Summary

In the Fall of 2022, the UK’s Government Office of Science (GOS) carried out a novel foresight experiment aimed at developing a framework for connecting government priority areas to both the technologies and capabilities required for realising related societal goals, these by 2030 and beyond. Called the Drivers of Technology Needs (DTN). This project looks in detail at the DTN project, providing analysis of both the process through which its modified Delphi methodology was applied and of the findings drawn. In doing so, the project looks to (1) place the DTN project within both a spectrum of foresight approaches and the state of the art in the foresight of capabilities; (2) identify from what foresight approaches the DTN is derived, i.e. foresight toolkit; (3) identify the DTN’s relative strengths and limitations (e.g. expert recruitment, panel questions, wind-tunnelling, granularity); and (4) to propose an enhanced DTN framework, one that better identifies enabling and complementary capabilities and at greater degrees of granularity.