This guide has been produced as part of a European Commission funded project (ForeIntegra) aimed at integrating foresight into research infrastructures (RI) policy and decision making. The project was carried out with a consortium led by Applied Research and Communications Fund (ARC Fund, Bulgaria); and with PREST, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research of the University of Manchester, (PREST, UK) and the Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (IE HAS, Hungary), as main partners.

One of the strategic objectives of the ForeIntegra project has been to contribute to the development of RIs of European interest by displaying the potential of Foresight as a tool for eliciting strategic outlooks and mobilising stakeholder groups as a prerequisite for sustainable long-term RI policy.

Thus, three specific objectives have been set:

• to pilot a foresight exercise, including a success scenario workshop in a pilot area, namely agri-food technologies, and the development of several contrasting scenarios;
• to elaborate policy recommendations for more extensive use of Foresight in RIs;
• to develop guidelines for conducting further foresight initiatives for RIs.

The guide is aimed at policy makers and managers of existing (and future) research infrastructures (RIs) and answers in 35 pages the following questions:

• What is foresight?
• Who uses foresight and why?
• What challenges might foresight address?
• How could foresight address these challenges?
• How to organise and manage foresight exercises?
• How to design a foresight methodology?
• When could foresight be usefully deployed?
• How could foresight reorient a national facility?
• How could foresight formulate a RI roadmap?
• How could foresight network facilities?
• How could foresight scope large-scale RIs?

The guidelines are also available from the document service area of wbc-inco.net at http://www.wbc-inco.net/doc/3235.html (apply for a free log-in).