Future Centre

WHAT ARE FUTURE CENTERS?

FACILITADED WORKING AND MEETING ENVIRONMENTS

Future Centers are facilitated working and meeting environments that are helping organisations to prepare for the future in a proactive, collaborative and systematic way. Common for those centers are that they are used to create and apply knowledge, develop practical innovations, bring citizens in closer contact with government and connect end-users with industry.

POWERFUL INSTRUMENTS FOR THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

Future Centers can be powerful instruments in supporting Europe’s goal of becoming a leading knowledge economy. They are used by government organisations for developing and testing citizen-centred solutions and future-proof policy options with broad acceptance by stakeholders. They are used by business to increase the customer-driven and user-centred quality of new products and services. The centres also support employees within the organisations to develop and test new ways of working and new technical tools. They are also breeding-grounds for innovation, societal renewal and for enhancing and applying intellectual capital of organisations, sectors, regions and nations.

REAL PEOPLE AND REAL ISSUES

Future Centers assume different forms in different organisations. There are varieties operating at the moment in public administration, in geographical regions, and in multinational industries. What unites them is a common focus on dealing with real people and real issues in organisations. They are centres for facilitated problem-solving, where people looking for real-time answers, new ideas and new directions, can bring their issues, problems, and questions. They feed and facilitate the decision-making process in organisations, whereby the output of working sessions, which – depending on what is relevant – can be as diverse as:

  * decisions about strategic choices and ‘the way forward’, and/or
  * physical prototypes of promising policy options, new products and services, and/or
  * an enhanced sense of mutual respect, understanding and trust amongst collaborating partners or session participants

CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE MIND SET IN THE WORK PROCESSES

While working on questions of industrial, organisational and societal innovation, the centres bring a creative and innovative mind-set to bear on the issues at hand. People – both session participants and process end-users – are the starting point for designing work processes in these centres.

Projects in Future Centers are as diverse as the organizations and organisational units which use them – although they often deal with gaining perspective on strategic issues, developing new policy options, creating prototypes for new products and services, enhancing internal cooperation and/or furthering collaboration with external stakeholders and partners. Sessions in Future Centers can take a variety of forms, depending on the issue at hand and the specific objectives. Through the use of diverse methods and techniques for enhancing creativity, considering multiple perspectives, recognizing patterns and blind spots, improving team cooperation and the effectiveness of decision-making, Future Centers have demonstrated they are able to achieve results which other, less people-oriented workspaces cannot.

EXPLICIT FUTURE ORIENTATION WITH A HIGH TECH HIGH TOUCH APPROACH

In Future Centers, an explicit future orientation is brought to bear on today’s questions. Playfulness can be combined with hard work on serious issues and people are encouraged to make use of both cognitive and non-cognitive inputs and perspectives. There is a conscious emphasis on exploiting the innovative power of interface: high tech and high touch, public and private, citizens and government, people and technology. Throughout the Future Center process, the focus is always on achieving concrete results.