driven university model are precisely the mechanisms through which the insights of EcosystemsInMotion can be preserved and extended.

10.9 Lessons for the foresight-driven university

EcosystemsInMotion provides several lessons for the model developed in Chapter 12. First, foresight must be able to move across formats: physical expeditions, digital conversations, hybrid events, public festivals, archives and international networks. Second, foresight must connect regions of the world without flattening their differences. Third, foresight must document itself if it wants to become collective memory. Fourth, foresight must treat crisis not only as risk, but as a moment of accelerated learning.

The programme also confirms that the foresight-driven university is a convening institution. It does not own the future; it creates conditions in which different actors can explore it together. It organizes conversations that would not otherwise happen. It transforms dispersed expertise into shared inquiry. It turns crisis into learning and learning into institutional capability.

In the broader arc of the book, EcosystemsInMotion is therefore not an isolated Covid experiment. It is a hinge: between Learning Expeditions and ECOPOSS, between ecosystem research and public futures, between the physical and the digital, between innovation ecosystems and transforming ecosystems.

Transition to Chapter 11 — ECOPOSS: Making Futures Public

EcosystemsInMotion showed that foresight could continue to operate when physical mobility was interrupted. It transformed crisis into digital research-action and demonstrated that a university could convene distributed actors around emerging futures. Yet this digital opening still remained relatively close to expert communities, institutional networks and structured foresight conversations.

The next step was to make futures public. ECOPOSS extended the logic of foresight beyond expert dialogue and transformed it into a civic, cultural, artistic and intergenerational experience. Where EcosystemsInMotion connected the world through digital research-action, ECOPOSS invited society to explore, imagine and debate desirable futures. The next chapter therefore examines how UCL moved from digital foresight to public futures.

 

Chapter 11

ECOPOSS: Making Futures Public

 Central Question

How can a university make futures public, civic, cultural, and desirable?

Chapter Thesis

This chapter interprets ECOPOSS as the moment when the foresight trajectory of the Université Catholique de Lille leaves the expert circle and becomes a public culture of the future. ECOPOSS does not simply present futures to an audience. It creates conditions in which citizens, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, families, institutions, and children can explore, debate, experience, and imagine desirable futures together.

In the sequence of the book, ECOPOSS closes the movement from embedded foresight to public futures. The Direction de la Prospective gives foresight institutional form. EcosystemsInMotion transforms foresight into digital research-action during crisis. ECOPOSS then opens foresight to society through a festival-like architecture of books, cinema, talks, exhibitions, villages, scientific meetings, and civic debate.

The central claim of this chapter is that a foresight-driven university must not only produce scenarios, reports, strategies, or expert knowledge. It must also create public spaces where futures become visible, discussable, desirable, and actionable. In this sense, ECOPOSS is not an additional event in the UCL trajectory. It is the civic manifestation of the foresight-driven university.

11.0 — Introduction: From public futures to institutional model

ECOPOSS occupies a decisive place in the architecture of this book because it changes the scale, language and audience of foresight. After IIPEI, Learning Expeditions, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective and EcosystemsInMotion, foresight is no longer only an expert practice, an institutional function or a research-action method. With ECOPOSS, foresight becomes a public experience.

This chapter therefore examines ECOPOSS not simply as an event, but as a civic format through which a university can make futures visible, discussable and desirable. ECOPOSS transforms the campus and its partners into a public arena where sciences, arts, books, cinema, debates, exhibitions, young audiences, researchers, entrepreneurs and citizens meet around the question of futures worth inhabiting.

The chapter also prepares the conceptual move that follows. If ECOPOSS demonstrates that futures can be made public, Chapter 12 asks what institutional capabilities are required to sustain such a movement. The transition from ECOPOSS to the foresight-driven university model is therefore not incidental: it is the passage from a public manifestation of foresight to the institutional capacities that make that manifestation possible.

11.1 — Why ECOPOSS matters in the book

ECOPOSS matters because it transforms the status of foresight. Until ECOPOSS, much of the UCL foresight trajectory was organized through institutes, seminars, learning expeditions, expert networks, research-action projects, internal strategic work, and international events. ECOPOSS marks a shift in scale and audience. It asks whether the future can become a shared public question rather than the exclusive responsibility of experts, leaders, consultants, researchers, or public authorities.

The event is also important because it gives a concrete form to the idea of desirable futures. Desirable futures cannot remain abstract values or distant scenarios. They must be made visible through places, stories, images, debates, books, films, experiments, workshops, and embodied encounters. ECOPOSS translates foresight into an experience of participation.

For the architecture of the book, ECOPOSS gives Chapter 11 a specific function. The chapter is not only about a festival. It is about the public democratization of foresight. It shows that a foresight-driven university must create civic agoras where society can learn to imagine and discuss futures before those futures become crises.

11.2 — From institutional foresight to public culture of the future

The UCL trajectory begins with a research-action institute on innovation ecosystems, expands through learning expeditions, and becomes institutionally embedded through the Direction de la Prospective. ECOPOSS transforms that trajectory into a cultural and civic proposition. It asks: what happens when a university turns its campus, networks, researchers, cultural partners, students, and public spaces into a shared laboratory of desirable futures?

This shift is decisive. Foresight often remains hidden inside strategy departments, consulting processes, think tanks, policy units, or academic conferences. ECOPOSS makes foresight visible. It gives it places, formats, audiences, rhythms, and public rituals. It turns anticipation into encounter.

The expression public culture of the future captures this shift. A public culture of the future is not simply a public event about the future. It is an ecology of practices through which a society learns to speak about futures, compare narratives, confront risks, share hopes, cultivate responsibility, and imagine action. ECOPOSS provides one institutional example of such an ecology.

11.3 — The 2022 Biennale: Osons l’éloge du futur

The 2022 Biennale represents the first major public expression of ECOPOSS. Its motto, Osons l’éloge du futur, is significant because it reverses the dominant emotional tone of the future. Public discourse about the future is often marked by anxiety, collapse, acceleration, ecological threat, technological disruption, war, or social fragmentation. ECOPOSS does not deny these risks. It seeks to create a constructive and ethical relationship to them.

The phrase éloge du futur does not mean naive optimism. It means that the future must be reopened as a space of responsibility, imagination, and commitment. A society that only fears the future becomes defensive. A society that praises the future without discernment becomes naive. ECOPOSS tries to hold a third position: a positive ethical confrontation with possible futures.

The Biennale combined scientific, artistic, educational, literary, cinematic, and civic formats. It included conferences, debates, exhibitions, workshops, books, public encounters, young audiences, and research-linked events. This multiplicity matters. It shows that futures cannot be approached only through one language. They require science, narrative, image, ethics, embodied experience, and public conversation.

11.4 — ECOPOSS as spatial and experiential architecture

One of the most original dimensions of ECOPOSS is its spatial architecture. ECOPOSS was not designed only as a conference programme. It was imagined as a journey through villages, pavilions, demonstrations, performances, talks, exhibitions, debates, books, cinema, and workshops. This spatialization is important because it turns foresight into a walkable and experiential form.

A visitor does not merely receive information. A visitor moves through issues, encounters people, sees demonstrations, hears arguments, participates in conversations, and constructs a personal path through future questions. The future becomes a promenade, not only a projection.

This architecture is deeply aligned with the foresight-driven university model. A university that makes futures public must create formats through which different publics can enter complex questions without being overwhelmed. Spatial design, event design, festival design, and pedagogical design become instruments of foresight. ECOPOSS shows that the staging of futures is not superficial. It is part of how societies learn.

11.5 — Cinema, books, stories and the imagination of futures

ECOPOSS gives significant place to cinema, books, literary imagination and public storytelling. This is essential. Futures cannot be built only through indicators, expert reports, dashboards, or strategic plans. They require stories. They require symbols, images and narratives capable of orienting desire and attention.

The festival of cinema, the salon du livre, author meetings, literary competitions, scenarios, and public talks show that ECOPOSS understands imagination as a civic resource. The future becomes thinkable when it becomes narratable. It becomes desirable when people can recognize themselves inside possible stories.

This connects ECOPOSS to the deeper artistic and epistemological roots of the book. From the author’s early artistic trajectory to Design Me a Planet and the idea of the planet as collective artwork, the project has consistently argued that imagination is not decorative. It is transformative. ECOPOSS makes this principle public.

11.6 — Science, ethics and public deliberation

ECOPOSS is not only cultural. It is also scientific and ethical. Its public formats are connected to research, data, sustainable cities, foresight meetings, ethics, technology, ecology and social transformation. This is important because public futures must not be reduced to entertainment or inspiration. They need epistemic seriousness.

The challenge is to connect accessibility with rigor. A university has a specific role here. It can create spaces where complex questions are opened to the public without being simplified into slogans. It can bring researchers, experts, artists, students, citizens and institutions into shared deliberation.

In this sense, ECOPOSS illustrates a key responsibility of higher education: to mediate between expert knowledge and public meaning. The university becomes an interpreter, convener and host. It helps society deliberate on futures that are too important to be left only to experts or markets.

11.7 — Youth, families and intergenerational futures

The public orientation of ECOPOSS includes youth, students, families and intergenerational audiences. This is not a secondary dimension. Futures are always intergenerational. The people who will inhabit the long-term consequences of current decisions must be included in the imagination and debate of those futures.

By opening foresight beyond professional circles, ECOPOSS creates opportunities for young people and families to engage with future questions through accessible formats: workshops, exhibitions, books, cinema, games, talks and participatory experiences. This is important for a university because higher education cannot limit its mission to enrolled students. It can also become a civic learning infrastructure for society.

Intergenerational futures require new pedagogies. They require forms that children, students, parents, teachers, researchers, citizens and leaders can share without erasing their differences. ECOPOSS is one attempt to create such shared spaces.

11.8 — ECOPOSS 2025: Festival du Futur and the triptych explorer, imaginer, agir

The 2025 evolution of ECOPOSS into a Festival du Futur confirms that the initiative is not a one-time event only. It becomes a continuing public culture of the future. The formula explorer, imaginer, agir gives ECOPOSS a simple but powerful pedagogical sequence.

Explorer means opening attention to signals, issues, places, people, technologies, risks and possibilities. Imaginer means producing narratives, images, hypotheses, scenarios and desires. Agir means moving from spectatorship to responsibility. Together, the three verbs define a civic pedagogy of futures.

This triptych also reflects the deeper model of the foresight-driven university. A university must explore the world, imagine desirable futures, and act through research, pedagogy, partnerships, public engagement and institutional transformation. ECOPOSS gives these verbs a public and experiential form.

11.9 — ECOPOSS and integral ecology

ECOPOSS is closely linked to integral ecology because it refuses to separate ecological, social, cultural, ethical and spiritual questions. The future is not treated as a technological problem alone. It is approached as a common good, a matter of transition, responsibility, imagination and collective discernment.

This is why ECOPOSS prepares the later movement toward EPISTEMA. A public culture of the future must eventually ask deeper questions: What kind of world do we desire? What forms of life do we value? What kind of progress do we pursue? What is the human being for? What does it mean to inhabit the Earth responsibly?

ECOPOSS does not answer all these questions. It stages them. It gives the university a public role in keeping such questions open, visible and debatable.

11.10 — Limits and conditions of durability

ECOPOSS also raises important limits. A futures festival may inspire participants without transforming institutions. It may produce events without continuity. It may attract attention without changing practices. It may become too broad, too dependent on key actors, or too difficult to evaluate.

For ECOPOSS to remain a genuine expression of the foresight-driven university, it must be connected to research, pedagogy, archives, evaluation, partners and institutional strategy. It must not be only communication. It must be part of a broader foresight ecology.

This requires careful documentation: programmes, attendance figures, partner lists, media reviews, outputs, videos, publications, student participation and long-term effects. It also requires institutional continuity so that ECOPOSS becomes a recurring capability, not only a remarkable moment.

11.11 — ECOPOSS as civic foresight

The concept of civic foresight summarizes the contribution of ECOPOSS. Civic foresight means that future-oriented thinking becomes part of public life. It is not limited to strategic planning, expert scenario building or institutional reform. It becomes a shared competence through which citizens learn to imagine, debate and orient futures together.

A university is well placed to support civic foresight because it stands at the intersection of knowledge, youth, research, culture, territory, public debate and long-term responsibility. ECOPOSS shows how this position can be activated.

ECOPOSS therefore represents one of the most visible expressions of the foresight-driven university: the university as public agora for desirable futures.

11.12 — From ECOPOSS to the foresight-driven university model

ECOPOSS shows that foresight can leave the expert circle and become a public culture of the future. Through books, cinema, debates, exhibitions, workshops, scientific encounters and civic participation, futures are no longer only analyzed; they are staged, experienced and discussed. This public opening raises a deeper institutional question: what kind of university can sustain such a movement over time? What capabilities must a university develop if it wants not only to organize events about the future, but to become structurally oriented toward anticipation, dialogue, experimentation and transformation?

Chapter 12 answers this question by translating the Université Catholique de Lille experience into a model: the foresight-driven university.

Key Takeaways

·       ECOPOSS transforms foresight from expert practice into public culture of the future.

·       The 2022 Biennale and 2025 Festival du Futur show how futures can become civic, cultural, scientific and experiential.

·       The motto “Osons l’éloge du futur” establishes a constructive ethical relationship to possible futures.

·       The triptych “explorer, imaginer, agir” provides a simple pedagogy of public foresight.

·       ECOPOSS demonstrates that a foresight-driven university can become a civic agora for desirable futures.

·       The durability of ECOPOSS depends on documentation, evaluation, institutional embedding and connection to research and pedagogy.

Source Anchors for Final Referencing

·       D-ECOPOSS-2021-001 — Biennale ECOPOSS livret présentation.

·       D-ECOPOSS-2022-002 — ECOPOSS4FICHES.

·       D-ECOPOSS-WEB-2022-001 — Public web documentation on the 2022 Biennale.

·       D-ECOPOSS-WEB-2025-001 — Official web documentation on the 2025 Festival du Futur.

·       D-UCL-DP-2021-001 — Plan d’action interne Direction de la Prospective.

·       Appendix B — Case Note B.15: ECOPOSS.

·       Appendix D — Evidence Matrix: Chapter 11 source mapping.

End of Chapter 11 draft.

Part V The Foresight-Driven University Model, Planetary Governance, and Civilizational Discernment

Chapter 12

The Foresight-Driven University Model
Eight Institutional Capabilities for Desirable Futures

Draft chapter — Dossier consolidé du projet — Version 1.1

 

12.1 — Why a model is needed ?

The preceding chapters have described an institutional trajectory rather than a linear project. The experience begins with artistic and systemic roots, is institutionalized through IIPEI, tested through Learning Expeditions, translated territorially through Symbiogora, embedded in a Direction de la Prospective, digitized through EcosystemsInMotion, opened publicly through ECOPOSS, and extended internationally through IFRN and planetary governance networks.

A model is therefore necessary for two reasons. First, it prevents the experience from remaining a collection of events, journeys, documents and personalities. Second, it makes the experience transferable without pretending that it can be copied mechanically. The aim is not to turn the Université Catholique de Lille into a universal template. The aim is to identify institutional capabilities that other universities may adapt according to their own history, culture, territory and mission.

The foresight-driven university is not defined by a single foresight department, a single event, a single leader, or a single method. It is defined by the capacity of an institution to embed foresight across strategy, pedagogy, research, civic engagement, territorial partnerships, international networks and ethical responsibility. In that sense, foresight becomes less a specialized technique than an institutional intelligence.

12.2 — Definition of the foresight-driven university

A foresight-driven university is a university that develops the capacity to anticipate systemic transformations, explore emerging futures, connect heterogeneous actors, experiment with new institutional forms, document knowledge in living archives, engage society in public future-making, internationalize its learning networks, and transform itself in response to the futures it helps to reveal.

This definition combines three dimensions. The first is strategic: the university must be able to detect change and support decision-making. The second is pedagogical and civic: the university must help students, citizens and partners imagine, debate and build desirable futures. The third is civilizational: the university must participate in the deeper transformation of values, knowledge, responsibility and meaning in the age of artificial intelligence, ecological crisis and planetary interdependence.

The model is therefore not a managerial checklist. It is an architecture of capabilities. Each capability is necessary, but none is sufficient alone. Anticipation without engagement can become expert isolation. Exploration without documentation can become travel memory. Documentation without transformation can become archive. Civic engagement without scientific depth can become spectacle. Internationalization without territorial rooting can become abstraction. The strength of the foresight-driven university lies in the articulation of all these capabilities.

12.3 — The eight institutional capabilities

The model emerging from the UCL experience can be summarized through eight institutional capabilities. These capabilities form the operational grammar of the foresight-driven university.

 

12.4 — Capability 1: Anticipation

Anticipation is the first capability of the foresight-driven university. It concerns the ability to identify long-term transformations, weak signals, discontinuities, emerging risks and possible futures before these become institutional emergencies.

At UCL, anticipation appears through the creation of a foresight function within the university’s strategic environment. The Direction de la Prospective was not conceived only as a place for speculative thinking. It was designed to support strategic monitoring, decision-making, transversal cooperation and interfaces with local, national and international partners.

The anticipation capability also includes the capacity to think about disruptions. The 2021 internal action plan explicitly calls attention to rupture scenarios, wild cards, war, insecurity, viruses and systemic uncertainty. This is crucial: a foresight-driven university must not limit itself to desirable futures. It must also prepare for shocks, bifurcations and crises.

12.5 — Capability 2: Exploration

Exploration is the capacity to learn from places where futures are already emerging. It is the capability that turns foresight into embodied inquiry. The Learning Expeditions developed through IIPEI and Futurissima were not innovation tourism. They were structured learning processes that combined preparation, immersion, expert encounters, observation, debriefing and strategic translation.

Palo Alto and Silicon Valley provided the first foundational field experience. China transformed the method into embodied, intercultural and performative research-action. Togo and Benin opened the model to African innovation ecosystems, technological democracy, ecovillages and the decolonization of the imaginary. Decathlon Copenhagen showed that the method could be transferred to corporate foresight. New York connected the university to planetary governance, the United Nations, universities, diplomacy, law, technology and the Holy See.

Exploration means that the university does not only study the future from the campus. It learns from the world. It reads cities, institutions, cultures, technologies and spiritual traditions as signs of futures in motion.

12.6 — Capability 3: Connection

Connection is the capability to bring heterogeneous actors into generative relation. A foresight-driven university does not work alone. It connects researchers, students, companies, territories, public institutions, artists, spiritual actors, associations, international organizations and citizens.

IIPEI connected the university with corporate sponsors, experts and innovation ecosystems. Symbiogora connected global ecosystem knowledge with territorial actors. EcosystemsInMotion connected companies, universities, diplomats, elected officials and international networks through digital research-action. ECOPOSS connected sciences, arts, books, cinema, ethics, families, students, citizens and researchers. IFRN extended these connections into an international research network.

Connection is not networking in the superficial sense. It is the creation of relational conditions for collective intelligence, co-learning, co-innovation and shared responsibility.

12.7 — Capability 4: Experimentation

Experimentation is the capability to convert foresight into concrete devices, formats and prototypes. Without experimentation, foresight remains discourse. With experimentation, it becomes institutional learning.

The UCL trajectory includes many experimental formats: Learning Expeditions, the video interview archive, HÉMiSF4iRE, EcosystemsInMotion, Symbiogora, ECOPOSS, the International School of Foresight project, the prospective seminars, the New York learning journey and the IFRN seminars. Each format tests a different way of learning, connecting, imagining or transforming.

Experimentation also means accepting incompleteness. Not every prototype becomes a permanent institution. Some remain pilots, events, reports, networks or archives. Yet together they create an institutional ecology of experimentation.

12.8 — Capability 5: Documentation

Documentation is one of the most distinctive features of the UCL experience. The IIPEI trajectory generated hundreds of video interviews, reports, blogs, programmes, presentations, books, learning journey documents, event archives, web pages and internal action plans. These traces are not secondary. They are part of the method.

A foresight-driven university must learn to document its own learning. Videos, publications, evidence matrices and case notes become forms of living institutional memory. They allow later interpretation, transmission, critique and re-use.

Documentation also protects the project from mythologizing. It makes it possible to distinguish what is verified, partially documented, memory-based, to be confirmed or still missing. In this sense, the Evidence Matrix is not only an administrative appendix. It is a methodological safeguard.

12.9 — Capability 6: Civic engagement

Civic engagement is the capability to make futures public. ECOPOSS is decisive here. ECOPOSS transforms foresight from expert practice into a shared public culture of the future. It opens future-oriented reflection to families, students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs, children, citizens and institutions.

Through the Biennale, the Festival du Futur, the salon du livre, cinema, talks, villages, workshops, exhibitions and public debates, ECOPOSS shows that desirable futures must be made visible, discussable and experiential. Foresight is not only a tool for decision-makers. It is a civic competence.

A foresight-driven university therefore becomes a civic agora. It does not only produce knowledge for society. It creates spaces where society can imagine and debate its possible futures.

12.10 — Capability 7: Internationalization

Internationalization is the capability to situate local experience within global learning networks. In the UCL trajectory, internationalization is not limited to student mobility or institutional partnerships. It includes WorldFuture, the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Stanford, Silicon Valley, China, Taiwan, Togo, Benin, New York, the United Nations, the Holy See, FIUC, IFRN and international benchmarks.

The New York learning journey is especially significant because it connects the university to planetary governance: Columbia, Fordham, the United Nations, ECOSOC, the Earth Institute, the French diplomatic network, the Holy See mission, the Colin Powell School and Cornell Tech. This shows that a foresight-driven university must learn in the places where global norms, technologies, policies and ethical frameworks are produced.

IFRN gives this internationalization a more durable form. It extends the UCL experience into a research network dedicated to long-term futures, foresight-in-action, education, training, megatrends, major risks and planetary transitions.

12.11 — Capability 8: Transformation

Transformation is the capability that integrates all the others. A university is not foresight-driven if it only studies transformation outside itself. It must also allow foresight to transform its own strategy, pedagogy, governance, culture, partnerships and public mission.

The UCL experience shows several layers of transformation: the passage from IIPEI to the Direction de la Prospective; the passage from physical journeys to digital research-action; the passage from expert seminars to ECOPOSS as public futures culture; the passage from institutional foresight to IFRN; and the passage from strategic foresight toward integral ecology and EPISTEMA.

Transformation is therefore both external and internal. It concerns the world the university studies, and the university that studies the world.

12.12 — The integrative principle: embedded foresight

The eight capabilities require an integrative principle: embeddedness. Foresight must not remain peripheral, occasional or decorative. It must be embedded in governance, research, pedagogy, partnerships, public engagement and institutional memory.

Embedded foresight does not mean that every unit of the university becomes a foresight department. It means that the university develops the reflex to ask future-oriented questions across its activities: What is changing? What futures are emerging? What should be preserved? What must be transformed? Who should be included? What evidence do we have? What futures are desirable?

The Direction de la Prospective provides an institutional expression of this principle, but embedded foresight also requires cultural diffusion. It needs leaders, teachers, researchers, students, partners and citizens capable of thinking with long-term responsibility.

 

12.13 — Inner Development Goals, integral ecology and transformational conditions

The eight capabilities are not only organizational. They also require human and cultural conditions. This is where the Inner Development Goals and integral ecology become important for the model.

The Sustainable Development Goals provide a global agenda for ecological, social and economic transformation. Yet external transformation also requires inner capacities: attention, complexity awareness, empathy, courage, collaboration, responsibility and discernment. A foresight-driven university must therefore cultivate not only knowledge and skills, but also interior postures.

Integral ecology deepens this requirement. It asks the university to understand ecological crisis as inseparable from social, economic, cultural, spiritual and epistemological crises. The foresight-driven university must therefore become capable of connecting outer transformation and inner development, institutional strategy and ethical conversion, technological innovation and care for the common home.

12.14 — Limits and risks of the model

The model is not without risks. The first risk is dependence on key actors. The UCL experience was strongly shaped by particular people, relationships, intuitions and leadership moments. A transferable model must therefore ask how foresight capacities can survive beyond charismatic individuals.

The second risk is discontinuity. Foresight initiatives can disappear when institutional priorities change, teams move, funding ends or leadership attention shifts. This makes documentation, governance and transmission essential.

The third risk is measurement. The impact of foresight is difficult to quantify. Its effects often appear indirectly: new conversations, new partnerships, changed perceptions, better preparedness, improved imagination, avoided errors or long-term cultural shifts. A foresight-driven university therefore needs qualitative and narrative evaluation methods, not only numerical indicators.

The fourth risk is overextension. A foresight-driven university can become too dispersed if every initiative is added without hierarchy. The model needs focus, rhythm and editorial discipline. The Evidence Matrix, the timeline, the glossary and the chapter architecture are therefore not only documentation tools; they are instruments of strategic coherence.

12.15 — Transferability: not a blueprint, but a grammar

The foresight-driven university model should not be understood as a blueprint. A blueprint assumes that one institution can copy another. The UCL experience shows the opposite: foresight must be rooted in singular histories, places, people, values and ecosystems.

What is transferable is not the exact sequence of events. Other universities do not need to reproduce IIPEI, ECOPOSS or IFRN in identical form. What is transferable is the grammar of capabilities: anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize and transform.

Each university can ask: What are our foresight traditions? What are our ecosystems? What territories do we serve? What publics do we engage? What archives do we build? What international networks do we need? What forms of ecological and ethical responsibility should guide us?

12.16 — Synthesis: the university as mediator of futures

The foresight-driven university is a mediator. It mediates between knowledge and action, technology and ethics, territory and planet, research and public culture, institutions and citizens, outer transformation and inner development.

The UCL experience shows that this mediation requires an institutional ecology rather than a single tool. IIPEI explored innovation ecosystems. Learning Expeditions made foresight embodied. Symbiogora translated global learning into territorial capacity-building. The Direction de la Prospective embedded foresight institutionally. EcosystemsInMotion transformed the method digitally during crisis. ECOPOSS made futures public. IFRN internationalized the network. Integral ecology and EPISTEMA opened the deepest question: not only what futures are possible, but from what worldview, values and forms of consciousness those futures will be imagined.

Chapter 12 therefore provides the hinge between the empirical narrative and the final civilizational reflection. It shows that the foresight-driven university is not an abstract ideal. It is a practical model built through capabilities, evidence, experiments, networks, memory and discernment.

12.17 — From the model to planetary governance

 The eight capabilities described in this chapter define the internal architecture of the foresight-driven university. Yet no university becomes foresight-driven in isolation. Foresight requires comparison, dialogue, international networks and exposure to institutions where futures are already being studied, debated or prototyped. Chapter 13 therefore situates the UCL experience within a wider landscape of planetary governance, IFRN, the United Nations, the SDGs, the IDGs, international benchmarks and global transformation frameworks.

Central Question What capabilities define a foresight-driven university?

Chapter function This chapter is the conceptual keystone of the book. It translates the lived experience of the Université Catholique de Lille into a transferable, adaptable model: the foresight-driven university.

1. Anticipation

What futures must be detected before they become obvious?

Foresight Department, action plan, wild cards, Futures publications

Strategic vigilance and decision support

2. Exploration

Where are futures already being prototyped?

Learning Expeditions, Palo Alto, China, Africa, New York, Scandinavia

Field-based institutional learning

3. Connection

Who must be brought into relation?

IIPEI sponsors, territories, universities, companies, ECOPOSS, IFRN

Ecosystem orchestration

4. Experimentation

How can foresight become concrete?

HÉMiSF4iRE, ECOPOSS, EcosystemsInMotion, prospective school projects

Prototyping and institutional innovation

5. Documentation

How can experience become memory and knowledge?

700 videos, publications, blogs, reports, evidence matrix

Living institutional memory

6. Civic engagement

How can futures become public and debatable?

ECOPOSS, cinema, books, workshops, talks, public festivals

Public culture of the future

7. Internationalization

How can local learning enter planetary networks?

WorldFuture, CIFS, New York, UN, IFRN, FIUC, benchmarks

Global learning and governance interface

8. Transformation

How does the institution change itself?

Direction de la Prospective, Vision 2030, ECOPOSS, integral ecology

Cultural, strategic and civilizational change

Closing proposition A foresight-driven university helps society detect what is emerging, understand what is at stake, deliberate on what is desirable, and cultivate the institutional and human capacities needed to build futures worth inhabiting.

 

Chapter 13
Planetary Governance, IFRN, and International Benchmarks
Draft chapter for the consolidated project dossier — Version 1.1

Central Question: What makes the Universite Catholique de Lille experience distinctive when compared with other foresight-oriented universities, institutions, and planetary transformation frameworks?

13.1. From Local Experimentation to Planetary Governance

The previous chapter translated the Universite Catholique de Lille experience into a model of eight institutional capabilities: anticipation, exploration, connection, experimentation, documentation, civic engagement, internationalization, and transformation. This chapter takes the next step. It asks how that model sits within a wider international landscape of futures-oriented institutions, planetary governance frameworks, benchmark universities, foresight networks, and civilizational transformation agendas.

The experience developed at UCL was never meant to remain only local. IIPEI began as an exploration of innovation ecosystems across the world. Learning Expeditions connected the university to Palo Alto, Munich, Copenhagen, China, Togo and Benin, New York, Scandinavia, and other living laboratories of change. EcosystemsInMotion translated field-based learning into digital research-action. ECOPOSS made futures public. IFRN then gave the trajectory an international research-network form. The movement is therefore double: from Lille to the world, and from the world back to Lille.

This double movement is the central argument of Chapter 13. A foresight-driven university develops its originality not by copying international models, but by learning from them, translating them, hybridizing them, and returning to its own territory with a stronger capacity to act. International benchmarking is therefore not imitation. It is a disciplined way of reading other institutions as mirrors, contrasts, inspirations, and warnings.

Key proposition: The distinctiveness of the UCL experience lies in combining international foresight learning with territorial responsibility, civic imagination, audiovisual memory, integral ecology, and a public culture of desirable futures.

13.2. Why Benchmarks Matter for a Foresight-Driven University

Benchmarking is often used in higher education as a technique of comparison: rankings, performance indicators, funding levels, international mobility, patents, publications, or employability. The foresight-driven university requires another kind of benchmark. It is less interested in ranking institutions than in understanding what each institution reveals about the future of knowledge, learning, governance, ecology, technology, and society.

For this book, a benchmark is not an external standard to be copied. It is a learning encounter. A benchmark institution is a place where one or more future-oriented capabilities are visible in an advanced, distinctive, or provocative form. Turku reveals the institutionalization of futures studies as an academic field. ASU shows a university-scale attempt to address planetary habitability. MIT Media Lab embodies creative technological experimentation at the boundary of art, science, design, and engineering. Stanford d.school represents design thinking and human-centered innovation. The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies provides a long-standing think tank model of applied foresight. Dubai Future Foundation illustrates a public-sector future-design strategy linked to city ambition and acceleration.

Each benchmark is partial. None is the model. The purpose is not to say that UCL should become Turku, ASU, MIT, Stanford, Copenhagen, or Dubai. The purpose is to identify comparable capabilities and ask: what can UCL learn, what is already distinctive in its own trajectory, and what remains to be developed?

 

13.3. Lived Benchmarks and Documentary Benchmarks

The UCL experience combines two forms of benchmarking: lived benchmarks and documentary benchmarks. Lived benchmarks are places, institutions, events, or ecosystems encountered through travel, meetings, interviews, seminars, learning expeditions, or direct participation. Documentary benchmarks are institutions or frameworks studied through reports, programmes, publications, websites, and secondary sources.

This distinction matters methodologically. A lived benchmark is embodied. It includes atmosphere, informal conversations, places, rhythms, rituals, tensions, and surprises. A documentary benchmark is more distant but allows comparison across a broader landscape. The UCL trajectory is distinctive because it combines both. Palo Alto, New York, China, Togo-Benin, Copenhagen, and Scandinavia are not only documentary cases; they are lived research-action experiences. UNESCO, the SDGs, IDGs, ASU, MIT, Turku, Stanford, CIFS, and Dubai can also operate as documentary benchmarks for the model.

 

13.4. New York as a Planetary Governance Learning Ecosystem

The New York Learning Journey is one of the clearest examples of a lived benchmark oriented toward planetary governance. Its programme connected universities, the United Nations, the Earth Institute, French diplomatic actors, the Holy See mission, civil society interfaces, civic leadership, technology, law, intellectual property, and cultural institutions. New York functioned not merely as a city to visit, but as a planetary governance ecosystem to be read.

Columbia and Fordham opened academic and legal perspectives. The United Nations and ECOSOC-related meetings connected the journey to global governance and the SDGs. The Earth Institute connected foresight to sustainability and planetary systems. The Holy See mission opened the ethical and spiritual dimension of global responsibility. Cornell Tech connected technology, law, intellectual property and information governance. The Colin Powell School added civic and global leadership. Together, these nodes made visible the kind of world interface a foresight-driven university must learn to navigate.

For Chapter 13, New York should be treated as a hinge between the UCL experience and planetary governance. It shows that internationalization is not only student mobility or institutional partnership. It can become strategic exposure to the arenas where future norms, technologies, policies, ethics, and narratives are produced.

Editorial interpretation: New York is not only a benchmark city. It is a planetary governance classroom.

13.5. The SDGs and the Global Grammar of Planetary Transformation

The Sustainable Development Goals provide one of the most widely recognized global grammars for planetary transformation. The United Nations describes the 2030 Agenda, adopted by all UN Member States in 2015, as a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals at its heart. The SDGs are therefore not only policy objectives; they are a common language through which institutions, governments, corporations, cities, universities, NGOs, and citizens can align action around shared global challenges.

For a foresight-driven university, the SDGs are useful but insufficient. They provide a strong external framework for action, measurement, partnership, and public legitimacy. Yet they do not by themselves guarantee the inner, cultural, institutional, pedagogical and epistemological transformation required to act effectively. That is why the UCL trajectory must be read at the intersection of SDGs, IDGs, integral ecology, and foresight. The SDGs define many of the external goals. The IDGs and integral ecology ask what kind of human and institutional capacities are needed to pursue them.

13.6. The IDGs: Inner Capacities for Outer Transformation

The Inner Development Goals initiative emerged from a simple diagnosis: the Sustainable Development Goals define what should be achieved, but progress remains too slow, and humanity needs stronger inner and collective capacities to face complex challenges. The IDG Guide organizes inner development across five dimensions: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting. These dimensions are directly relevant to the foresight-driven university because foresight is not only analytical. It requires presence, self-awareness, systems thinking, long-term orientation, empathy, co-creation, courage, creativity and perseverance.

In the UCL experience, these inner capacities are implicit in many practices: learning expeditions require openness and perspective-taking; research-action requires self-reflexivity; ECOPOSS requires public engagement and optimism; the Direction de la Prospective requires long-term orientation and institutional courage; EPISTEMA requires the capacity to question deep assumptions. The IDGs therefore help identify the human development conditions of institutional foresight.

 

13.7. IFRN: From UCL Experience to International Foresight Research Network

The International Foresight Research Network France represents a crucial step in the internationalization of the UCL foresight trajectory. The UCL experience began with IIPEI as a research-action institute on innovation ecosystems. It expanded through learning expeditions, publications, videos, EcosystemsInMotion and ECOPOSS. IFRN translates this accumulated experience into a network form: a structure designed to gather researchers, teachers, practitioners, companies, public actors and individuals interested in long-term futures and foresight-in-action.

IFRN matters because it prevents the UCL trajectory from remaining only an institutional memory. It gives the work a durable platform beyond one department, one event, or one personal trajectory. It also reframes foresight as a collective research and education activity. This is essential for the future of the foresight-driven university: foresight must not only be practiced internally; it must circulate, be debated, be taught, be compared and be shared across institutions and countries.

In this chapter, IFRN should be interpreted as a bridge between the UCL model and planetary foresight networks. It is not merely an association. It is a continuation mechanism, a transmission mechanism and an internationalization mechanism.

 

13.8. Reading International Benchmarks

13.8.1. Turku and the Academic Institutionalization of Futures Studies

The Finland Futures Research Centre at the University of Turku is one of the most significant academic references for futures studies. It was founded in 1992 and operates within the Turku School of Economics. Its work is transdisciplinary and combines academic futures studies, critical interdisciplinary research, education, strategic foresight, business foresight and futures knowledge. It also serves Finnish public decision-making through a relationship with the Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament.

For UCL, Turku is a benchmark of academic institutionalization. It shows what happens when futures studies becomes a stable university field with education, research, conferences, doctoral work, public-policy interfaces and international collaborations. The UCL experience differs in that it emerged more as a strategic, institutional and civic trajectory than as a long-established academic department. The comparison is useful: Turku shows academic depth; UCL shows institutional experimentation and public futures activation.

13.8.2. ASU and the University as Planetary Futures Laboratory

Arizona State University's Global Futures Laboratory provides a powerful benchmark for university-scale engagement with planetary futures. ASU presents the laboratory as a comprehensive platform for addressing complex planetary systems, habitability, sustainability, global futures and long-term solutions. Its College of Global Futures connects degrees, research, sustainability, innovation and planetary health.

For UCL, ASU is a benchmark of scale and strategic integration. It shows how a university can create a global futures identity around planetary systems. UCL's distinctiveness is different. It lies less in scale and more in the integration of foresight, territory, Catholic social thought, ECOPOSS, audiovisual memory, learning expeditions and integral ecology.

13.8.3. MIT Media Lab and Creative Technological Experimentation

The MIT Media Lab is a benchmark for creative technological experimentation. Its official description emphasizes imagination, design, invention, interdisciplinary collaboration and transformative technologies at the intersection of art, science, design and engineering. Its history shows a move from digital futures toward pervasive computing, biological technologies, human-machine interfaces and contemporary concerns around ethics, inclusivity, sustainability and justice.

For UCL, the Media Lab is not a model to copy, but a reminder that futures are prototyped through experimental cultures. Its relevance lies in the laboratory spirit: imagining, building, testing, recombining, and allowing unlikely encounters between disciplines. The UCL experience is less technology-lab centered, but ECOPOSS, HEMiSF4iRE, learning expeditions and the video archive can be read as alternative forms of public and institutional experimentation.

13.8.4. Stanford d.school and Human-Centered Design

Stanford d.school defines itself as a creative place at Stanford where people use design to discover and build new possibilities. Its educational approach emphasizes hands-on learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, human-centered design, prototyping and complex challenges in service of people and planet.

For UCL, the d.school is a benchmark for pedagogy and design. It clarifies the importance of learning by doing, prototyping, interdisciplinary teams, and attention to human and non-human stakeholders. The foresight-driven university can learn from design schools, while extending design thinking toward long-term futures, public deliberation, territorial responsibility and integral ecology.

13.8.5. Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies and Applied Strategic Foresight

The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies is an independent non-profit futures think tank founded in 1969. It helps people and organizations imagine, work with and shape their future through futures studies, foresight, advisory work, talks, courses and partnerships. It offers a reference point for applied strategic foresight and for collaborations across public, private, academic and civic sectors.

For UCL, CIFS is historically important because Michel Saloff-Coste's work was connected to the institute before and during the emergence of IIPEI. As a benchmark, CIFS shows how futures studies can operate outside the university as an independent think tank. UCL's distinctiveness is that it tried to internalize foresight within a university while also connecting to businesses, territories and public futures.

13.8.6. Dubai Future Foundation and Future-Oriented Public Governance

Dubai Future Foundation describes its mission as reimagining, inspiring and designing Dubai's future in collaboration with public and private partners, with the aim of making Dubai one of the world's foremost future cities. Its programmes connect government entities, startups, researchers, entrepreneurs and students to solve challenges and co-create future-oriented solutions.

For UCL, Dubai is a benchmark of ambition and public-sector future design. It demonstrates how foresight can become part of city strategy, institutional identity and governmental acceleration. The contrast is useful: Dubai illustrates state-led future orientation; UCL illustrates university-led foresight rooted in territory, ethics, civic culture and integral ecology.

13.9. What Makes the UCL Experience Distinctive?

The purpose of benchmarking is not to prove that UCL is superior to other institutions. It is to clarify the singularity of its trajectory. When compared with the benchmarks above, the UCL experience appears distinctive in seven ways.

1.         It connects foresight with a long personal and intellectual genealogy: art, systemic management, prospective, Club de Budapest, Universite Integrale, IIPEI and integral ecology.

2.         It uses learning expeditions as a method of field-based foresight, rather than relying only on desk research or institutional reports.

3.         It documents foresight through audiovisual memory: interviews, videos, events, digital archives and living traces.

4.         It translates global ecosystem learning into territorial responsibility through Symbiogora, Hauts-de-France, RRI and territorial foresight.

5.         It embeds foresight institutionally through the Direction de la Prospective, an internal action plan, governance links and a portfolio of projects.

6.         It democratizes futures through ECOPOSS, transforming foresight into public culture, cinema, books, villages, exhibitions, debates and civic experience.

7.         It extends foresight toward civilizational discernment through IFRN, integral ecology and EPISTEMA.

This combination is unusual. Many institutions do one or two of these things well: academic futures studies, design thinking, technological experimentation, sustainability, public policy foresight or civic engagement. The UCL trajectory is distinctive because it combines them through a lived, cumulative and reflective process.

13.10. Planetary Governance as a Learning Ecology

Planetary governance is often imagined as a matter of institutions: the United Nations, states, treaties, international organizations, NGOs, corporations, foundations and global networks. Chapter 13 proposes a broader interpretation. Planetary governance is also a learning ecology. It requires the capacity to connect scales, disciplines, cultures, generations, technologies and ethical frameworks.

A foresight-driven university can contribute to planetary governance not by governing the planet, but by creating the conditions for wiser collective orientation. It can support long-term thinking, convene diverse actors, cultivate futures literacy, document emerging transformations, test desirable futures, connect local territories to global frameworks, and translate planetary issues into educational and civic experiences.

In this sense, planetary governance is not only an external object of study. It becomes a responsibility of the university. The university helps societies ask: What futures are possible? What futures are desirable? What futures are dangerous? What capacities are needed? What must be transformed within institutions, territories and ourselves?

13.11. Limits of Benchmarking and Networked Foresight

The benchmarking approach has limits. First, institutional models are context-dependent. What works in Turku, Phoenix, Cambridge, Stanford, Copenhagen or Dubai cannot simply be transferred to Lille. Second, benchmarks can become mythologies. Silicon Valley, for example, is both an innovation model and a space of social contradiction. Third, international networks can remain symbolic if they do not generate concrete research, learning, projects, training and transformation. Fourth, planetary frameworks can become abstract unless they are translated into lived practices.

These limits are essential. They protect the foresight-driven university from imitation, abstraction and branding. The UCL experience suggests that the value of benchmarks lies in translation, not replication. A university must ask not 'How do we copy this model?' but 'What does this model reveal about capabilities we need to develop in our own context?'

13.12 — From planetary governance to EPISTEMA

This chapter has situated the UCL experience within international benchmarks, planetary frameworks and foresight networks. It has shown how the foresight-driven university model can engage with SDGs, IDGs, UNESCO's futures of education, Turku, ASU, MIT Media Lab, Stanford d.school, CIFS, Dubai Future Foundation, New York and IFRN.

International benchmarks and planetary governance frameworks help situate the UCL experience in a global context. They show that universities increasingly operate within shared planetary agendas: sustainability, technological transformation, civic responsibility, inner development and global cooperation. Yet these frameworks do not fully answer the deepest question raised by the book: what kind of civilization is emerging, and what hidden assumptions shape the way societies think, believe, value and act?

Chapter 14 addresses this deeper layer through integral ecology and EPISTEMA. It argues that the foresight-driven university must not only navigate global governance frameworks, but also help society discern the epistemic ground from which futures become thinkable, desirable and actionable.

Source Anchors for Chapter 13

Internal project evidence: Voyage New York programme; IFRN France statutes; PPT Scauflaire 2024; Plan d action interne Direction de la Prospective 2021; Dossier ECOPOSS; IIPEI and Learning Expedition documents; Appendix D Evidence Matrix.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: official UN SDG sources describe the 2030 Agenda as a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity, centered on 17 goals adopted by UN Member States in 2015.

UNESCO Futures of Education: official UNESCO sources describe the programme as a foresight, research, vision and dialogue effort to imagine new possibilities for education and support more just, equitable and sustainable futures.

Inner Development Goals: IDG sources describe five dimensions of inner development: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating and Acting, with skills supporting sustainable transformation.

Finland Futures Research Centre: University of Turku sources describe FFRC as a transdisciplinary futures research centre founded in 1992 within the Turku School of Economics.

Arizona State University Global Futures Laboratory: ASU sources describe the laboratory as a platform for addressing planetary systems, habitability, sustainability and global futures.

MIT Media Lab: official MIT Media Lab sources describe it as an interdisciplinary creative sandbox integrating art, science, design and engineering to invent better futures.

Stanford d.school: official Stanford d.school sources describe the institute as a creative place where people use design to discover and build new possibilities through human-centered and hands-on learning.

Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies: CIFS official sources describe it as an independent non-profit think tank founded in 1969 that helps people and organizations imagine, work with and shape their future.

Dubai Future Foundation: official DFF sources describe the foundation as reimagining, inspiring and designing Dubai future in collaboration with public and private partners.

 

Chapter 14
Integral Ecology, EPISTEMA, and Planetary Transformation
From foresight as anticipation to foresight as civilizational discernment

 Central Question :
How can integral ecology and EPISTEMA help define the deepest civilizational task of the foresight-driven university?

Chapter Thesis

This chapter closes the book by moving from the institutional model of the foresight-driven university to its deepest civilizational horizon. The preceding chapters have shown how a university can develop foresight capabilities through innovation ecosystems, learning expeditions, territorial engagement, digital research-action, public futures, international networks, and documentary memory. This final chapter asks a deeper question: what kind of transformation is such a university ultimately called to serve?

The answer proposed here is that a foresight-driven university must help society discern the hidden EPISTEMA through which a civilization thinks, believes, values, organizes, and acts. Integral ecology gives this discernment a normative horizon: everything is connected, and no ecological transition can succeed if it remains separated from social justice, cultural meaning, spiritual depth, technological responsibility, and inner transformation.

In this sense, foresight is not only a technique for anticipating possible futures. It becomes a practice of civilizational discernment: a way of identifying what humanity must leave behind, what is emerging, and what forms of knowledge, responsibility, spirituality, and institutional courage are required to build futures worth inhabiting.

14.1 Why This Chapter Closes the Book

The logic of the book has been progressive. It began with the disruption of higher education under conditions of artificial intelligence and systemic uncertainty. It then clarified the meaning of prospective and foresight, positioned the author as a participant-observer, reconstructed the genesis of IIPEI, followed learning expeditions through global innovation ecosystems, protected the territorial role of Symbiogora, analyzed the institutionalization of foresight through the Direction de la Prospective, documented EcosystemsInMotion as digital research-action, and interpreted ECOPOSS as a public culture of the future.

Chapter 12 formulated the model: eight institutional capabilities for a foresight-driven university. Chapter 13 opened that model toward planetary governance, IFRN, international benchmarks, SDGs, IDGs and networks of transformation. Chapter 14 now brings the argument to its deepest level. It asks not only what universities can do, but what kind of civilizational transformation they are called to accompany.

The answer cannot be only institutional, technological, or strategic. The horizon is civilizational. The university is not merely adapting to a new economy or to a new digital environment. It is participating in a change of world. What is at stake is a transformation in the very ground from which societies understand life, knowledge, progress, power, the human being, the Earth, and the sacred.

This is why the chapter introduces EPISTEMA as a culminating concept. EPISTEMA names the invisible ground of a civilization: the underlying structure that determines what a time can think, value, believe, desire, and make intelligible. If universities are to help society face planetary transformation, they must become capable of working not only on curricula, strategy, research, and innovation, but on EPISTEMA itself.

14.2 Integral Ecology: More Than Sustainability

Integral ecology should not be reduced to environmental management, carbon accounting, circular economy, or institutional sustainability plans. These dimensions are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Integral ecology begins from a different intuition: crises are systemic because life is relational. Ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, economic inequality, technological acceleration, spiritual emptiness, and institutional exhaustion are not separate crises. They are expressions of a deeper rupture in the way modern civilization understands its relation to the world.

For a foresight-driven university, integral ecology provides a decisive corrective to technocratic foresight. Foresight can become dangerous if it is reduced to prediction, optimization, innovation management, or strategic adaptation. It must remain connected to the common good, to the dignity of persons, to the living Earth, to intergenerational responsibility, and to forms of knowledge that include the scientific, the artistic, the ethical, the spiritual, and the experiential.

Integral ecology therefore modifies the mission of the university in four ways:

8.         It reconnects knowledge with life, refusing the separation between scientific intelligence and ecological responsibility.

9.         It reconnects outer transformation with inner transformation, showing that institutional change requires personal and collective conversion.

10.    It reconnects technological innovation with ethical discernment, asking whether new tools serve life, dignity, justice, and the common good.

11.    It reconnects the university with planetary responsibility, making higher education a mediator between local action and global transformation.

In the UCL trajectory, this integral horizon does not appear suddenly at the end. It was prepared by the artistic and spiritual roots of the author, by the Club of Budapest, by the Universite Integrale, by Design Me a Planet, by the China learning expedition and ecological civilization, by the African mission and the decolonization of the imaginary, by ECOPOSS and desirable futures, by IFRN and planetary foresight, and by the later development of the Chair of Integral Ecology.

14.3 EPISTEMA: The Invisible Ground of Civilization

The concept of EPISTEMA extends the notion of episteme into a broader civilizational framework. It designates the invisible ground from which an epoch determines what counts as real, true, valuable, sacred, rational, desirable, and possible. EPISTEMA is not only a theory of knowledge. It is a theory of civilizational intelligibility.

Every society is organized by explicit institutions and implicit assumptions. Laws, universities, economies, technologies, rituals, media, policies, and organizations are visible. But beneath them lie deeper structures: images of the human being, assumptions about nature, representations of time, figures of the divine or the absolute, dominant forms of reason, and implicit definitions of progress. These deeper structures constitute the EPISTEMA.

The foresight-driven university must therefore ask not only: What futures are possible? It must also ask: From which EPISTEMA are we imagining these futures? If a society imagines the future from within an industrial, extractive, technocratic EPISTEMA, even its green transition may reproduce domination, acceleration, inequality, and disconnection. If a society imagines the future from a relational and integral EPISTEMA, then technology, economy, education, and governance can be reinterpreted in service of life.

This is why EPISTEMA is central to the final chapter. It prevents foresight from remaining superficial. It pushes foresight below trends, scenarios, and signals toward the deeper question of civilizational meaning.

14.4 Civilizational Waves and Figures of the Absolute

The Evolution Grid developed in the earlier work of Michel Saloff-Coste provides a useful framework for linking civilizational transformations to changing forms of knowledge, power, communication, organization, and history. Chapter 14 adds one further dimension: each civilizational wave also names the absolute differently.

This table is not intended as a rigid historical determinism. It is a heuristic. It shows that transformations in tools, power, exchange, communication, organization, and knowledge are inseparable from transformations in meaning. A civilization does not only produce differently; it believes differently. It does not only organize differently; it names the absolute differently. This insight is decisive for higher education because universities are custodians and transformers of EPISTEMA.

14.5 From the Technocratic Paradigm to a Relational Ontology

The modern industrial EPISTEMA is marked by extraordinary achievements: scientific knowledge, technical mastery, public institutions, industrial production, democratic rights, mass education, medicine, infrastructure, and global communication. The problem is not modernity as such. The problem is the absolutization of a reductionist and technocratic paradigm: the belief that reality is composed of separable objects, that knowledge means control, that progress means acceleration, that nature is a resource, and that human freedom consists in unlimited expansion.

The ecological crisis reveals the exhaustion of this paradigm. The living world does not function as a set of isolated objects. It is composed of interdependencies, feedback loops, thresholds, emergences, symbioses, and fragile balances. A relational ontology is therefore required: a way of understanding reality as a tissue of relations rather than as an inventory of resources.

For universities, this shift has profound consequences. It changes the meaning of disciplines. It does not abolish disciplinary rigor, but it prevents disciplines from becoming closed territories. It changes the meaning of innovation. Innovation is no longer only the production of new tools, products, or business models; it becomes the capacity to regenerate relations. It changes the meaning of education. Education is not only knowledge transmission; it is formation of persons capable of inhabiting complexity responsibly.

The foresight-driven university must therefore help society move from technocratic control to relational responsibility. This does not mean rejecting technology. It means reorienting technology within a deeper ecology of meaning, life, justice, and spiritual discernment.

14.6 Artificial Intelligence as an Epistemological Revealer

Artificial intelligence returns in this final chapter not as a separate technological topic, but as an epistemological revealer. AI reveals the power and the limits of analytical intelligence. It shows that knowledge can be recombined at unprecedented speed. It transforms writing, images, coding, research, decision-support, pedagogy, and organizational intelligence. Yet it also reveals how fragile human judgment becomes when speed, automation, and pattern recognition are confused with wisdom.

AI systems are often opaque, emergent, statistical, and dependent on vast technical and institutional infrastructures. They do not fit easily into old images of linear causality or transparent mechanical control. In this sense, AI confirms the need for systemic thinking: the whole cannot be understood only by dissecting its parts. But AI also intensifies the risk of the technocratic paradigm: the illusion that every question can be reduced to data, every ambiguity to optimization, every decision to computation.

A foresight-driven university must therefore cultivate an AI literacy that is not merely technical. It must include ethical literacy, epistemological literacy, civic literacy, ecological literacy, and spiritual literacy. Students, researchers, leaders, and citizens need to understand not only how AI works, but what AI changes in the human relation to knowledge, creativity, work, identity, truth, authorship, authority, and responsibility.

AI can assist foresight by helping structure corpora, compare scenarios, synthesize documents, map concepts, organize archives, and support writing. But AI cannot replace discernment. The final responsibility for meaning remains human, collective, ethical, and spiritual. Appendix H documents this very point: the book itself used AI-assisted reflection, but did not delegate judgment to AI.

14.7 The University as a Place of Epistemological Conversion

If EPISTEMA is the invisible ground of a civilization, then the university is one of the institutions where EPISTEMA is reproduced, criticized, transmitted, and transformed. This gives the university a role deeper than training and research. The university is a place where societies learn how to think.

In an industrial paradigm, universities often became organized around disciplines, credentials, specialization, departments, rankings, publications, and professional pathways. These remain important, but they are no longer sufficient. In a planetary transition, universities must also become places of epistemological conversion: places where societies learn to identify the limits of their inherited paradigms and to cultivate new forms of relational, systemic, integral, and ethical intelligence.

This conversion cannot be imposed by decree. It requires spaces, practices, and communities: foresight seminars, learning expeditions, public festivals, research-action laboratories, interdisciplinary chairs, audiovisual memory, international networks, civic dialogues, and spiritual reflection. The UCL experience provides examples of these spaces: IIPEI, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, IFRN, the Chair of Integral Ecology, and EPISTEMA.

The university as a place of epistemological conversion must hold together four dimensions:

12.    Scientific rigor: the disciplined pursuit of knowledge, evidence, method, and conceptual clarity.

13.    Civic responsibility: the public debate of futures, risks, values, and collective choices.

14.    Interior development: the cultivation of attention, humility, courage, discernment, and relational maturity.

15.    Spiritual horizon: the search for meaning, common good, integral ecology, and the dignity of life.

14.8 Planetary Transformation: Outer Change and Inner Development

The language of planetary transformation connects this chapter to the SDGs, the IDGs, integral ecology, and international foresight networks. The Sustainable Development Goals provide a global grammar of outer transformation: poverty, inequality, climate, education, health, peace, institutions, cities, oceans, biodiversity, and partnerships. The Inner Development Goals add an essential insight: outer transformation requires inner capacities. Without humility, courage, complexity awareness, collaboration, self-awareness, empathy, and long-term responsibility, global goals remain technocratic checklists.

Integral ecology goes one step further by placing both outer and inner transformation within a relational and spiritual horizon. It asks not only how to achieve goals, but how to convert the underlying relationship between humanity and the living world. It calls for a transformation of imagination, desire, institutions, economics, technology, culture, and spirituality.

The foresight-driven university can serve this transformation by connecting SDGs, IDGs, and integral ecology through education, research, public engagement, and international cooperation. It can help students and leaders understand that planetary transformation is not a project outside themselves. It is also a transformation of perception, values, attention, identity, and vocation.

This means that the university of the future must teach not only knowledge about the world, but responsibility for the world. It must not only prepare students for jobs, but help them discover how their singular gifts can contribute to a common future. It must not only describe risks, but help communities cultivate the capacities needed to respond.

14.9 The Civilizational Task of the Foresight-Driven University

The civilizational task of the foresight-driven university can now be summarized. Such a university must help society move through a rupture of EPISTEMA without collapsing into fear, nostalgia, technocracy, or fragmentation. It must help name the old world, read the emerging world, and form persons and institutions capable of acting responsibly between the two.

This task includes at least seven responsibilities:

16.    To reveal the assumptions of the dominant paradigm, especially the reductionist and technocratic assumptions inherited from industrial modernity.

17.    To cultivate systemic and integral thinking, so that ecological, social, technological, economic, and spiritual questions can be understood together.

18.    To connect foresight with ethics, so that possible futures are evaluated in relation to dignity, justice, life, and the common good.

19.    To create public spaces where futures can be explored, debated, imagined, and made desirable.

20.    To develop international networks capable of comparing experiences, sharing methods, and learning from diverse cultural contexts.

21.    To preserve living memory through archives, videos, publications, case notes, and evidence matrices.

22.    To orient education toward vocation, genius, contribution, and planetary responsibility.

This is why the foresight-driven university cannot be reduced to a strategic foresight office, an innovation lab, or a sustainability department. It must become an integrated institutional posture. It must learn to anticipate, explore, connect, experiment, document, engage, internationalize, and transform. But beyond these eight capabilities, it must learn to discern EPISTEMA.

14.10 Limits, Risks, and Necessary Humility

The argument of this chapter is ambitious, and it requires humility. There are risks in connecting foresight, ecology, spirituality, and civilization. The first risk is abstraction: speaking of civilization without attending to concrete institutions, budgets, governance, programs, and people. The second risk is inflation: imagining that a single university can transform the world. The third risk is spiritual vagueness: using words such as integral, planetary, or consciousness without operational clarity. The fourth risk is institutional fragility: initiatives may depend too much on key individuals and may weaken if they are not embedded in governance, pedagogy, research, and budgets.

The UCL experience itself shows these limits. It is rich, creative, and generative, but it also requires further consolidation: stronger documentation of Symbiogora, complete metadata for the audiovisual archive, deeper evaluation of impact, continuity mechanisms for ECOPOSS and IFRN, and clearer articulation between foresight, curriculum, research, and governance.

These limits do not invalidate the model. They make it more realistic. A foresight-driven university is not a perfect institution. It is an institution that learns. It accepts incompleteness, documents its experiments, acknowledges uncertainty, and remains open to revision. Its authority comes not from claiming mastery over the future, but from cultivating disciplined attention to what is emerging.

14.11 Toward Civilizational Discernment

The phrase civilizational discernment is the final synthesis of the book. It means that foresight must help societies distinguish between futures that extend the failures of the old EPISTEMA and futures that open toward a more relational, just, ecological, creative, and spiritually mature civilization.

Discernment is not prediction. It is not simply analysis. It is not opinion. It is a disciplined practice of attention, interpretation, ethical judgment, and orientation. It asks: Which futures are life-giving? Which futures deepen domination? Which futures regenerate relationships? Which futures reduce humans to data, consumers, or functions? Which futures allow persons, communities, ecosystems, and institutions to flourish?

The foresight-driven university becomes necessary because no single actor can answer these questions alone. Governments, companies, NGOs, technologies, religious institutions, artists, researchers, citizens, and students all hold fragments of the answer. The university can become a mediator among these fragments. It can hold complexity without reducing it prematurely. It can connect knowledge and wisdom, innovation and ethics, memory and imagination, local territories and planetary horizons.

This is the deeper meaning of the UCL experience: it shows that a university can become a place where futures are explored not only as scenarios, but as calls to responsibility.

14.12 Conclusion: From Foresight to EPISTEMA

The book began with a question about higher education in an age of artificial intelligence and systemic uncertainty. It ends with a deeper question: what kind of civilization is being born, and what kind of university can help it become humane, ecological, creative, and spiritually grounded?

The answer proposed here is that the foresight-driven university is not only an institution that anticipates futures. It is an institution that helps society discern the EPISTEMA through which it thinks, believes, values, and acts. It does this by cultivating foresight capabilities, by learning from ecosystems, by engaging territories, by creating public cultures of the future, by joining international networks, and by opening toward integral ecology.

Integral ecology gives the normative horizon. EPISTEMA gives the depth of analysis. Planetary transformation gives the field of action. The university gives the institutional form through which knowledge, ethics, imagination, and responsibility can be connected.

The final task is not to predict the future. It is to help humanity become capable of futures worth inhabiting.

Key Takeaways

·       Integral ecology is not only environmental sustainability; it is a conversion of relations among humans, society, technology, economy, and the living Earth.

·       EPISTEMA names the invisible ground from which a civilization thinks, believes, values, and acts.

·       Artificial intelligence reveals both the power and the limits of analytical intelligence, making ethical and epistemological discernment more necessary.

·       The university is a place where EPISTEMA is reproduced, criticized, transmitted, and transformed.

·       The foresight-driven university must help society move from technocratic control toward relational responsibility.

·       The final horizon of the book is civilizational discernment: distinguishing futures that regenerate life from futures that deepen fragmentation.

Source Anchors for Final Referencing

D-MSC-EPISTEMA-2026-001: De qui Dieu est-il le nom? - EPISTEMA.

D-MSC-LASZLO-2026-001: Deux cartographies pour un seul monde.

D-UI-2014-001: Retrospective Universite Integrale.

D-MSC-ART-001: Can Art Save the World?

D-UCL-RRI-2019-002: Industry of the Future closing speech.

D-IFRN-2024-001: IFRN France statutes.

D-ECOPOSS-WEB-2025-001 and D-ECOPOSS-2021-001: ECOPOSS public futures sources.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

From Foresight to Civilizational Discernment

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The university, facing unprecedented challenges from AI, ecological disruption, and geopolitical fragmentation, must redefine its role in shaping the future. The foresight-driven university embraces anticipation as a core value, integrating it into its intellectual and ethical framework. This approach involves teaching how knowledge changes, examining the futures research enables, and preparing students for a world of constant transformation.

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The University as a Place Where Futures Become Thinkable, Debatable, and Desirable

 

A literary and academic synthesis of The Foresight-Driven University

 

1. At the Threshold: The University and the Return of the Future

This study began from a threshold. It began from the intuition that the university, one of the oldest institutions of the Western world and one of the most widely shared institutions of modern civilization, has reached a moment when continuity can no longer be secured by repetition. The university has survived because it has changed before: it moved from the medieval community of masters and students to the research university, from the formation of clerics and public servants to mass higher education, from the guarded library to the globally connected campus. Yet the transformation now under way is of another order. It touches not only the organization of teaching and research, but the very conditions under which knowledge is produced, authority is recognized, attention is sustained, and a future is imagined.

Artificial intelligence can compose, calculate, translate, compare, model, and synthesize at a speed that unsettles inherited definitions of expertise. Ecological disruption forces every discipline to reconsider the material conditions of human life. Geopolitical fragmentation challenges the promises of globalization, while digital networks connect societies more intensely and divide them more rapidly. The future of work becomes uncertain at the very moment when education is asked to prepare for it. The accumulation of information does not necessarily produce meaning; the multiplication of connections does not guarantee relationship; the acceleration of innovation does not tell us where we ought to go. The university therefore confronts a paradox: never has humanity possessed so much knowledge, and rarely has it seemed so uncertain about the purposes that knowledge should serve.

The argument developed throughout these pages is that the future has become a university question. It is no longer merely the distant horizon toward which education sends its graduates. It has entered the institution itself. It appears in the choices made today about curricula, research priorities, digital infrastructures, territorial partnerships, ecological commitments, and international alliances. Every university already participates in the making of futures, whether or not it recognizes that responsibility. By teaching some forms of knowledge rather than others, by rewarding certain types of excellence, by investing in particular technologies, by opening or closing itself to society, it makes some futures more probable and leaves others unexplored.

This is why adaptation, though necessary, is no longer sufficient. An institution may adapt perfectly to a world that should not be prolonged. It may innovate without asking what its innovation accelerates. It may become efficient while losing sight of its vocation. The decisive question is therefore not simply how universities will survive disruption, but what they will choose to preserve, what they will dare to transform, and what forms of life they will help to bring into being. The foresight-driven university emerges from this question. It is not a university that claims to know the future. It is a university that accepts responsibility for its relationship to the future.

The expression “foresight-driven” must therefore be understood with care. It does not imply that the institution is driven by forecasts, trend reports, or strategic scenarios alone. It means that anticipation becomes part of its intellectual and ethical metabolism. The university learns to look beyond the immediate, to recognize weak signals, to test inherited assumptions, to compare possible pathways, and to deliberate about desirable directions. It learns to remain open to surprise without becoming passive before uncertainty. It learns that the future is neither a territory to conquer nor a fate to endure, but a field of responsibility shared with others.

At this threshold, the task of higher education is renewed. The university must continue to transmit knowledge, but it must also teach how knowledge changes. It must continue to conduct research, but it must also examine the futures that research makes possible. It must continue to prepare students for professional life, but it must also form persons capable of judgment when professions, technologies, and institutions are themselves being transformed. It must protect rigor without becoming closed, cultivate innovation without surrendering to novelty, and remain rooted in a history while becoming available to what is not yet visible. The university is called not to abandon its inheritance, but to make that inheritance generative again.

2. A Journey Becomes a Model: The Coherence of the Fourteen Chapters

The fourteen chapters of this book do not present a linear program designed in advance. They reconstruct a living trajectory whose coherence becomes visible retrospectively. This distinction matters. The foresight-driven university did not begin as a concept waiting to be applied. It emerged from encounters, experiments, journeys, crises, institutional opportunities, incomplete projects, archives, conversations, and acts of interpretation. The model is credible precisely because it has passed through the resistance of reality. It carries the marks of contingency, dependence, interruption, and renewal. It is not the polished product of a single method; it is the reflective form given to a long institutional apprenticeship.

The first movement established the problem, the language, and the method. The opening chapter placed higher education within the combined turbulence of artificial intelligence and systemic uncertainty. The second chapter built a bridge between the French tradition of prospective and the international vocabulary of foresight. That bridge is more than linguistic. Prospective preserves a humanistic insistence that the future is constructed through freedom, responsibility, and action; foresight provides a shared language for strategic anticipation, futures literacy, and institutional preparedness. The third chapter then made the author’s position explicit. Because the inquiry arises from participation, memory had to become evidence, experience had to become reflection, and proximity had to be disciplined through triangulation, archives, and methodological transparency.

The second movement returned to the intellectual and institutional sources of the project. The trajectory through art, systemic thinking, the Evolution Grid, the Fields of Reality, the Club of Budapest, the Université Intégrale, and Design Me a Planet revealed that foresight was never merely technical. Before it became an institutional function, it was a way of perceiving. Art taught that reality can be reframed; systems thinking taught that visible forms are sustained by relations and assumptions; integral inquiry taught that social transformation cannot be separated from transformations of consciousness and meaning. IIPEI then gave these intuitions an institutional address. It became the first laboratory in which the university could learn from innovation ecosystems through research-action, dialogue, moving inquiry, and audiovisual memory.

The third movement opened the campus to the world. Learning Expeditions transformed travel into field-based foresight. Palo Alto and Silicon Valley disclosed an ecosystem of permission, entrepreneurial narrative, capital, experimentation, and technological ambition, but also its social and ethical shadows. Munich revealed another rhythm: industrial depth, reliability, and long-term excellence. Copenhagen made visible the role of trust, design, sustainability, and civic culture. China required a civilizational rather than merely economic reading. Togo and Benin challenged imported categories of development and revealed forms of endogenous, communal, spiritual, and frugal innovation. New York brought universities into contact with diplomacy, global institutions, law, technology, and planetary governance. Scandinavia linked futures studies and ecological transition with the inner capacities required for transformation.

From these journeys emerged the idea of ecosystem signatures. A place becomes intelligible not when it is reduced to indicators, but when its characteristic configuration of values, institutions, technologies, narratives, histories, and tensions can be perceived. This insight protected the project from the mythology of imitation. The purpose was never to reproduce Silicon Valley in Lille or to turn every territory into a delayed version of a dominant model. The purpose was to learn how different worlds make different futures possible. Symbiogora then became the hinge through which global learning returned to territorial responsibility. It translated observation into capacity-building and benchmarking into collective intelligence. The territory ceased to be a passive recipient of imported solutions and became a learning ecosystem capable of recognizing its own resources and composing its own future.

The fourth movement carried foresight from exploration into the institution and from the institution into public life. The Direction de la Prospective gave foresight a durable place within governance without reducing it to administrative routine. It connected strategic vigilance, international learning, territorial engagement, public programming, documentation, and institutional dialogue. EcosystemsInMotion showed how a crisis could become a methodological accelerator. When physical travel became impossible, the Learning Expedition was reimagined as a distributed digital research-action process. The world could no longer be entered through movement, so it was convened through conversation. The digital format lost some of the sensory intelligence of place but gained reach, replayability, and a new form of international simultaneity.

ECOPOSS completed another decisive passage: the future left the expert room and entered the public square. Through books, cinema, science, exhibitions, workshops, villages, debates, and intergenerational encounters, foresight became a civic and cultural experience. The future was no longer presented only as risk, forecast, or strategic object. It became something that could be explored, narrated, contested, desired, and shared. In this movement, the university recovered one of its deepest public functions. It became an agora where society could practice imagination without abandoning rigor and confront uncertainty without surrendering to fear.

The final movement transformed experience into model and model into horizon. The eight capabilities of the foresight-driven university gathered the dispersed initiatives into an institutional grammar. IFRN and the international benchmarks situated that grammar within a wider field of futures research, higher education transformation, global cooperation, and planetary governance. Integral ecology and EPISTEMA then carried the argument to its summit. The book could not end with technology, because technology does not determine its own meaning. It could not end with innovation, because innovation does not choose its own direction. It could not even end with foresight, because foresight itself requires an ethical and civilizational horizon. The final question became the deepest one: from what understanding of reality, humanity, and the common good do we imagine the future?

3. The Foresight-Driven University: An Institutional Grammar of Transformation

The model that emerges from this trajectory is best understood not as a blueprint but as a grammar. A blueprint presumes stable conditions, fixed proportions, and reproducible components. A grammar offers principles of composition. It does not prescribe identical sentences; it enables different communities to speak meaningfully in their own voice. No university can or should reproduce the precise history of the Université Catholique de Lille. Each institution is shaped by its mission, territory, disciplines, spiritual or civic inheritance, governance, and relationships. What can travel is not the sequence of events but the architecture of capabilities distilled from them.

Anticipation is the first capability, but it is not prediction. It is the disciplined practice of widening the temporal horizon of decision. It creates room for weak signals, discontinuities, alternative scenarios, and questions that daily urgency tends to suppress. A university capable of anticipation does not wait until a transformation becomes a crisis before beginning to think about it. It makes the long term present within governance. Yet anticipation must remain humble. Its purpose is not to eliminate uncertainty, which is impossible, but to improve the quality of attention, preparedness, and judgment.

Exploration gives anticipation a body. It carries the institution beyond its own routines and exposes it to places where other futures are being tried. Exploration is intellectual, geographic, cultural, and spiritual. It requires the courage to enter contexts that disturb familiar categories. It is not tourism and not the extraction of “best practices.” It is an encounter with difference, followed by interpretation. Through exploration, the university learns that the future is plural and already unevenly distributed across laboratories, neighborhoods, enterprises, communities, artistic practices, and social movements.

Connection recognizes that no institution, discipline, or sector can understand systemic transformation alone. The foresight-driven university therefore convenes improbable encounters. It links researchers and entrepreneurs, students and citizens, artists and engineers, territories and international networks, ethical traditions and technological experimentation. Connection is more than networking. It creates the relational conditions through which new intelligence can emerge. It requires trust, translation, hospitality, and the capacity to remain in dialogue across difference.

Experimentation converts possibility into learning. A foresight process that never changes a practice, tests a format, or modifies a decision remains incomplete. The initiatives described in this book constitute an ecology of prototypes: institutes, expeditions, seminars, digital world tours, territorial learning communities, public festivals, international networks, and editorial architectures. Not every prototype must become permanent. Some reveal their value precisely by remaining temporary. What matters is that the institution learns to act under uncertainty, to evaluate without demanding premature certainty, and to preserve lessons from what does not endure.

Documentation transforms experience into transmissible memory. This capability is easily underestimated because archives appear retrospective, while foresight appears future-oriented. In reality, there can be no mature relationship to the future without a disciplined relationship to memory. The audiovisual archive, timelines, evidence matrices, case notes, publications, programs, and metadata form a living infrastructure of institutional learning. They protect the narrative from mythologizing and allow later generations to distinguish fact, interpretation, aspiration, and incompleteness. Documentation is therefore an ethical practice: it makes claims accountable and prevents institutional memory from belonging only to those who were present.

Civic engagement establishes that the future is a common good. Universities betray their public vocation when they reserve future-thinking for leaders and experts. The decisions made about technology, ecology, work, health, cities, and education concern everyone, even when their technical dimensions require specialized knowledge. The university’s role is not to dissolve expertise into opinion but to create forms through which expertise can enter public meaning. ECOPOSS reveals the importance of artistic, narrative, spatial, and intergenerational formats in this work. A society must be able to imagine together if it is to act together.

Internationalization situates local learning within planetary interdependence. It is not merely mobility, reputation, or partnership portfolios. It is exposure to other ways of knowing and to arenas where shared norms are negotiated. Through international networks, benchmarks, and learning journeys, universities discover both the universality and the situatedness of their concerns. Yet internationalization must always return to place. Its purpose is not to escape the territory but to deepen the capacity to serve it in awareness of the world.

Transformation integrates the other seven capabilities. A university cannot claim to study change while remaining untouched by what it learns. Foresight becomes credible when it modifies governance, pedagogy, research, partnership, institutional memory, and public presence. This does not require permanent disruption. Transformation may also mean preserving what is essential by changing the forms through which it is carried. The task is not novelty for its own sake, but fidelity through renewal.

Embeddedness is the principle that holds these capabilities together. Foresight must have an institutional home, but it must not become a silo. It requires identifiable responsibility and transversal circulation. If it remains personal, it is fragile; if it becomes bureaucratic, it loses vitality; if it becomes purely strategic, it loses ethical depth; if it becomes purely visionary, it loses institutional effect. The art of the foresight-driven university lies in sustaining this tension. It must formalize without freezing, open without dispersing, and inspire without escaping the disciplines of evidence, governance, and evaluation.

The model’s limits are therefore part of its truth. Dependence on key actors, discontinuity between projects, incomplete documentation, difficulty in evaluating cultural effects, and the temptation of overextension all remain real. These are not objections external to the model; they are design challenges within it. They require succession, shared leadership, mixed methods of evaluation, metadata discipline, portfolio choices, and protected spaces for reflection. A foresight-driven university is not one that has solved uncertainty. It is one that has learned to make uncertainty discussable, governable, and fertile.

4. Artificial Intelligence, Planetary Governance, and the Inner Conditions of Change

Artificial intelligence returns at the end of this book in a different light from that in which it first appeared. At the beginning, it was one of the forces disrupting higher education. At the conclusion, it becomes a mirror held up to the university’s deepest purpose. If machines can retrieve information, produce fluent language, generate images, write code, and support analysis, then education can no longer justify itself solely through the transfer of content or the reproduction of routine expertise. The value of the university moves toward what cannot be reduced to accelerated output: the formation of judgment, the practice of inquiry, the interpretation of context, the courage of responsibility, and the capacity to relate knowledge to meaning.

This does not make technology secondary. AI will reshape research, teaching, administration, creativity, and institutional strategy. It can help structure archives, compare documents, identify themes, simulate possibilities, support translation, and extend access. The making of this book itself testifies to such assistance. Yet the use of AI also clarifies the boundary that must not be abandoned. Assistance is not authorship in the full human sense; pattern generation is not responsibility; fluency is not truth; optimization is not wisdom. The university must therefore form people who can work with intelligent systems without surrendering the ends of education to the logic of those systems.

An adequate AI literacy will have to be simultaneously technical, epistemological, ethical, ecological, civic, and spiritual. Students and researchers need to understand how models are trained, but also how they shape authority and attention. They need to know what systems can do, but also what infrastructures, labor, energy, data, and political choices sustain them. They need to question bias and opacity, but also the deeper desire for frictionless automation. The decisive question is not whether intelligence can be augmented; it is whether augmented power will be accompanied by enlarged responsibility.

The same relation between capability and responsibility appears at the planetary scale. The Sustainable Development Goals provide a shared grammar for outer transformation. They name urgent tasks relating to poverty, education, health, equality, climate, biodiversity, peace, institutions, and partnership. For universities, they offer a framework through which disciplines, territories, and international networks can align action. Yet goals alone do not transform the persons and institutions expected to realize them. A checklist can organize effort, but it cannot supply courage, empathy, humility, complexity awareness, or perseverance.

The Inner Development Goals illuminate these human conditions of collective action. Their dimensions of being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting remind us that institutional transformation always has an interior dimension. A university may adopt ambitious sustainability strategies while preserving cultures of competition, fragmentation, and exhaustion. It may teach systems thinking while rewarding siloed performance. It may celebrate partnership while neglecting the patience that trust requires. The IDGs do not replace structural reform, but they prevent reform from being imagined as a purely external engineering problem.

The foresight-driven university connects outer and inner transformation. It treats the SDGs not simply as topics to be taught, but as challenges that reorganize research, learning, campus life, and partnership. It treats the IDGs not as private self-development, but as relational capacities needed for collective agency. It recognizes that the future cannot be governed only through institutions, and that inner development without institutional change becomes powerless. The task is to hold both together: structures capable of justice and persons capable of inhabiting them.

Planetary governance, in this perspective, is more than the activity of international organizations. It is a learning ecology. It depends on the ability to connect scales, cultures, disciplines, generations, and forms of authority. The New York journey made this visible through encounters among universities, the United Nations, diplomacy, the Earth Institute, the Holy See, civic leadership, law, and technology. IFRN extends the same intuition in network form. A university contributes to planetary governance not by claiming to govern the planet, but by improving the quality of collective orientation: by cultivating long-term thinking, preserving memory, convening difference, and translating planetary questions into education and territorial action.

International benchmarks deepen this learning when they are used as mirrors rather than monuments. Turku demonstrates the academic institutionalization of futures studies. Arizona State University shows the scale at which planetary futures can become a strategic identity. The MIT Media Lab reveals the generative force of interdisciplinary experimentation. Stanford’s d.schoolembodies learning through design and prototyping. The Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies offers a long tradition of applied foresight. The Dubai Future Foundation illustrates public ambition and future-oriented governance. The distinctiveness of the Lille experience does not lie in surpassing these institutions, but in combining dimensions often separated elsewhere: foresight and territory, experimentation and memory, civic culture and international learning, ecological responsibility and spiritual depth.

The local and the planetary therefore cease to be opposites. The planet is encountered through territories, and territories are transformed by planetary conditions. The university becomes a mediator of scales. It helps a region recognize how global transitions are already present within its industries, social relations, ecosystems, and aspirations. It helps international networks remain connected to lived realities. Its cosmopolitanism is not placeless. It is the capacity to inhabit a place with responsibility for the whole.

5. Integral Ecology and EPISTEMA: Toward Civilizational Discernment

The argument of the book now reaches the point where institutional language alone becomes insufficient. Capabilities, governance, strategy, networks, and programs matter, but they do not answer the deepest question: toward what understanding of life should transformation be oriented? An institution can anticipate efficiently and still serve destructive purposes. It can innovate rapidly and deepen inequality. It can master the language of sustainability while leaving untouched the worldview that turns the living world into a stock of resources. Foresight requires a normative horizon. In this book, that horizon is provided by integral ecology.

Integral ecology begins from the recognition that everything is connected. This phrase is easily repeated and difficult to inhabit. It means that ecological degradation cannot be separated from social injustice, that economic choices shape cultural desires, that technological systems affect attention and relationship, and that spiritual emptiness may express itself through patterns of consumption and domination. The crisis is not only “out there” in climate indicators or biodiversity loss. It is also present in the categories through which modern societies define progress, success, freedom, and the good life.

For the university, integral ecology is not one more theme beside others. It is an invitation to transform the organization of knowledge. Disciplines remain indispensable, because rigor requires depth, language, and method. But disciplines become dangerous when their boundaries are mistaken for the boundaries of reality. The living world does not organize itself according to departments. A river is at once ecological, legal, economic, historical, cultural, and spiritual. Artificial intelligence is at once computational, political, pedagogical, environmental, anthropological, and ethical. Integral inquiry does not dissolve differences; it composes them around realities too complex for any one perspective.

This compositional task returns the project to its artistic origins. If the planet is approached as a collective work of art, then civilization is not a machine to be optimized but a world to be composed. Composition requires attention to form, relation, proportion, dissonance, memory, and possibility. It accepts that creation is never simply self-expression; it is an answer to materials, histories, others, and limits. A foresight-driven university can become a studio of collective world-making, provided it remains accountable to evidence, justice, and the dignity of what it did not create.

EPISTEMA names the deepest level of this work. It designates the largely invisible ground from which an epoch decides what counts as real, true, rational, valuable, sacred, desirable, and possible. Institutions, laws, technologies, and curricula are visible; beneath them lie images of the human being, relations to nature, conceptions of time, dominant forms of reason, and implicit figures of the absolute. A civilization does not only produce objects. It produces the horizon within which those objects acquire meaning.

The industrial EPISTEMA brought extraordinary achievements: scientific knowledge, medicine, infrastructure, rights, mass education, and productive power. The task is not to reject modernity or romanticize a lost past. It is to recognize the point at which a partial truth becomes an absolute. When knowledge is reduced to control, when progress is equated with acceleration, when nature appears only as resource, and when freedom becomes unlimited expansion, the achievements of modernity begin to undermine their own conditions. Ecological crisis is therefore not merely a failure of technology. It is a revelation of the limits of an entire way of making reality intelligible.

A relational EPISTEMA is beginning to appear through ecology, complexity science, systems thinking, indigenous knowledge, spiritual traditions, social innovation, and new forms of cooperation. It understands beings through relations, agency through interdependence, and freedom through responsibility. It does not abolish the individual but situates individuality within webs of life. It does not reject reason but enlarges reason beyond calculation. It does not oppose technology but asks technology to take its place within an ecology of meaning and limits.

The university is one of the places where EPISTEMA is reproduced. Through its disciplines, methods, rankings, credentials, and hidden curricula, it teaches not only knowledge but what knowledge is worth knowing. Yet the university is also one of the rare institutions where an EPISTEMA can be criticized from within. It can preserve memory while exposing inherited assumptions. It can place different traditions of knowledge into conversation. It can cultivate the patience required to distinguish transformation from fashion. This double role—as custodian and critic—defines its civilizational importance.

Civilizational discernment is the practice suited to this responsibility. It is not prediction and not ideological certainty. It is a disciplined attention to the futures implicit in present choices. It asks which innovations regenerate relationship and which deepen domination; which forms of intelligence enlarge human agency and which reduce persons to data; which transitions change the surface and which transform the underlying logic. Discernment requires evidence, but evidence does not relieve us of judgment. It requires imagination, but imagination must remain answerable to the world.

This is also where the spiritual horizon of the project becomes unavoidable. To speak of what is ultimately valuable is to approach questions that no technical method can settle alone. The sacred need not be invoked to suspend reason; it may instead name the depth at which life can no longer be treated as an instrument. A Catholic and humanistic university carries a particular responsibility here. It can bring scientific rigor into conversation with the common good, social friendship, integral human development, care for the common home, and the dignity of every person. Its distinctiveness will not be secured by asserting answers too quickly, but by sustaining spaces where ultimate questions can be asked without embarrassment or coercion.

The summit of the book is therefore not a doctrine but an opening. EPISTEMA is not offered as a final system that replaces all others. It is a lens that allows the university to recognize the depth at which future-making occurs. It invites institutions to ask what they are reproducing when they educate, what they authorize when they innovate, and what image of humanity their strategies assume. It brings foresight to the threshold of wisdom.

6. A Manifesto for the University Yet to Come

The university yet to come is already present in fragments. It appears wherever a classroom becomes a place of inquiry rather than repetition; wherever research crosses a disciplinary border because reality requires it; wherever a territory is treated as a partner rather than a market; wherever students are invited to become authors of responsibility rather than consumers of credentials; wherever a public debate makes complexity accessible without making it simplistic; wherever an archive preserves the memory of an experiment so that others may learn from it; wherever technology is placed in service of human and ecological flourishing.

This university will not be defined first by architecture, size, prestige, or technological sophistication. It will be defined by the quality of attention it brings to what is emerging and by the courage with which it relates knowledge to consequence. It will know that intelligence without orientation can accelerate disaster, that innovation without memory repeats old errors, and that internationalization without place becomes abstraction. It will understand that its deepest resource is not information but the capacity to convene people around questions no actor can answer alone.

The university yet to come will be anticipatory without pretending to be prophetic. It will explore without extracting, connect without dissolving difference, experiment without worshipping novelty, and document without turning memory into a museum. It will internationalize without becoming placeless and transform without losing fidelity to what deserves to endure. It will make futures public because democracy requires more than participation in decisions already framed by others; it requires participation in the imagination of what could be.

It will treat artificial intelligence neither as an oracle nor as an enemy. It will use machine capabilities to extend inquiry while protecting the irreducibility of human responsibility. It will teach that an answer can be plausible and false, efficient and unjust, innovative and undesirable. It will form people capable of pausing before acceleration, of asking who benefits and who bears the cost, of recognizing what data cannot contain, and of refusing to delegate moral agency to systems designed without conscience.

It will connect the SDGs to the material transformation of institutions and the IDGs to the formation of persons, while refusing to separate one from the other. It will make planetary governance concrete through the patient work of local partnership. It will recognize that the future of the Earth is decided not only in global summits but in campuses, cities, laboratories, companies, farms, neighborhoods, and habits of attention. It will cultivate cosmopolitan responsibility rooted in the love of particular places.

It will understand integral ecology as a method of belonging. It will oppose the fragmentation of knowledge not with vague unity but with disciplined cooperation. It will create spaces where science, art, ethics, technology, economics, spirituality, and lived experience can correct and enrich one another. It will recover wonder as a form of intelligence and limit as a condition of creation. It will teach that to know the world is already to enter into responsibility for it.

It will recognize that every education transmits an EPISTEMA, whether consciously or not. It will therefore examine its own hidden assumptions. It will ask what image of success is built into its rankings, what understanding of time is encoded in its schedules, what relation to nature is expressed by its investments, what conception of the person is carried by its pedagogy, and what future is made more likely by its governance. It will not ask these questions in order to achieve purity, but in order to become capable of conversion.

Such a university cannot be created by decree. It must be practiced into existence. It grows through protected experiments, courageous leadership, patient documentation, shared language, succession, public trust, and communities willing to learn from failure. It requires institutional structures, but also interior freedom. It requires resources, but also attention to what cannot be purchased. It requires strategy, but also hospitality to surprise.

The experience of the Université Catholique de Lille does not offer a finished model standing outside history. It offers something more useful: evidence that a university can begin. It can create a laboratory, enter the world, listen to ecosystems, return to its territory, institutionalize foresight, transform crisis into research-action, open the future to the public, build international networks, and ask questions that exceed the horizon of management. It can turn a sequence of initiatives into a reflective corpus and a lived trajectory into a transferable grammar.

The remaining work is considerable. Archives must be completed, impacts evaluated, methods taught, responsibilities distributed, and initiatives protected from dispersion. The model must be tested in other universities and translated into other cultural contexts. Its claims must be challenged by external readers, younger generations, territories, and disciplines not yet sufficiently present. A genuinely foresight-driven university must remain open to the possibility that its own model will be transformed by those who inherit it.

Yet the incompleteness of the work is not a defect to be concealed. It is faithful to the subject. The future is always unfinished. An institution devoted to the future must resist the temptation to present itself as complete. Its authority comes not from mastery but from disciplined openness, not from certainty but from the courage to learn publicly. The book therefore ends where institutional transformation begins: with an invitation.

The invitation is addressed to university leaders who must decide under uncertainty, to teachers who form people for worlds not yet visible, to researchers whose discoveries carry consequences beyond their disciplines, to students whose lives will unfold within the futures now being shaped, to territorial partners whose knowledge is indispensable, to artists who make possibilities perceptible, to citizens who refuse the confiscation of the future, and to spiritual traditions that preserve questions of ultimate purpose.

The invitation is to make the future a shared object of knowledge, imagination, deliberation, and care. It is to move from adaptation to anticipation, from benchmarking to translation, from innovation to direction, from information to discernment, from sustainability as compliance to integral ecology as relationship, and from the management of change to the transformation of EPISTEMA.

A university worthy of the century ahead will not promise certainty where none exists. It will offer something more demanding: the capacity to remain lucid without becoming cynical, imaginative without becoming naive, technologically capable without becoming technocratic, rooted without becoming closed, and spiritually open without abandoning intellectual rigor. It will help societies distinguish what is merely new from what is genuinely life-giving.

The final measure of the foresight-driven university will therefore not be whether it predicted the future correctly. It will be whether it enlarged the range of responsible possibilities; whether it helped people see earlier, connect more deeply, deliberate more honestly, and act more courageously; whether it preserved the memory needed for transformation; whether it made the future available to those too often excluded from its design; and whether it contributed, however modestly, to a civilization more capable of inhabiting the Earth with justice, intelligence, beauty, and care.

The future does not ask the university to become an oracle. It asks the university to become fully itself: a community of inquiry, a guardian of memory, a critic of power, a workshop of imagination, a school of responsibility, and a meeting place between worlds. At the edge of uncertainty, this may be its oldest vocation and its newest task. The journey from foresight to civilizational discernment does not lead away from the university. It leads back to the depth of what a university can be.

The Foresight-Driven University

A Reflective Study of Innovation Ecosystems, Artificial Intelligence, and Desirable Futures in Higher Education

Lessons from the Université Catholique de Lille Experience

Plan en 14 chapitres :

Front Matter

• Foreword

• Author’s Note — A Participant-Observer Perspective

• Executive Summary

• Acknowledgements

Introduction — Why Universities Need Foresight

Part I — Foundations

Chapter 1 — Higher Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence and Systemic Uncertainty

Chapter 2 — From French Prospective to International Foresight

Chapter 3 — Research Design: A Reflective Study

Part II — Intellectual and Institutional Genesis

Chapter 4 — A Life Trajectory: Art, Systems, Foresight, and Integral Thinking

Chapter 5 — IIPEI and the Birth of a Foresight Laboratory

Part III — Learning from Innovation Ecosystems

Chapter 6 — Learning Expeditions as Field-Based Foresight

Chapter 7 — Global Innovation Ecosystem Signatures

Chapter 8 — From Global Ecosystems to Territorial Transformation: Symbiogora and Hauts-de-France

Part IV — From Embedded Foresight to Public Futures

Chapter 9 — Institutionalizing Foresight: The Direction de la Prospective

Chapter 10 — EcosystemsInMotion: Digital Research-Action in a Time of Crisis

Chapter 11 — ECOPOSS: Making Futures Public

Part V — Model, Planetary Governance, and Civilizational Discernment

Chapter 12 — The Foresight-Driven University Model

Eight Institutional Capabilities for Desirable Futures

Chapter 13 — Planetary Governance, IFRN, and International Benchmarks

Chapter 14 — Integral Ecology, EPISTEMA, and Planetary Transformation

Conclusion — From Foresight to Civilizational Discernment

Appendices

Appendix A — Timeline of the Université Catholique de Lille Experience

Appendix B — Case Notes

Appendix C — Glossary of Key Concepts

Appendix D — Methodological Note and Evidence Matrix

Appendix E — Audiovisual Archives

Appendix F — Index of Persons

Appendix G — General Bibliography, International Benchmarks, and Resources

Appendix H — Making the Book: AI-Assisted Reflection, Writing, and Knowledge Structuring