The vendor is required to provide to purchase membership in a customized strategic foresight training service which will support advancement of strategic planning at the university by empowering executive leadership with long-range planning capabilities focused on innovation, product development, human resources and emerging technologies (looking 10+ years into the future) to:
• Create a future-ready, innovative and community-engaged institution aligned with the university’s strategic plan, ahead of tomorrow;
• Cultivate a culture of innovation and adaptability; and
• Enable the university to anticipate change, build strategic resilience, and make bold decisions that extend well beyond the current planning cycle.
- The required services include:
• Online and in-person training sessions which examine long-view societal changes and human-centered futures delivered by certified foresight practitioners
• Customized coaching and advisory sessions designed to build organizational foresight capacity across functions such as innovation, human resources and strategy, led by senior researchers with minimum of 10 years applied experience across diverse academic and professional domains
• Access to foresight resources, including research, reports, toolkits, signal scanning platforms, facilitation tools, and planning resources.
• Access to timely insight and expert analysis of drivers and signals of change, and quarterly emerging signals memos curated and interpreted by expert foresight researchers
• Collaborative platform for sharing and analyzing real-time signals of change and engaging in collaborative foresight practices and research with peer network of 1,000+ practitioners
• Participation in experiments which integrate generative ai into foresight practices
• Invitations to peer gatherings on urgent future research topics
• Access to original foresight content, frameworks and methodologies spanning multiple decades
• Community-led meeting design and facilitation
- The services listed above; requirements include but may not be limited to:
• Cross-sector foresight experience (business, government, non-profit, civic, philanthropic) offering broad, interdisciplinary perspective
• Research and program staff with minimum of 10 years applied foresight experience in professional or civic settings
• Relationships with global network of experts from technology, venture, academia, media and civil society across Europe, Asia and the Americas
• Demonstrated experience supporting strategic foresight initiatives within higher education, including large-scale participatory strategy development experience with public universities
• Proven expertise in developing long-term thinking skills among post-secondary educators and academic administrators
• Experience researching and designing the future of learning with post-secondary education partners
• Experience designing and facilitating participatory foresight processes to engage diverse academic and community stakeholders in collective visioning
• Previous foresight work with education-focused organizations, such as the women’s college coalition
• Research-driven approach to forecasting, using both qualitative and quantitative data analysis to ground insights in evidence
• Demonstrated commitment to systematic and comprehensive studies of the long-range future which broaden understanding of technological, environmental and societal changes and their long-term consequences, challenge assumptions about the future, explore alternative scenarios, and trace the implications of emerging developments, with the goal of guiding society toward a more equitable and sustainable future to the department’s knowledge, IFTF is the only organization with the program, resources, competencies and experience to meet all requirements.