Professeur Michel Godet, holder of the Chair of industrial Prospective, CNAM

The Memory of Prospective is a research project directed by Professor Michel Godet at the Lipsor, a research laboratory in prospective and strategy within the polytechnical university, the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM) in Paris.
The project grew out of two observations:
1 Practitioners do not know the fundamentals of the art of prospective or the basic documentation;
2 Canonic documents in this field from the past 50 years are not readily available because they are lost, forgotten or out of print.
Building a memory of prospective consists or promoting and disseminating its rudiments and concepts whether French, European or American.
Our goal also includes acquiring cognitive capital in prospective with a view to intellectual rebuilding. We must practice what we preach for history enlightens us on the present in parallel with the prospective process itself.
Acquiring and managing this capital involves a core group of figures in France— the Plan, DATAR, Futuribles and LIPSOR. They now share the following mission: Make sources available, optimize resources and maximize operating costs. This work-in-progress entails building a co-operative learning network, which may expand beyond the founding partners and the initial framework.
By highlighting the roots of prospective, we hope to promote evaluation, a much-needed component in today’s project culture firmly installed at the highest levels of government.
The interviews for The Memory of Prospective are part of this greater process. As such, they seek to provide historical and conceptual points of reference drawn from discussions with the main witnesses to the birth of modern prospective in France or abroad.

See the French version