25 Years of Exploring the Futures – Finland Futures Research Centre’s Research Activities Reviewed
Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC) is one of the few university departments devoted to futures research in the world. Jointly founded by three universities in Turku in 1992, the FFRC is a department within the Turku School of Economics at the University of Turku, Finland. Professors Petri Tapio and Sirkka Heinonen have written a thorough review of futures research in Finland, focusing especially on FFRC. This article has recently been published by the World Futures Review, SAGE Publications.
–This paper is not a historical account, says Professor Petri Tapio. We are deliberately not focusing so much on stories about personalities at the FFRC as team work has been the key to success. Instead we tried to provide an overview, what has been done and how "what-has-been-done" can be structured in a meaningful way by looking at FFRC publication lists. There are a lot of references for interested readers to find the people behind the publications, more than 150. Emphasis is on the references to publications in English in order to serve international readership. My estimate is that the overall sum of publications made by FFRC researchers is clearly over one thousand (possibly some 1200–1400). This article naturally does not cover it all, he explains.
The FFRC has proceeded from a small unit of three devoted persons into one of the key futures research institutes in Europe with about fifty staff members, hundreds of research and developmental projects, and more than a thousand publications. The FFRC activities include research, education as well as societal interaction and networking.
–Although acknowledging the variety of futures studies topics and approaches nourished by the researchers, we conclude that facilitating expert-based and stakeholder-based futures studies processes is the key competence of the FFRC, says Professor Sirkka Heinonen. Hybrid methods are continuously developed, meaning combinations of more specific techniques. A proper mix of tools and approaches to gather, analyze, organize, and interpret data is always searched for. At the end of the article, we present four scenarios of the future of the FFRC jointly made by the staff. The scenarios outline one probable future, one moderately preferred future, one radical preferred future and one wild card scenario for the next ten years.
Article is currently in press and available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1946756718754847.
Tapio, P. & Heinonen, S. (2018) Focused futures from Finland. World Futures Review 10(2).