The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) are undergoing a rapid transformation, driven by emerging technologies like AI and immersive realities. This fast-moving landscape presents a crucial challenge: how do we effectively guide current professionals toward the emerging career opportunities of tomorrow? This is one of the questions we aim to tackle within the ekip project, the European Cultural and Creative Industries Innovation Policy Platform.

The EKIP initiative, funded by Horizon Europe, is dedicated to understanding and accelerating these transitions through research, policy, and collaboration. For each sector it studies, EKIP brings together policymakers, researchers, and creative practitioners to translate emerging needs into actionable frameworks for change.

Our foresight exercise, conducted within ekip's identification phase , addresses this challenge by mapping actionable career paths from the future back to the present. Our method employed social media listening to track real-time conversations across sectors, helping stakeholders anticipate change and enabling the co-creation of smarter innovation policies .

Our societies are facing increasingly complex sets of risks, and the rapid pace of change is challenging existing governance systems. There is a growing acknowledgement of the need to transform current approaches to policymaking and decision-making to become more futureoriented in support of anticipatory action and building long-term resilience.

The UN Summit of the Future, held in September 2024, marked a pivotal moment in global governance. The Pact for the Future, including its annexes on a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations, was adopted by the UN General Assembly by consensus and committed to a broad range of priorities to ensure that the multilateral system is better able to
address the realities of today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

To contribute to fostering a culture of anticipation and preparedness, and to building a multilateral system that remains relevant for current and future generations, the UN Futures Lab/Global Hub and the International Science Council (ISC) have collaborated to better understand the concrete and transformational role of futures thinking and strategic foresight in informing decision-making and action. Futures thinking and strategic foresight are key to helping us address complex issues and deal with significant uncertainty – and to embedding long-term perspectives that consider policy implications on future generations.

Drawing on case studies from the Global South , this joint paper demonstrates the versatility of foresight practices with a focus on tangible actions for decision-makers and policymakers. It also illustrates how these approaches can support anticipatory governance and resilience building, offering lessons learned and practical recommendations.

The selection of 14 case studies presented in this report reflect balance across geographies, themes, sectors, stakeholders, and foresight tools. The case studies illustrate a range of impacts, primarily through a typology of approaches by desired outcomes as outlined below:

📌Local and Indigenous Knowledge, Sources, and Practices

        📌Building Local Capacities and Durable Solutions from Community-Led Initiatives

        📌Multistakeholder Partnerships and Collaborations

        📌Organizational Development

        📌Sector-Wide Policy Development and Innovation

        📌Futures Empowered by Technological Advancements and Innovation

        📌Improved Social Outcomes/Social Well-Being for Marginalized Communities

        📌Rebuilding Narratives

🔗Source: UN Futures Lab/Global Hub and the International Science Council (2025). Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight in Action: Insights from the Global South, New York. unfutureslab.org/project/futures-thinking-and-strategic-foresight-in-action-insights-from-the-global-south

What if we could test-drive our future selves?

Most scenario workshops stay in the head. The Resonant Future Self Framework flips that script by letting participants embody possible futures through immersive narrative experiences - while their brains and bodies react in real time. Peaks of coherence in EEG and heart-rate variability become “north-star signals” that guide purpose discovery. The method weaves together generative AI, emotional storytelling, and biometric sensing to open a new path toward deeply felt, personal foresight.

First public presentation – Vienna, May 2025
The framework was introduced at the Futures4Europe Conference 2025 – Exploring Future-Oriented Collective Intelligence (Vienna, 15–16 May), organised by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as part of the Eye of Europe flagship initiative. The presentation focused on the conceptual foundations of the method, shared results from the first single-participant pilot study, and outlined how emotional resonance - measured through real-time physiological signals - can enrich scenario work with an embodied, intuitive layer of decision-making.

Next stop – AIMEDIA, Venice, July 2025
From 6–10 July, the project will be featured in the AI in Immersive Media track at the First International Conference on AI-based Media Innovation (AIMEDIA 2025) in Venice.

The presentation will cover the generative narrative pipeline that produces the six personalised future-self videos, share expanded pilot-study findings (including EEG and HRV analysis), and preview ongoing efforts to partially automate the scripting, visual generation, and video assembly process using tailored AI workflows.

While human editing and quality control remain essential, these steps point toward a future in which the method becomes faster, more scalable, and easier to adapt across educational, coaching, and wellbeing contexts.

Read more
To explore more about the method, goals, and future plans, visit the dedicated project page (link below).

This report sums up recent developments in neurotechnology, that is, technology that can read and modify activity from the central nervous system. Some devices record information from the brain, and others deliver stimulation to the brain (and some do both).
These technologies are rapidly advancing and are likely to have a profound impact on various aspects of society. In the near future, neurotechnology is set to revolutionise the way we approach a range of policy areas, from healthcare, education, employment, law enforcement and security, to more obvious areas such as technology, digital and research.
The report analyses advances in the technologies for monitoring and stimulating the brain, some of which are incorporated into neurotechnology devices. It acts as a horizon-scan of new and emerging uses of these technologies, and takes these as inputs to pose a range of questions for the consideration of policymakers.

Read more from the blogpost by the author.

This foresight study explores possible and necessary changes in the European social and economic systems as the European Union engages in managing sustainability transitions towards 2050. With this focus, the study presents strategic areas of intervention covering a new social contract, governance for sustainability, people and economy, and the global perspective on sustainability. The study reflects on the agency of EU actors (such as government at various levels, business, and communities) to address the strategic areas of intervention as part of collectively addressing sustainability transitions. The study builds on a participatory foresight exercise, which generated four foresight scenarios for a climate-neutral EU in 2050. Based on each scenario, a corresponding transition pathway was co-created and analysed through the process. The study presents and analyses these outputs of the process. The outputs can also serve as input to policymakers and practitioners interested in conducting new participatory exercises on sustainability transitions.

Source: European Commission - JRC - JRC Publications Repository 

Foresight seems to be on everyone’s lips these days – but what is it really and, more importantly, how can you use it in your own work? This “menu” is designed to help policymakers understand and leverage foresight for more effective strategy- building and decision-making.

Foresight is about thinking long-term to make smarter choices now. It is a collective effort to look beyond the present and consider what could happen in the future. Foresight isn’t about gazing into a crystal ball, but a way to methodically broaden our perspective and prepare for different possible futures scenarios.

There are many reasons and ways to engage in long-term thinking for policymaking. This menu showcases the various goals and approaches of foresight in policy contexts, featuring tools and processes that the EU Policy Lab can offer. 

Source: European Commission - Knowledge for policy  

What if education wasn’t controlled by institutions but shaped by learners, communities, and technology? Using backcasting, I explored a future where learning is decentralized, open, and driven by collaboration—and mapped the steps to get there.

This vision is inspired by discussions between Sara Skvirsky (IFTF Research Director) and Katherine Prince (VP of Foresight & Strategy, KnowledgeWorks), as well as the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning - a report that, even today, feels like a glimpse into what’s coming.

🔹 How do we get there?

- From institutional control to collective intelligence
- From passive learning to a culture of creation
- From centralized credentials to peer-validated knowledge
- From rigid curriculums to dynamic, adaptive education

🎥 Watch the short film exploring this future!

Results for the working group Water are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-water.html

Results for the working group Complexity are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-comple-xxi.html 

Results for the working group Models, Algorithms, and Data for the Future are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-mad4future.html 

Results for the working group Materials are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-materials.html 

Article "STEM materials: a new frontier for an intelligent sustainable world" by Pier Francesco Moretti is available at https://bmcmaterials.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42833-019-0004-4 

Results for the working group Health are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-health.html

Results for the working group Food are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-food.html 

Results for the working group Energy are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-energy.html