In recent years, an increasing number of futures research applications or foresight have been conducted as practical processes. Such foresight knowledge might not be “scientific” in an empirical sense. Rather, it is an organized way of processing futures problems combined with an applicable selection of scientific methods. On the other side, there is a growing number of futures research dissertations pointing to the core of scientific futures research. The most comprehensive collection of futures research methods is presented by a global think tank called the Millennium Project (Glenn et al 2009). Most often, a multi-method approach is used. Moreover, futures research both borrows and further-develops methods of other sciences. There is a variety of method-combinations and applications and an arising need to define quality criteria of methods specific to futures research. A challenge for the conference is to discuss and
to compare used quality criteria and to
suggest new ones.
