The LSE Public Policy Group was asked by the Foresight Programme in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) to review the impact and value of eight future-focused research projects completed as part of the Programme’s work since 2002. We have looked at impacts of these research projects across government in policy making and practice, in academia and research science communities, in the commercial sector, and in civil society and the public at large. Overall the eight Foresight projects have achieved a wide and in parts impressive range of impacts. In our interviews with research scientists involved in the projects, almost all could point to some specific or relevant impact from the research work, and very few were dismissive of the Foresight work and its value. Most, if not all, research users in government and civil society were generally positive about Foresight research, and on the whole confirmed or corroborated impact claims made by researchers. More experienced observers compared the current model of Foresight reports far more favourably to previous versions from an earlier period. Around half of our survey respondents agreed with the statement that the ‘Foresight model works well’ and only around 1 in 10 disagreed with this. More than one half of the references to Foresight research that we found in our Google searches were explicitly positive, a high rate, (with the vast majority of the rest neither positive nor negative) and we list some words below which conveyed the general mix of feeling (see Figure 1.21 in Part 1)
