[AN INSTRUMENT OF INNOVATION POLICY: THE TECHNOLOGY FORESIGHT

This paper represents a survey of the recent initiatives of technology foresight in Europe. After the decline of forecasting techniques and the first experiments in Japan and the United States, technology foresight has been adopted in several European countries. However only in the 90's, under the pressure of more rigorous public policies, these initiatives started to play a fundamental role as an instrument of selection for the innovation policies; as a consequence their methodologies are becoming more sophisticated.