16.6.2026 Jaakko Paasi & Tiina Apilo
As the coordinator of the FORECO project, VTT plays a central role in shaping how collaborative foresight is developed and implemented across ecosystems.
For VTT, FORECO is a strategic opportunity to advance its long-term work on corporate foresight, ecosystem collaboration, and innovation systems towards a more applied, systemic approach.
The project enables VTT to move beyond studying foresight as an organisational capability and instead focus on how it can function as a shared capability across multiple actors, with direct links to decision-making and market shaping.
A timely shift in foresight practice
Organisations today face a more interconnected and complex operating environment: innovation happens across networks, and signals, risks, and opportunities propagate through ecosystems. At the same time, foresight is still often conducted in isolation.
“We see a clear shift: it is no longer enough for organisations to anticipate the future individually. What is needed and where the real challenge is how ecosystems can build shared understanding and act on it together.”
– Jaakko Paasi, Project Manager, VTT
From fragmented foresight to shared capability
A central challenge is how to move from fragmented foresight activities towards shared processes that create value at the ecosystem level. This requires new ways for organisations to jointly interpret signals, build shared understanding, and connect foresight insights to concrete decisions. To reach the target, we must understand current experiences and expectations of companies towards collaborative foresight, and create processes and practices for ecosystem level collaborative foresight.
Through the FORECO consortium, these approaches are developed and tested together with companies and research partners in real-world settings.
“We study and simultaneously test collaborative foresight together with our partners, seeing how it works in real-world ecosystems.”
– Tiina Apilo, VTT
Towards long-term ecosystem impact
FORECO aims to strengthen ecosystems’ ability not only to anticipate future demand but also to actively shape markets.
For VTT, the long-term impact lies in embedding collaborative foresight as a core capability for competitiveness and renewal within how ecosystems operate.