THE FORESIGHT-DRIVEN UNIVERSITY
From Institutional Anticipation to Civilizational Discernment
A Reflective Study of Innovation Ecosystems, Artificial Intelligence, Territorial Transformation, and Desirable Futures in Higher Education
Michel Saloff-Coste
Université Catholique de Lille · IIPEI · IFRN
Academic synthesis article · July 2026
Abstract
This article develops the concept of 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 the creation of the International Institute for Foresight on Innovation Ecosystems (IIPEI) to Learning Expeditions, the interpretation of ecosystem signatures, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, the International Foresight Research Network (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, pedagogy, research, territorial engagement, public culture, international networks, and ethical responsibility. Eight interdependent capabilities are identified: anticipation, exploration, connection, experimentation, documentation, civic engagement, internationalization, and transformation. The article also examines the model’s limitations, including dependence on key actors, discontinuity, evidential gaps, evaluation difficulties, bureaucratic drift, and technological solutionism. It proposes that the Sustainable Development Goals provide an external grammar of planetary transformation, while the Inner Development Goals identify human and relational capacities required for change. Integral ecology supplies the normative horizon, and EPISTEMA names the deeper civilizational assumptions through which societies think, value, and act. The principal contribution is a transferable grammar rather than a replicable blueprint. A foresight-driven university does not predict the future; it helps society detect what is emerging, deliberate about what is desirable, and cultivate the institutional and human capacities needed to build futures worth inhabiting.
Keywords: Foresight-driven university; prospective; higher education transformation; innovation ecosystems; Learning Expeditions; ecosystem signatures; territorial translation; artificial intelligence; futures literacy; integral ecology; EPISTEMA; civilizational discernment.
1. Introduction: Why the Future Has Become a University Question
Universities have always lived in a paradoxical relationship with time. They inherit languages, methods, disciplines, archives, and traditions from the past, yet they educate persons whose lives will unfold in conditions that cannot be fully known. They stabilize knowledge and simultaneously create discoveries that destabilize inherited worlds. This temporal tension is constitutive of their vocation. What has changed in the early twenty-first century is not the university’s relation to the future as such, but the intensity with which the future has entered its present. Artificial intelligence changes the conditions of authorship and expertise; ecological disruption changes the horizon of responsibility; social fragmentation changes the conditions of trust; geopolitical instability changes the meaning of international cooperation; and digital systems change attention, memory, and public debate. These transformations interact rather than unfold separately. Higher education is therefore not confronting a collection of trends but a systemic change in the environment of knowledge.
The dominant institutional response has often been adaptation. Universities create new programs, install digital platforms, revise strategies, establish sustainability offices, and form partnerships with innovative organizations. Such responses are necessary. They are insufficient when change is nonlinear, uncertain, and value-laden. Adaptation generally begins once the change to which an institution must respond has become legible. Foresight begins earlier and asks different questions. What is emerging before it is widely recognized? Which assumptions organize current decisions? Whose futures are included or excluded? What possibilities become visible when a dominant narrative is reframed? What kind of future does an institution make more likely through its present choices? UNESCO’s work on futures literacy similarly emphasizes the capability to use plural futures to see the present differently and diversify action (Miller, 2018; UNESCO, 2023).
The concept of the foresight-driven university is proposed here as a response to that challenge. It does not designate a university that forecasts with greater confidence. It designates an institution that builds a disciplined relationship to uncertainty across its governing, scientific, pedagogical, territorial, civic, and international functions. The future becomes a shared object of inquiry rather than the private domain of planners or experts. Foresight becomes an institutional intelligence: the capacity to detect, interpret, deliberate, experiment, remember, and transform.
This proposition has emerged from the experience of the Université Catholique de Lille. It should not be read as a claim that the institution has completed the transition or realized an ideal model. The case is valuable because it is unfinished. Over more than a decade, a series of initiatives created an increasingly coherent ecology of foresight: IIPEI, field-based Learning Expeditions, ecosystem-signature analysis, Symbiogora, the Direction de la Prospective, EcosystemsInMotion, ECOPOSS, IFRN, and work on integral ecology and EPISTEMA. The article transforms this lived trajectory into a conceptual model while preserving the tensions, gaps, and dependencies that make institutional change real.
The argument is organized around three research questions. First, how can foresight move from a specialized method to an embedded institutional capability in higher education? Second, what can be transferred from a singular university trajectory without reducing transfer to imitation? Third, what ethical and civilizational horizon should orient a university’s anticipatory capacities in an age of artificial intelligence and planetary disruption? The answers developed here lead from institutional design toward a deeper thesis: the ultimate task of the foresight-driven university is civilizational discernment.
2. Conceptual Foundations: From French Prospective to International Foresight
The model rests on a conceptual translation between French prospective and international foresight. The French tradition associated with Gaston Berger did not understand the future primarily as an object of prediction. It emphasized an attitude of looking far, wide, and deeply, while placing human action and responsibility at the center. The future was open because persons and institutions could participate in its construction. International foresight provides a wider vocabulary that includes horizon scanning, scenarios, futures studies, anticipatory governance, strategic preparedness, and futures literacy. The expression foresight-driven university adopts this internationally legible vocabulary while retaining the humanistic, normative, and action-oriented depth of prospective.
Several distinctions follow. Prediction asks what will happen and tends toward a single expected future. Forecasting asks what is likely if identified trends continue. Futures studies explores plural possibilities. Strategic foresight connects plausible futures to present decisions. Futures literacy examines how anticipatory assumptions shape present perception and action. Prospective asks what futures people and institutions should imagine, debate, and construct. These modes can be complementary, but they should not be confused. 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 adjective “driven” does not imply mechanical determination. It indicates that foresight becomes one of the institution’s organizing principles. The university uses the future as a lens across research, learning, governance, partnership, and public engagement. It pays attention not only to probable futures but also to possible, preferable, and reframed futures. UNESCO’s participatory Futures Literacy Laboratories are relevant because they invite participants to reveal and challenge the assumptions underlying their images of the future, thereby creating new questions for action in the present (UNESCO, 2023). The model developed here shares this capability-based orientation while extending it from workshops toward institutional architecture.
The concept also differs from the entrepreneurial, innovative, digital, or sustainable university. Each of these models names an important transformation, but each can become partial. Entrepreneurship can privilege market value; innovation can accelerate change without examining direction; digitalization can confuse infrastructure with pedagogy; sustainability can be reduced to compliance and reporting. Foresight does not replace these dimensions. It places them within a field of long-term consequences, plural alternatives, ethical questions, and public responsibility.
3. Research Design: Reflective Inquiry, Participant-Observation, and Research-Action
This study is neither an external evaluation nor an official institutional history. It is a reflective inquiry written from the position of a participant-observer and practitioner-scholar. The author participated in the emergence of many initiatives discussed, contributed concepts and networks, organized learning processes, and later sought to reinterpret the accumulated experience. This proximity creates unusual access to intentions, informal conversations, archives, and intellectual continuities. It also creates risks of selective memory, over-identification, retrospective coherence, and celebratory narration.
The method addresses these risks by treating memory as one source among others. Institutional documents, action plans, event programs, travel materials, publications, web pages, statutes, audiovisual interviews, presentations, timelines, and case notes are triangulated through an evidence matrix. Claims are differentiated according to whether they are documented, partially documented, memory-based, interpretive, or still to be confirmed. Reflexivity does not eliminate subjectivity; it makes the author’s position visible and accountable.
Research-action is central because the initiatives were designed not only to observe systems but to transform the conditions of learning and cooperation within them. A Learning Expedition produces knowledge through immersion while changing the participants’ frames of interpretation. Symbiogora helps territorial actors become aware of their ecosystem while strengthening their capability to act within it. EcosystemsInMotion creates a distributed field of inquiry by convening diverse actors during crisis. ECOPOSS studies public futures partly by making futures public. The observer is therefore inside the system, and knowledge develops through cycles of action, documentation, reflection, and redesign.
The audiovisual archive occupies a distinctive methodological place. Interviews and recordings are not illustrations added to a textual research process. They preserve situated voices, gestures, vocabulary, institutional moments, and the relational construction of knowledge. Their research value depends on metadata: speaker, date, place, context, theme, related concepts, and evidential status. Without indexing, a large archive remains an accumulation; with indexing, it becomes a living research infrastructure.
The purpose is not statistical generalization. It is analytical transferability. The case is historically and institutionally specific, but it can generate concepts and capabilities that other universities may reinterpret. Transfer requires abstraction without erasure. The model must be sufficiently general to travel and sufficiently grounded to retain meaning. This is why the article presents an institutional grammar rather than a universal recipe.
4. The UCL Trajectory: From Innovation Ecosystems to Public Futures
IIPEI constitutes the initial institutional crystallization of the approach. It brought creative strategy, systems thinking, collaborative foresight, innovation ecosystems, corporate dialogue, international inquiry, video interviews, and publishing into a university-based research-action setting. Its conceptual contribution was to treat innovation as ecosystemic. Innovation rarely emerges from a single organization. It arises through relations among universities, firms, public authorities, investors, cultural institutions, technologies, narratives, and communities. Foresight can activate such ecosystems by creating shared attention to long-term questions.
Learning Expeditions gave this perspective an empirical method. Participants did not simply visit successful organizations; they entered places as living systems. Preparation, encounter, debriefing, documentation, interpretation, and translation transformed travel into field-based foresight. Silicon Valley demonstrated the force of permission, networks, venture capital, failure narratives, and global ambition, while revealing inequalities and technological utopianism. Munich foregrounded engineering depth and industrial continuity. Copenhagen linked design, trust, sustainability, and civic culture. China required a civilizational reading; Togo and Benin revealed endogenous and frugal innovation; New York became a classroom of planetary governance; Scandinavia connected futures studies, welfare, sustainability, and inner development.
The concept of ecosystem signatures emerged from comparison. An ecosystem signature is the distinctive configuration of history, values, institutions, technologies, economic logics, social relations, and symbolic narratives through which a place generates transformation. The concept prevents benchmarking from becoming mimicry. It asks what makes a practice meaningful in its original context, what is transferable at the level of function or principle, and what must be reinvented elsewhere.
Symbiogora translated international learning into territorial capacity-building. It shifted the question from “How can a territory attract innovation?” toward “How can a territory understand and activate itself as an ecosystem?” The university became convener, translator, and catalyst. Territorial actors were treated as co-learners rather than recipients of expert solutions. This territorial turn is essential because global foresight loses legitimacy if it does not return to places and contribute to their capability to navigate change.
The Direction de la Prospective marked the passage from project to institutional function. Foresight acquired an identifiable home connected to strategy and governance while retaining interfaces with learning journeys, public events, international networks, companies, and territories. The institutional design challenge was to formalize foresight without bureaucratizing it. Too little structure leaves foresight dependent on individuals; too much structure can neutralize exploration and imagination. Embedded foresight requires both an address and transversality.
EcosystemsInMotion emerged from the interruption of physical mobility during the Covid period. Rather than suspend international learning, the project reconfigured the Learning Expedition as a virtual world tour and digital research-action process. This demonstrated that crisis can accelerate institutional learning when constraint is converted into method. The digital format extended access and archiveability, although it could not reproduce the sensory and informal intelligence of place. It should therefore be understood as a complementary mode rather than a replacement for embodied inquiry.
ECOPOSS then moved foresight into public culture. Its festivals, books, cinema, debates, exhibitions, workshops, and intergenerational encounters treated the future as a civic question. This is more than communication. It democratizes the capability to imagine and deliberate. UNESCO similarly frames futures literacy as a capability that enables people to diversify their choices and engage uncertainty creatively (UNESCO, 2023). ECOPOSS gives this principle a university-based cultural and spatial form. It turns the campus and its partnerships into an agora of desirable futures.
IFRN provides a continuation and internationalization mechanism. It extends foresight beyond a particular institutional period and connects researchers, practitioners, educators, companies, and public actors concerned with long-term futures and foresight-in-action. In the model, internationalization is not prestige-seeking. It is the circulation, comparison, and critique of practices across contexts.
5. The Foresight-Driven University Model
5.1 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.
5.2 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.
5.3 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.
6. 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.
6.4 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.
6.5 The SDGs as a Global Grammar
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.
6.6 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.
6.7 IFRN and Internationalization
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.
7.3 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.
7.4 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.
7.5 From Technocratic Paradigm to 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.
7.6 AI 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.
7.7 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:
Scientific rigor: the disciplined pursuit of knowledge, evidence, method, and conceptual clarity.
Civic responsibility: the public debate of futures, risks, values, and collective choices.
Interior development: the cultivation of attention, humility, courage, discernment, and relational maturity.
Spiritual horizon: the search for meaning, common good, integral ecology, and the dignity of life.
7.8 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.
7.9 The Civilizational Task
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:
To reveal the assumptions of the dominant paradigm, especially the reductionist and technocratic assumptions inherited from industrial modernity.
To cultivate systemic and integral thinking, so that ecological, social, technological, economic, and spiritual questions can be understood together.
To connect foresight with ethics, so that possible futures are evaluated in relation to dignity, justice, life, and the common good.
To create public spaces where futures can be explored, debated, imagined, and made desirable.
To develop international networks capable of comparing experiences, sharing methods, and learning from diverse cultural contexts.
To preserve living memory through archives, videos, publications, case notes, and evidence matrices.
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.
7.10 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.
7.11 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.
7.12 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
8. Contributions, Limitations, and Research Agenda
The first contribution of this study is conceptual. It proposes the foresight-driven university as a model distinct from, yet compatible with, entrepreneurial, innovative, digital, sustainable, and civic university models. Its core proposition is that foresight should function as an embedded institutional capability connecting strategy, pedagogy, research, territory, public culture, international networks, and ethical responsibility. The second contribution is methodological. The case demonstrates how participant-observation, research-action, documentary triangulation, and audiovisual archives can transform institutional experience into accountable and transferable knowledge. The third contribution is practical: the eight-capability grammar provides universities with a framework for diagnosis and design without prescribing uniform implementation.
The study also has significant limitations. The case depends heavily on the author’s involvement and on initiatives carried by relatively small constellations of actors. The documentary corpus is uneven: certain projects have rich audiovisual and published traces, while others require further consolidation. Impact is difficult to attribute because foresight often changes language, perception, relationships, and preparedness before it produces measurable outputs. The model may also overstate coherence by reading a dispersed trajectory retrospectively. Finally, the civilizational language of integral ecology and EPISTEMA risks abstraction unless it remains linked to budgets, curricula, governance, institutional incentives, and evaluable practices.
These limitations define a research agenda. Comparative case studies should examine how the eight capabilities appear in different university systems and cultural contexts. Longitudinal studies should investigate the durability of foresight functions across leadership transitions. Evaluation research should combine quantitative indicators with contribution analysis, network mapping, narrative evidence, and institutional ethnography. Further work is needed on student participation, curricular integration, governance mechanisms, AI-supported foresight, and the relationship between inner development and organizational change. The evidence matrix and audiovisual archive should evolve into accessible research infrastructures capable of supporting external critique.
The model should also be tested against counter-cases. Universities may develop strong foresight capabilities without a dedicated foresight office, or may possess formal foresight structures without meaningful cultural transformation. Public futures events may democratize imagination or become symbolic communication. International networks may generate deep learning or remain reputational. A mature theory must explain not only the presence of capabilities but the conditions under which they interact productively.
9. Conclusion
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 public trust in a period of systemic transition. The experience examined here suggests that foresight acquires institutional force when it moves through a sequence of mutually reinforcing practices: exploration of emerging realities, interpretation of ecosystem signatures, translation into territorial capacity, embedding within governance, experimentation across physical and digital formats, public democratization of futures, international comparison, and ethical deepening.
The central lesson is that the university’s relationship to the future cannot be separated from its relationship to knowledge, territory, technology, and the common good. Artificial intelligence makes information abundant while intensifying the need for judgment. The SDGs provide an integrated agenda for planetary action while revealing the limits of progress without political will and institutional capability. The IDGs identify inner and relational capacities required to sustain outward transformation. Integral ecology insists that environmental, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual crises are inseparable. EPISTEMA asks from what deeper assumptions societies imagine and authorize their futures.
A foresight-driven university does not promise mastery over uncertainty. It cultivates a disciplined openness to what is emerging and a shared responsibility for what may be brought into being. Its success will not be measured by whether it predicted correctly, but by whether it enlarged the field of responsible possibilities, strengthened collective intelligence, preserved institutional memory, democratized future-making, and helped society distinguish what is merely new from what is genuinely desirable. 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
Director of Foresight, Université Catholique de Lille
President, International Foresight Research Network (IFRN)
July 2026
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Author Note
Michel Saloff-Coste is Director of Foresight at the Université Catholique de Lille and President of the International Foresight Research Network. This article is written from a participant-observer perspective and synthesizes the institutional, territorial, international, and civilizational trajectory reconstructed in The Foresight-Driven University. The author retains full responsibility for the argument and final text. Microsoft 365 Copilot assisted with editorial structuring, comparison, and document preparation under the author’s direction.
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