Since its creation in 1989, the Prospective and Innovation Foundation has been directed by two Presidents, both Senators from Vienne. René Monory, who founded it, was notably Chairman of the General Council of Vienne, Minister of the Economy, President of the Senate. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who chairs it today, was among others Chairman of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council, Minister, Prime Minister. He is now the government’s special representative for China.
This continuity is in itself a manifesto, in counterpoint to the typical paradigm of modern Europe that was the theme of the rupture – revolution, invention, Copernican reversal, epistemological rupture were the vocabulary of the intelligentsia of the time, of Althusser. to Michel Foucault.
The concern of the founders was long overdue, and for this very reason precisely a requirement to integrate the factors of the future with the continuities inherited from the past. Identifying what is happening, and accompanying its development with sagacity, anticipating what is happening, and preparing for it to take advantage of it, is not to break with anything, it is on the contrary to heighten the potential. life of what is already alive, by breathing new life into it.
To provide his department with such a resource, René Monory decided to create the Futuroscope there, a space open to new technologies, to the whole world, and to the future. Creating a foundation for innovation was essential in such a place.
Initially focused on the new technologies then provided by America, the Foundation did not take long to realize that the transformation they induced and reflected was of a global nature, calling for a 360 ° prospective. She did so with ardor and success, combining her mission of supporting the development of Vienna with an increasingly proactive and far-reaching intellectual curiosity.
The continuity of this evolution leads it today to an attentive follow-up of the emergences, of which continuous work since 2006 on China has conferred on it the expertise, in prejudice of a monitoring maintained at all levels of the change which is now continuous, since from global governance to local territorial issues, including European issues and the crisis of political representation.
Faithful to its Poitou ties, which make it so good, but now well versed in global debates (for example its President was co-opted into the Board of the Boao Forum, the “Asian Davos”), the Foresight and Innovation Foundation, recognized for its usefulness. public, works with constancy to improve the hand of France in the great game of the world, which calls on the latter to dare more than ever to show daring and genius.
