Measuring foresight performance in a public organization : An evaluation case study on City of Turku and recommendations for foresight development

The aims of institutions, both public and corporate alike, are similar in the post-modern days: the need to cope in an accelerated pace of change and turbulence is creating a need for a more organized and systematic way to develop and evaluate foresight activities. Rohrbeck (2011) has created a foresight maturity model to evaluate corporate foresight efforts. The main goal of this thesis is to determine, whether the corporate foresight performance framework could be adapted to further understand the public foresight activities in local level public governance. The research question is: What is the current foresight performance of the city of Turku and how could the organization’s foresight activities be developed? The Delphi study methods are adapted to this two-stepped evaluation framework research: the first round consists of responses from the City of Turku officials giving their evaluation on each of the 21 elements of foresight capabilities. The second round consists of evaluating the foresight maturity level based on descriptive statistics with the innovation work group of the City of Turku. The main findings suggest that while the efforts on foresight at the City of Turku are on an average level, there are factors that could be improved, such as organization of foresight activities. Further insight is interpreted with the aid of cluster taxonomies and a framework which connects the foresight efforts on different levels, as well as a vision on how foresight efforts should be managed through dynamic and conscious pursuits