Foresight and responsible innovation: Openness and closure in anticipatory heuristics

Abstract

[EN]The heuristic versatility of foresight is increasingly positioning this anticipatory instrument as a key resource to promote more responsible research and innovation practices. In a context where foresight's multiple heuristic potential is sometimes wrapped up in a promissory rhetoric that could lead to its being taken for granted, this article underlines the need to understand the emergence of these heuristics as being dependent on how foresight's dynamics unfold. By acknowledging the existence of more "open" or "closed" forms of foresight (which in turn can articulate more "open" or "closed" anticipations), the article argues that the degree of "openness/ closure" of foresight activities is constituted during the ex-ante, ex-dure and ex-post processes, and according to the relations underlying their constructive dynamics. The main conclusion reached is that a pre-condition for foresight practices to become "instruments for" responsible innovation is to make them "subjects of" responsibility simultaneously. This involves monitoring the socioepistemic relations whereby foresight practices are designed and executed, as well as monitoring how their emergent heuristics are translated into action.