The future is booming. The accelerated pace of technological change, as well as the associated social changes, require decision-makers from politics and business to deal with future-oriented issues more and more intensively. Questions that are often answered prematurely and incomprehensibly in our impatient media society.

Future research, on the other hand, reflects on how concrete practical and well-founded answers to future-oriented challenges can be obtained. All valid results of scientific futurology must be based on sound knowledge and comprehensible methods.

It is not a question of predicting the future, but of being prepared for the future.

(Pericles)

Futurology currently appears to be a dynamic field of research. From a sociological-scientific point of view, however, futurology in the sense of a scientific discipline still lacks the necessary attributes. These characteristics range from peer-reviewed scientific journals to a discussion of quality criteria and standards to disputes in a scientific community about how futurology, as a discipline, separates itself from a variety of more or less unscientific activities, but how can scientific futures research be conducted if it has not yet reached the stage of a scientific discipline? At present, foresight, technology assessment and early technology detection provide pragmatic and proven starting points. In order to advance the systematic understanding of technical and scientific questions of the future, it is necessary to integrate not only insights into the social construction of technical development processes but also, above all, the results of innovation research into futurology.

Future research is therefore currently concerned with building bridges between theory and practice, between innovation and future research and not least between the natural and social sciences.