“Sipho is a small business owner from Mussina, who sells goods to Zimbabwean visitors on behalf of Makro SA.  Sipho is about to register his business with SARS, CIPRO and the Department of Labour.  He has another appointment in an hour from now, so he needs to do this quickly.  Without leaving his living room, he takes out his cellphone with embedded DNA biometrics that he uses for banking transactions.  He also makes sure that he has his smart card on hand to access the e-Government services via his cellphone.  The certificate on his ID card was issued by an NGO service provider affiliated with a UN organisation based in Switzerland, and recognised by the South African Government.  He logs onto the Government portal, authenticates using his smart ID card, DNA biometrics and cellphone.   He completes this transaction in five minutes.  This includes confirmation of a unique company name, and verification of his data already on record.  In order to protect his private information, the interaction with the back-end system is encrypted, similar to the Government systems that are also encrypted.  In a day from now he receives a signed certificate for his business registration and uses this to open a business bank account.  What Sipho doesn’t know is that his business will be so successful that in 2025, five years from now, he will list his company and eventually retire a wealthy man.”

Pic by o palsson on flickr.com, CC BY 2.0

Whilst the above might read like an entertaining extract from a new sci-fi novel this is, in fact, an entirely probable future as developed by a group of participants in the Foresight for Development workshop that was hosted earlier this year by the CSIR Meraka Institute in conjunction with SAFIPA.

The beginning of Futures
Foresight technique is the latest strategic movement that has sectors as diverse as academia, corporations and even governments around the globe incorporating it into their strategic development and innovation processes.   Surprisingly, the notion of Futures study, or Foresight, is not a new phenomenon.  Almost a century ago in the 1930s, the famous British science-fiction writer, HG Wells, spoke publicly about the importance of turning Foresight or Futures study into an academic discourse.  Yet it was not until the seventies that the methodology received serious consideration, and only now, in the twenty-first century, that it has been broadly adopted as a resource of significance.

At the end of last year, SAFIPA invited Finnish Foresight expert, Olli Hietanen, Project Director at the Finland Futures Research Centre within the Turku School of Economics, to facilitate Foresight workshops which were to be led by the CSIR Meraka Institute.  Finland is one of the leading countries to have launched official, government-supported Foresight programmes.  According to a report compiled by the CSIR Meraka Institute’s Neeshal Munga and Barend Taute, Finland and a number of other developed countries such as Japan, Germany, Australia and the United States, have used Foresight techniques with some success in ‘selecting and exploiting (more…)