Foresight is a common subject in everyday discussions. What does it mean in educational and professional organizations? The background of foresight is in the fact that the future is unpredictable. However, there is a possibility of preparing for the future with limitations or one can even try to shape the future actively. (Cuhls 2003.)

Educational organizations should have an active role in shaping the future. The main responsibility of the educational organizations in higher and vocational education is to answer the demand of working life competence needs. Foresight is the most important action to discover these future competence needs which are relevant today and also in the future. Furthermore, foresight information is required at every level of the educational organizations; in teaching, research, development and innovations, management and administration.

Regardless of the significance of foresight activities, foresighting and foresight concepts have both received only minor consideration among educational research and practice. The prevailing definitions of foresight do not promote the understanding of the complex, but essential phenomena. The current foresight concepts concentrate on technology, managerial, business or regional foresight issues. The activities for competence foresight are becoming more critical; however, the definition for competence foresight is missing.

A widely used foresight definition is formed by the FOREN Network (Foresight for Regional Development) (2001): “Foresight can be defined as the application of systematic, participatory, future intelligence-gathering and medium-to-long-term vision-building processes to inform present-day decisions and mobilize joint actions.” However, the researchers argue that this definition is too incoherent and universal. Thus, competence foresight needs a more exact definition to inform the decision-makers.

The objective of this paper is to find a proper definition for the concept, which can then be used in professional organizations. The research questions are: What is the definition of competence foresight? What are the dimensions of competence foresight and from what perspectives can competence foresight be examined?

The significance of foresight is highlighted by Horton (1999), who introduces foresight as a key business skill. He asserts that foresightedness is a combination of the developing of understanding of possible futures for an organization and acting upon that understanding. The results of foresight are needed for practical purposes, such as management, strategies, policies, planning, design, roadmapping, action and decision-making (Malaska & Holstius 2009, 86-87).

Foresighting is a developing phenomenon and, thus, new interpretations such as social constructionist and adaptive foresight have evolved lately. Fuller and Loogma (2009) discuss the social constructionist perspective of foresight methodology and suggest that foresight is both a social construction and a mechanism for social construction. Adaptive foresight has been developed at the crossroads of foresight and strategic planning. Adaptive foresight favours a more modest interpretation of the collective ability to “shape the future” and stresses the need to adapt to actions by others. Adaptive foresight enhances the effectiveness of forward thinking by including both collective and single-actor processes. (Eriksson & Weber 2008).

As a consequence, the continually developing working methods and growing importance of the phenomena make competence foresight an interesting issue both for researchers and practitioners.

Cuhls, K. 2003. From Forecasting to Foresight Processes –New Participative Foresight Activities in Germany. Journal of Forecasting 22 (2003) 93-111. Erikkson, E.A. & Weber, K.M. 2008. Adaptive Foresight: Navigating the complex landscape of policy strategies. Technological Forecasting &Social Change 75 (2008) 462-482. Foren 2001. Foresight for Regional Development Network. A Practical Guide to Regional Foresight. European Commission Research Directorate General Programme. Fuller, T. &. Loogma, K. 2009. Constructing futures: A social constructionist perspective on foresight methodology. Futures 41 (2009) 71–79. Horton, A. 1999. A Simple guide to successful foresight, Foresight 1 (1) 5-9. Malaska. P. & Holstius, K. 2009. Modern futures approach. Futura. 28 (1). 85-96.