ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the qualities to be developed for fruitful understanding of the future and the types of study involved; forecasting techniques and alternative approaches to exploring the future; technology forecasts; ways of attempting to gauge future competitor moves. Several techniques of economic and business forecasting, ranging from the simple and inexpensive to sophisticated and costly methods such as war gaming, are available to analysts. Numerous nationwide surveys are produced by business organizations such as the Confederation of British Industry or the Engineering Employers Federation. Macroeconomic forecasts are based upon econometric models where equations derived from statistical data are used to quantify the relationships between the different components of the economy. One way of leveraging the qualitative dimension is the Delphi forecasting technique. Some technological support in trying to predict quantitative dimensions of the future such as sales or costs is now available in the form of neural networks.
