ABSTRACT

How can we think about strategy and management for universities in the Millennium-for time horizons like 2020 or 2050? Forecasting can be either normative or predictive: what ought to be, or what will be. Predictive forecasting is feasible for the short run-but, for complex systems, more or less impossible for the long run. A normative approach at least allows speculation and exploration, and this will be the one adopted here. However, to make sense of this, it is still necessary to make some predictions about the environment of universities, and in this case we can start from the here and now, because the elements which are likely to be important for universities in the future are already visible.