THE FORESIGHT-DRIVEN UNIVERSITY
From Institutional Anticipation to Civilizational Discernment
A Reflective Synthesis of Innovation Ecosystems, Artificial Intelligence, Territorial Transformation, and Desirable Futures in Higher Education
Michel Saloff-Coste
President, International Foresight Research Network — IFRN
Academic synthesis article · July 2026
Abstract
This article presents the foresight-driven university as an institutional response to the transformation of higher education under conditions of artificial intelligence, systemic uncertainty, ecological disruption, and planetary interdependence. Drawing on a reflective participant-observer study of the Université Catholique de Lille, it reconstructs a trajectory extending from IIPEI and Learning Expeditions to ecosystem signatures, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, IFRN, integral ecology, and EPISTEMA. The article argues that foresight should no longer be treated as a peripheral strategic method. It should become an embedded institutional capability linking governance, research, pedagogy, territorial engagement, public culture, international cooperation, and ethical responsibility. Eight capabilities define the model: anticipation, exploration, connection, experimentation, documentation, civic engagement, internationalization, and transformation. The article also examines the relation between artificial intelligence and human discernment, the contribution of the Sustainable Development Goals and Inner Development Goals, and the need to connect outer transformation with inner development. Integral ecology provides the normative horizon, while EPISTEMA names the deeper civilizational assumptions through which societies think, value, and act. The principal contribution is a transferable grammar rather than a model to be mechanically copied. A foresight-driven university does not predict the future; it helps society detect what is emerging, deliberate about what is desirable, and cultivate the human and institutional capacities required to build futures worth inhabiting.
Keywords: foresight-driven university; prospective; higher education; artificial intelligence; innovation ecosystems; integral ecology; EPISTEMA; civilizational discernment.
Résumé
Cet article présente l’université guidée par la prospective comme une réponse institutionnelle à la transformation de l’enseignement supérieur dans un contexte marqué par l’intelligence artificielle, l’incertitude systémique, la rupture écologique et l’interdépendance planétaire. À partir d’une étude réflexive menée depuis une posture de participant-observateur à l’Université Catholique de Lille, il reconstitue une trajectoire allant de l’IIPEI et des Learning Expeditions aux signatures écosystémiques, à Symbiogora, à la Direction de la Prospective, à EcosystemsInMotion, à ECOPOSS, à l’IFRN, puis à l’écologie intégrale et à EPISTEMA. La thèse défendue est que la prospective ne doit plus être considérée comme une méthode stratégique périphérique, mais comme une capacité institutionnelle structurante reliant gouvernance, recherche, pédagogie, engagement territorial, culture publique, coopération internationale et responsabilité éthique. Le modèle repose sur huit capacités : anticiper, explorer, connecter, expérimenter, documenter, engager la société, internationaliser et transformer. L’article examine également le rapport entre intelligence artificielle et discernement humain, la contribution des Objectifs de développement durable et des Inner Development Goals, ainsi que la nécessité d’articuler transformation extérieure et développement intérieur. L’écologie intégrale fournit l’horizon normatif, tandis qu’EPISTEMA désigne les présupposés civilisationnels à partir desquels les sociétés pensent, valorisent et agissent. La contribution principale est une grammaire transférable plutôt qu’un modèle à reproduire mécaniquement. Une université guidée par la prospective ne prédit pas l’avenir : elle aide la société à percevoir ce qui émerge, à délibérer sur ce qui est désirable et à cultiver les capacités humaines et institutionnelles nécessaires à la construction de futurs habitables.
Mots-clés : université guidée par la prospective ; prospective ; enseignement supérieur ; intelligence artificielle ; écosystèmes d’innovation ; écologie intégrale ; EPISTEMA ; discernement civilisationnel.
1. Introduction: The Future as a University Question
Universities have always occupied a singular position between past and future. They preserve languages, methods, disciplines, archives, and traditions inherited from previous generations, yet they educate persons whose lives will unfold in conditions that cannot be fully known. They stabilize knowledge and simultaneously produce discoveries that unsettle inherited worlds. This temporal tension belongs to their vocation. What has changed in the twenty-first century is the intensity with which the future has entered the university’s present. Artificial intelligence transforms authorship and expertise; ecological disruption changes the horizon of responsibility; social fragmentation weakens trust; geopolitical instability reshapes international cooperation; and digital systems modify attention, memory, and public debate. These changes interact. Higher education is confronting not a collection of isolated trends but a systemic transformation of the environment of knowledge.
The dominant response has often been adaptation. Universities create programs, install platforms, revise strategies, strengthen employability, establish sustainability offices, and form partnerships with innovative organizations. These responses are necessary but insufficient. An institution may adapt efficiently to a world that should not be prolonged. It may innovate without asking what its innovation accelerates. It may increase performance while losing sight of its vocation. Foresight begins where adaptation reaches its limit. It asks what is emerging before it becomes obvious, which assumptions organize current decisions, whose futures are represented, and what kind of future an institution makes more probable through its present choices.
The foresight-driven university is proposed as a response to this challenge. It is not a university that predicts with greater confidence. It is an institution that develops a disciplined and shared relationship to uncertainty across governance, research, pedagogy, territorial engagement, public life, and international cooperation. The future becomes a common object of inquiry rather than the private domain of planners. Foresight becomes an institutional intelligence: the capacity to detect, interpret, deliberate, experiment, remember, and transform.
2. From French Prospective to a Foresight-Driven Institution
The conceptual foundation of the model lies in a translation between the French tradition of prospective and the international language of foresight. Prospective, associated notably with Gaston Berger, does not treat the future primarily as an object of prediction. It is an attitude of looking far, wide, and deeply while placing human freedom and responsibility at the center. International foresight provides a vocabulary of horizon scanning, scenarios, strategic preparedness, futures studies, anticipatory governance, and futures literacy. The expression foresight-driven university adopts this internationally intelligible language while seeking to preserve the humanistic and action-oriented depth of prospective.
Prediction asks what will happen and tends toward a single expected future. Forecasting extends identified trends. Futures studies explores plural possibilities. Strategic foresight connects plausible futures to present decisions. Futures literacy examines how anticipatory assumptions influence what people perceive and do. Prospective asks what futures persons and institutions should imagine, debate, and construct. The foresight-driven university requires the plurality of futures studies, the decision relevance of strategic foresight, the reflexivity of futures literacy, and the ethical orientation of prospective.
The term “driven” does not imply that forecasts determine institutional decisions. It indicates that attention to futures becomes an organizing principle. A foresight-driven university differs from a university that merely possesses a foresight office. It also differs from entrepreneurial, innovative, digital, or sustainable university models, although it may incorporate each of them. Entrepreneurship can privilege market value, innovation can accelerate change without examining direction, digitalization can confuse infrastructure with learning, and sustainability can become compliance. Foresight places these activities within a wider field of consequences, alternatives, values, and public responsibility.
3. A Reflective Method Grounded in Research-Action
The argument emerges from a reflective study of the Université Catholique de Lille conducted from a participant-observer and practitioner-scholar position. The author contributed to many of the initiatives analyzed, mobilized concepts and networks, organized learning processes, and later sought to interpret the accumulated experience. Such proximity provides access to intentions, conversations, institutional textures, and continuities that may be invisible to an external observer. It also generates risks of selective memory, retrospective coherence, over-identification, and celebratory narration.
The method addresses these risks by distinguishing memory from proof and interpretation from verified institutional fact. Action plans, programs, travel materials, publications, statutes, presentations, public documents, videos, timelines, and case notes are triangulated through an evidence matrix. The objective is not impossible neutrality but disciplined reflexivity. The author’s position remains visible, and major claims can be related to a documentary corpus. Audiovisual records are treated as primary sources because they preserve voices, arguments, gestures, and the evolution of a network over time. Their value depends on metadata and indexing; without structure, the archive remains an accumulation, while with structure it becomes research infrastructure.
Research-action is essential because the initiatives did not merely observe transformation from outside. Learning Expeditions modified the participants’ frames of interpretation. Symbiogora helped territorial actors become conscious of their ecosystem. EcosystemsInMotion created a distributed field of inquiry during crisis. ECOPOSS investigated public futures partly by making futures public. Knowledge emerged through cycles of action, documentation, reflection, and redesign. The aim is therefore not universal generalization but transferability: to identify concepts and capabilities that other institutions may reinterpret according to their histories and territories.
4. From IIPEI to ECOPOSS: A Trajectory of Institutional Learning
IIPEI was the first institutional crystallization of the approach. It brought creative strategy, systems thinking, collaborative foresight, innovation-ecosystem research, corporate dialogue, international inquiry, video interviews, and publishing into a university-based laboratory. Its basic proposition was that innovation is ecosystemic. It rarely results from the isolated action of a single organization; it emerges from relations among universities, companies, investors, public authorities, cultural institutions, technologies, communities, and narratives. Foresight can activate such ecosystems by creating a shared field of long-term attention.
Learning Expeditions provided the empirical method. Participants approached places not as collections of best practices but as living configurations. Preparation, immersion, encounter, debriefing, documentation, interpretation, and translation transformed travel into field-based foresight. Silicon Valley revealed permission, venture capital, entrepreneurial narrative, rapid experimentation, and technological ambition, as well as inequality and technological utopianism. Munich foregrounded engineering depth and industrial continuity. Copenhagen linked trust, design, sustainability, and civic culture. China required a civilizational reading. Togo and Benin revealed endogenous, communal, and frugal innovation. New York became a classroom of planetary governance. Scandinavia connected futures studies, sustainability, social trust, and inner development.
The comparison led to the concept of ecosystem signatures: the distinctive configuration of history, values, institutions, technologies, economic logics, social relations, and symbolic narratives through which a place generates transformation. This concept protects learning from imitation. The purpose is not to reproduce Silicon Valley in Lille or to treat every territory as a delayed version of a dominant center. The purpose is to understand how different worlds make different futures possible and what principles can be translated without erasing context.
Symbiogora became the territorial hinge. It shifted the question from attracting innovation toward strengthening a territory’s capability to understand and activate itself as an ecosystem. The university became a convener, translator, and catalyst of collective intelligence. The Direction de la Prospective then marked the passage from project to institutional function. Foresight acquired an identifiable home connected to governance while remaining transversal. The challenge was to formalize without bureaucratizing: too little structure leaves foresight dependent on individuals, while too much structure can neutralize imagination and mobility.
EcosystemsInMotion demonstrated how crisis can accelerate institutional learning. When physical mobility became impossible during the Covid period, the Learning Expedition was reconfigured as a virtual world tour and digital research-action process. The format increased accessibility and archiveability but could not reproduce the sensory and informal intelligence of place. ECOPOSS then carried foresight into public culture. Through books, cinema, debates, science, exhibitions, workshops, and intergenerational encounters, it treated the future as a civic question. The campus became an agora in which possible and desirable futures could be explored without abandoning rigor.
IFRN extends the trajectory beyond a particular institutional period. It connects researchers, practitioners, educators, companies, and public actors concerned with long-term futures and foresight-in-action. Internationalization here is not a search for prestige. It is the circulation, comparison, critique, and renewal of practices across cultural and institutional contexts.
5. The Eight Capabilities of the Foresight-Driven University
The trajectory can be synthesized through eight interdependent capabilities: anticipation, exploration, connection, experimentation, documentation, civic engagement, internationalization, and transformation. Together they form an institutional grammar rather than a blueprint. A blueprint presumes stable conditions and reproducible components. A grammar offers principles of composition that different institutions may express in their own voice. No university should reproduce the history of the Université Catholique de Lille mechanically. What can travel is the capability architecture distilled from the experience.
Anticipation widens the temporal horizon of decision. It makes room for weak signals, discontinuities, alternative scenarios, and questions that urgency suppresses. Its purpose is not to eliminate uncertainty but to improve attention and preparedness. Exploration gives anticipation a body by exposing the institution to places and practices in which other futures are being attempted. Connection recognizes that no discipline or organization can understand systemic transformation alone. It creates generative relationships among researchers, students, companies, territories, artists, citizens, ethical traditions, and international networks.
Experimentation converts possibility into learning through prototypes, formats, and institutional devices. Not every experiment must become permanent; what matters is that lessons are preserved and used. Documentation transforms experience into transmissible memory. Timelines, evidence matrices, audiovisual archives, publications, programs, and metadata prevent the narrative from belonging only to those who were present. Documentation is an ethical capability because it makes institutional claims accountable.
Civic engagement affirms that the future is a common good. The university’s task is not to replace expertise with opinion but to create forms through which expert knowledge can enter public meaning. Internationalization situates local responsibility within planetary interdependence and exposes the institution to other ways of knowing. Transformation integrates the other 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, memory, and public presence.
Embeddedness is the integrative principle. Foresight needs an institutional home but must not become a silo. If it remains personal, it is fragile; if it becomes bureaucratic, it loses vitality; if it remains merely visionary, it loses institutional effect. The foresight-driven university must formalize without freezing, open without dispersing, and inspire without escaping evidence, governance, and evaluation.
6. Artificial Intelligence, the SDGs, the IDGs, and Planetary Governance
Artificial intelligence functions in this model as both disruption and epistemological revealer. If machines can retrieve information, produce fluent language, generate images, write code, and support analysis, education can no longer justify itself solely through content transfer or routine expertise. The value of the university moves toward the formation of judgment, inquiry, contextual interpretation, ethical responsibility, and the capacity to relate knowledge to meaning. AI can support archives, comparison, translation, analysis, and accessibility, but assistance is not authorship in the full human sense, fluency is not truth, and optimization is not wisdom.
An adequate AI literacy must therefore be technical, epistemological, ethical, ecological, civic, and spiritual. Students and researchers should understand what systems can do and what infrastructures, data, energy, labor, and political choices sustain them. The decisive question is not simply whether intelligence can be augmented, but whether augmented power will be accompanied by enlarged responsibility. Foresight is necessary because technological capability does not determine its own purpose.
The Sustainable Development Goals provide a shared grammar of outer transformation. They connect poverty, health, education, equality, climate, biodiversity, peace, institutions, and partnership. For universities, they offer a framework for aligning disciplines and territories with planetary challenges. Yet goals do not automatically transform the persons and institutions expected to achieve them. The Inner Development Goals illuminate the human foundations of change through the dimensions of being, thinking, relating, collaborating, and acting. They remind institutions that sustainability strategies may fail if organizational cultures remain fragmented, competitive, exhausted, or unable to cooperate.
The foresight-driven university connects outer and inner transformation. It treats the SDGs not merely as course content but as challenges that reorganize research, learning, campus life, and partnership. It treats the IDGs not as private self-development but as relational capacities required for collective agency. Inner development without structural change is powerless; structural change without human development is fragile.
Planetary governance is consequently understood as a learning ecology rather than only the activity of international organizations. It depends on connecting scales, cultures, disciplines, generations, and forms of authority. The New York Learning Journey made this visible through encounters among universities, the United Nations, diplomacy, sustainability institutions, the Holy See, civic leadership, law, and technology. A university contributes to planetary governance not by governing the planet but by improving collective orientation: cultivating long-term thinking, convening difference, preserving memory, and translating planetary concerns into education and territorial action.
7. Integral Ecology, EPISTEMA, and Civilizational Discernment
Institutional capabilities 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 use the language of sustainability while leaving untouched a worldview that treats the living world as a stock of resources. Foresight therefore requires a normative horizon. In this approach, that horizon is integral ecology.
Integral ecology begins from the recognition that ecological degradation cannot be separated from social injustice, that economic choices shape cultural desires, that technologies transform attention and relationship, and that spiritual emptiness may express itself through patterns of consumption and domination. For the university, integral ecology is not one topic beside others. It is an invitation to transform the organization of knowledge. Disciplines remain indispensable, but their boundaries are not the boundaries of reality. A river is ecological, legal, economic, historical, cultural, and spiritual. Artificial intelligence is computational, political, pedagogical, environmental, anthropological, and ethical. Integral inquiry composes differences around realities too complex for any single perspective.
EPISTEMA names the deeper level at which an epoch decides what counts as real, true, rational, valuable, sacred, desirable, and possible. Institutions and technologies are visible; beneath them are images of the human being, relations to nature, conceptions of time, dominant forms of reason, and implicit definitions of progress. The industrial EPISTEMA produced extraordinary scientific, medical, political, and educational achievements. The problem appears when one partial truth becomes absolute: knowledge becomes control, progress becomes acceleration, nature becomes resource, and freedom becomes unlimited expansion.
A relational EPISTEMA can be perceived through ecology, complexity science, systems thinking, spiritual traditions, social innovation, and new forms of cooperation. It understands beings through relationships, agency through interdependence, and freedom through responsibility. It does not reject reason or technology; it resituates them within an ecology of meaning and limits. The university is one of the places where EPISTEMA is reproduced through disciplines, rankings, credentials, methods, and hidden curricula. It is also one of the rare institutions where an EPISTEMA can be criticized from within.
Civilizational discernment is the practice appropriate to this responsibility. It asks which innovations regenerate relationships and which deepen domination, which forms of intelligence enlarge human agency and which reduce persons to data, and which transitions transform only the surface while preserving the underlying logic. Discernment is neither prediction nor ideological certainty. It combines evidence, imagination, ethical judgment, and humility. The ultimate task of the foresight-driven university is therefore not mastery of the future but the cultivation of a collective capacity to distinguish futures that extend an exhausted paradigm from futures that open toward a more relational, just, ecological, creative, and spiritually mature civilization.
8. Limits, Transferability, and Research Agenda
The model has important limitations. The UCL trajectory depended on key actors, personal networks, and moments of leadership support. Its documentary corpus is uneven: some initiatives generated extensive publications and audiovisual records, while others require consolidation. Foresight impact is difficult to attribute because it often changes language, perception, relationships, and preparedness before producing measurable outputs. Retrospective analysis may also impose coherence on events that were originally dispersed. Finally, civilizational concepts such as integral ecology and EPISTEMA risk abstraction unless connected to curricula, budgets, governance, incentives, and evaluable practices.
These limits do not invalidate the model; they define its conditions of credibility. Continuity requires succession, shared leadership, protected institutional memory, and portfolio choices. Evaluation should combine quantitative indicators with contribution analysis, network mapping, narrative evidence, institutional ethnography, and documentation of decisions influenced. The model should also be tested against counter-cases: universities may possess foresight offices without cultural transformation, while others may develop strong anticipatory capabilities without a dedicated structure.
Future research should compare how the eight capabilities appear in different university systems, missions, and cultural contexts. Longitudinal studies should examine their durability through leadership transitions. Further work is needed on student participation, curricular integration, AI-supported foresight, public futures, territorial partnerships, and the relationship between inner development and organizational transformation. Transferability should remain a process of translation rather than replication.
9. Conclusion: The University as a Builder of Desirable Futures
The foresight-driven university is not a prediction about what every university will become. It is a proposition about what universities may need to become if they are to remain worthy of trust during systemic transition. The experience reconstructed here suggests that foresight gains institutional force when global exploration returns to territorial responsibility, when experimentation is documented, when governance remains connected to imagination, when the future becomes public, and when international learning opens toward ethical and civilizational questions.
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. Such a university will be anticipatory without pretending to be prophetic, technologically capable without becoming technocratic, rooted without becoming closed, and spiritually open without abandoning intellectual rigor.
Its success will not be measured by whether it predicted correctly. It will be measured by whether it enlarged the field of responsible possibilities; whether it helped people see earlier, connect more deeply, deliberate more honestly, and act more courageously; whether it preserved the memory required for transformation; and whether it made the future available to those too often excluded from its design. Its ultimate horizon is not foresight itself but civilizational discernment: the capacity to connect knowledge, imagination, ethics, and action in service of futures worth inhabiting.
Michel Saloff-Coste
President, International Foresight Research Network — IFRN
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Author Note
Michel Saloff-Coste writes from a participant-observer perspective and remains fully responsible for the argument and final text. Microsoft 365 Copilot assisted with editorial structuring and document preparation under the author’s direction.
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