The Southwest Finland Foresight Academy (Ennakointiakatemia in Finnish) can be seen as a collaboration network which operates across boundaries between professions and industries in order to bring together the resources available for forecasting and foreseeing the regional competence and educational needs. Furthermore, the aim of the Foresight Academy is to increase the competence level of the businesses and educational organizations operating in Southwest Finland in forecasting the future competence and educational needs as well as to promote the availability and utilization of the foresight data related to the future prospects of the regional businesses. This development work is carried out by operational groups representing different clusters:
- Commerce
- Logistics
- Creative sectors
- Tourism
- Medicine- and health technology
- Marine- and manufacturing industry
- Construction and real estate
- Food chain
- Social and wellbeing sectors
At the regional level, reacting to the changes in working life requires a shared perception and close dialogue between the industrial life and educational organizations. The Foresight Academy develops a systematic method, based on network collaboration, for forecasting the competence required of future workforce. This method will enable educational organization needs a changenizations to flexibly react to the signals from working life regarding their labour needs. The Southwest Finland Foresight Academy also conducts national collaboration in regional networks of foresight working groups and participates in international knowledge and experience exchange.
The Southwest Finland Foresight Academy is based on partnership and co-operation agreement signed by the actors involved.