Research & Foresight
Harnessing data and trends to anticipate, co-create, and thrive in the futures of higher education.
What is foresight?
Strategic foresight is a structured approach to exploring the future of higher education. It broadens leaders’ perspectives, helping institutions navigate complexity, set long‑term strategies, and strengthen resilience and adaptability.
Leaders use foresight to identify emerging opportunities, spark innovation, and guide their institutions through continuous change.
Benefits of Foresight
Strategic Agility
Make swift, informed decisions that enable your organization to respond proactively to new challenges and opportunities.
Continuous Capacity Building
Strengthen learning and development to support long‑term organizational resilience.
Sustainable Future Preparedness
De-risk the future by staying responsive to emerging trends and seizing opportunities.
What We Offer
Want to bring strategic foresight to your institution?
Our Impact
Below are some of the opportunities and risks we’ve identified for the postsecondary sector:
Funding the Future
We built a catalogue of funding mechanisms for postsecondary education, aggregating both niche and mainstream options that institutions can use to generate revenue.
From Legacy to Next Wave
We identified innovations in Ontario’s higher education sector over the last 60 years, recognizing that the sector is on the cusp of another major era of innovation.
Immersive Futures
We created artifacts from the futures of higher education, which are imaginary objects that are designed by extrapolating the possibilities of the trends we see today. They are designed to give us a tangible experience of what a particular future could be like. These technologies could exist today.
Strategic Exnovation
We identified exnovation as a strategy to support flexibility by design and to re-allocate resources. Currently, programs, tools, and processes are being eliminated at institutions, but unfortunately not for the reasons we had signaled.
Postsecondary Precarity
We illustrated the economic precarity of postsecondary institutions, with emphasis on international students and working arrangements.
Advancements in AI
We encouraged the sector to watch for advancements in AI, especially with respect to equity, biases, and the need for training.