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The aim of our paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of current foresight practices and their impact on organizational learning, highlighting recent developments. The analysis is based on around forty foresight projects conducted by the CNAM community of practice in the last ten years or so, based on the typology proposed by Bootz (2003) and Bootz and Monti (2008). The aim is twofold: first, we test the robustness of the initial typology and, second, we examine global developments in foresight practices through an analysis of their cognitive aspects. The examination of present practice led to the typology being refined, and demonstrates how its impact on organizational learning has been extended. It also shows how discussion has evolved through networks that are more open to the outside world and closer to action, with measures and tools adopted to promote greater flexibility. These changes may be partially explained by the emergence of the knowledge economy.

In this paper, we introduce the themes addressed and approaches used by contributors to this special issue. Firstly, we underline that KM is approaching a stage of maturity that requires continuing efforts to use theoretical and empirical investigation to question its future evolution, through a foresight reflection. In parallel, we show that the link between knowledge management and foresight is of long-standing concern. In the context of a knowledge-based economy, this connection has taken on a structuring dimension. Thus, the purpose of this TFSC special issue is two-fold. On the one hand, we seek to explore the impacts of foresight on knowledge management and to understand its cognitive dimensions. And, on the other hand, we cast a future-oriented eye on knowledge management both as a set of practices and a research field. Finally, we present an overview of the topics covered by the selected papers.

Scenarios hold little interest if they are not pertinent, coherent, and plausible. Although foresight requires a rigorous approach to address complex problems, the tools must also be simple enough to be easily used. Since the mid-1980s, the approach in strategic prospective workshops (a term that reminds us of the participatory nature of the French approach) has proven its effectiveness in meeting these criteria (simple, rigorous and appropriable; i.e., may be appropriated by participants). The authors try to reply to simple and important questions: What is a scenario? How to judge the quality of a scenario? Which strategies for which scenarios? These questions remind us that applications of strategic foresight tools are contingent and modular. They could also involve the stakeholders from upstream to downstream, as seen in the agro-food sector. Finally, they argue that the future still has to be built and that futurists produced too many scenarios and not enough projects.

La prospective is generally considered to have grown after WWII in developed countries with two main centers, France and the United States of America. In France, the development of prospective does constitute an important point in contemporary history. Stemming from an idea from philosopher Gaston Berger near the end of the 1950s, a spirit arose accompanied by a practice spread in the central administration (government) and in major French corporations. The objective of this article is not to claim any French originality in thinking about the future. Instead, the following pages show how an original approach blending reflection on the future and present action took shape and the relationship that developed involving current practices on the other side of the Atlantic, mainly the USA, with the help of a few intermediaries.