Signal Futures4Europe and Eye of Europe knit European foresight into a standing network

Summary

In February 2024 the Commission's research and innovation directorate-general officially launched Futures4Europe, a foresight platform operated by the Foresight on Demand consortium. The platform connects foresight experts across Europe with research and innovation policymakers, aggregates national and European foresight projects and offers training materials and newsletters to improve futures literacy. Linked to the second phase, the Eye of Europe project aims to turn Europe's foresight community into a more integrated and sustainable infrastructure. It uses peer-learning workshops among foresight organizations, thematic pilot projects, large conferences with participants from more than 30 countries and online public engagement. The author reads these steps as a shift from fragmented project-by-project foresight toward capacity accumulated in a standing Europe-wide network. Together with consortium expansion and a larger budget, they show foresight settling in as permanent policy infrastructure rather than one-off projects.