Dear EFMN correspondents and EFMN friends,

I would like to welcome you to this year’s EFMN correspondents’ day in Brussels on behalf of the whole EFMN consortium and thank you for attending this important event for our community.

The EFMN is running for four years now approaching its contractual end in its current setup. This poses some uncertainty how the EFMN will continue in the future. But looking back at what has been achieved since 2004 the network looks strong enough to play a constructive and important role in foresight over the coming years. Over the last year the EFMN partners worked hard to consolidate the information collected and mapped over the last four years. The number of around 2000 collected foresights is impressive and the target of 160 briefs will shortly be met. The visibility of the network has steadily improved with more and more interest from foresight practitioners also outside Europe. This conclusion is supported by the over 1,500 unique visitors per month the EFMN website currently attracts.

After 4 years it is time to look back at what has been achieved and where lessons can be learned. The EFMN is a forerunner in systematically mapping foresight exercises at such scale, providing a central memory of exercises for the community. This forerunner role meant that processes and content were developed in an exploratory journey. Many valuable insights have been gained that we want to share with you. This was the primary reason for publishing a ‘special issue’ in the journal ‘Futures’ about the results and lessons learned of the last 4 years. And it is with pleasure that we will present you the publication and key messages at the correspondents’ day.

The EFMN Correspondents’ Day, set-up to strengthen the largely virtual EFMN community, provides a learning forum discussing every year a topic of special interest. This year we chose the topic of ‘Weak Signals in Foresight’. The topic receives increasing attention from policy-makers and firms to yield results in practice. Furthermore, several projects sponsored under the FP7 programme embark on identifying weak signals.

We therefore are proud to provide you with interesting presentations included in the programme, covering methodological issue in weak signals identification as well as two case studies. One presenting experiences of weak signals identification at a Finnish timber firm as well as another case study presenting the experiences made as part of the UK Horizon Scanning activities. Additionally, latest results from EFMN activities that are of high interest to you will be presented.

In this sense I wish us all an inspiring event, which will lead to new initiatives and contacts for the future.

Maurits Butter