'Technology foresight towards 2020 in China': the practice and its impacts

Technology foresight has attracted increasing attention from government and academia as well as industry since the 1990s. However, the impact of technology foresight on national strategic decision-making varies from country to country. This paper aims to introduce the 'Technology Foresight towards 2020' exercise in China, which has been conducted by a research group in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The paper consists of five parts: (1) introduction; (2) the framework for technology foresight towards 2020 in China; (3) the methodology including scenario building for identifying technology demands and the method for processing and analysing the data from a Delphi survey; (4) the major results of a Delphi survey in the following four research fields: Information technology, Biotechnology, Energy technology, Material science and technology; and (5) the impact of the research on decision-making concerning science and technology development in China.