Opportunities to Use Big Data Analysis for Strategic Foresight and Planning

Chulok, Alexander Alexandrovuch
D.Sc. in Public Administration (Economics), International Foresight Expert, the United Nations Development Program, Director of the HSE ISSEK Center for Science and Technology Foresight
achulok@hse.ru

Abstract
Modern approaches to strategic foresight and planning are based on interdisciplinary tools that combine methods from sociology, marketing, statistical and system analysis. However, the fundamental transformations, symptoms in recent years in science, economics, society, the scale and multidirectional patterns of their change constitute requests for a new class of tools.
This is largely facilitated by the processes of digitalization and the accumulation of large amounts of data, which have accelerated many times literally before our eyes. In the world practice of strategic foresight and planning the first attempts to use big data analysis date back to the end of the last century, however, this tool began to be used in tangible volumes relatively recently.
In Russia, there is one of the world's leading (according to the journal Nature) system for intellectual big data analytics—iFORA, based on a corpus of documents with a capacity of more than 750 million, and specially developed by the HSE ISSEK in the interests of foresight identifying global trends, building consensus forecasts, market analytics, study of digital footprints. Some real cases and directions for further use will be announced in the presentation.


Keywords: foresight, planning, big data analysis, global trends, market forecasts