User:Ozcan Saritas

Dr. Ozcan Saritas is based at the University of Manchester. He is a Research Fellow at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR, formerly PREST) and is the editor of Foresight: the journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy. In MIoIR, Ozcan is engaged in various research and teaching activities. His research activity has been focused mostly upon long-term policy and strategy making with particular emphasis upon Foresight methodologies and their implementation in socio-economic and technological fields at the supra-national, national, regional and sectoral levels. With a PhD from the “Foresight and Prospective Studies Programme” of the University of Manchester, Ozcan has kept abreast of the latest in academic research on improving the quality of futures research. He has introduced novel concepts like “Systemic Foresight Methodology (SFM)” and “Innovation Foresight”, which have been applied successfully to address long term issues involved in Sustainable Development, Renewable Energies, Information and Communication Technologies, and Development and Poverty.

Ozcan has been engaged in large scale multinational research and consultancy projects focussing on wide variety of areas including “Scanning for Emerging Science and Technology Issues (SESTI)”; “The Future Impact of Security and Defence Policies on the European Research Area (SANDERA)”; and “The Development of a Platform for Deliberative Processes on Nanotechnology in the European Consumer Market (NANOPLAT)”. He has been recently awarded a research grant by the Rockefeller Foundation for a Horizon Scanning project (Scan-4-Light) to envisage futures for the developmental issues in Africa and Asia. He has also collaborated with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) for a project on the “The Future of the Automotive Industry in a Post-Carbon Economy”. Ozcan has taken part in the design and implementation of executive education courses on foresight concepts and methods in Manchester and in collaboration with international organisations such as the UNIDO, European Commission and European Science Foundation. He has attended a number of conferences and have given keynote speeches on foresight. During all this work, he has collaborated with a number of policy-makers, researchers and corporate managers, particularly from Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa which has provided great opportunities to expand his networks across the globe. Ozcan conducts Horizon Scanning activities through continuous monitoring of the Trends, Drivers of Change, Weak Signals, Wild Cards and Discontinuities with a global scale Big Picture Survey. The survey responses provide a rich and diverse array of issues that cover most of the provocative policy agenda and engage public debate by offering new insights. The scanning work suggests an adequate number of critical uncertainties and polarities, which allow building a set of ‘evolutionary scenarios’. Uncertainties are also captured through the identification of unexpected disruptive events, which may result with a potential risks as undesirable consequences. The analysis of the Big Picture Survey results helps to determine the sorts of impacts those risks may have and develop ways of dealing with them.

As the editor of the Foresight journal, Ozcan has been making use of his long standing institutional networks to access good quality researchers and practitioners around the world to attract high quality publications, which have been cited widely thereby increasing the journal’s academic credibility and visibility.