ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the foresight activities of the three institutions with the majority of attention focused on PEN. It highlights a set of approaches and tactics that other institutions can utilize to render foresight efforts actionable for policymakers. The chapter examines the tactics that PEN in particular utilized to ensure that the anticipatory knowledge it produced was relevant to the policymaking process. Analyzing the policy implications of nanotechnology's utilization in consumer products became one of the linchpins of PEN's policy influence strategy. The chapter describes the connection between foresight, emerging technologies, and the policymaking process. It discusses how such strategies contribute to increasing the plausibility of future-oriented information often termed anticipatory knowledge thereby deepening the conceptual understanding of plausibility as a criterion for assessing the quality of outputs produced by foresight practices. In conclusion, the chapter shows that strengthening the plausibility of anticipatory knowledge reflects the close-coupling of many social, technical, and regulatory factors.
