Prof. Dr. Elif ÇEPNİ
Karabük University
Dean of Faculty of Business
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Dear Researchers,
Our attempt to establish a UNESCO Chair on Anticipation Studies, Futures Literacy and Strategic Foresight has been concluded. The first UNESCO Chair on this field in Turkey was set up at Karabuk University.
The “new economy” is a term many economists started to use in the last decade of the 20 th century. They argued that information technology, the Internet, ultra-high-tech companies and globalization had created a completely new type of economy.
After 2020, Worldwide pandemic has been added to this list. It changed how we work and live It changed many basic economic rules. We are observing a very serious economic metamorphosis.
We live in the VUCA World (Volatility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity). The environment that we live, and the conditions are changing very rapidly. Governance at corporate and governmental level is becoming more difficult.
This new economy requires the use of new techniques and scenarios in the formulation of our decisions and strategic plans.
The main aim of the Chair is to increase the awareness and use of future literacy. Future literacy: refers to our capacity to work on very different alternative futures and to use the combination of scientific knowledge, big data and our own imagination and creativity while making our decisions today.
Working on different scenarios in decision-making processes will better prepare us for many unexpected events and surprises (structural breaks).
The support of the institutions and universities on the way we set out to establish a new strategic understanding in the face of uncertainties, unpredictable events (such as the Covid-19 pandemic, 2008 global economic crisis, Ukraine-Russia War) and human behavior, and to establish a chair for future studies in order to spread this change in our country, was very important.
The Rector of Karabuk University, Prof. Dr. Refik Polat provided all the necessary support from the first day I shared this project. Having served as the UNESCO Foresight president for many years, Dr. Riel Miller has mentored me on Future Literacy for the past 10 years. I am grateful to both of them.
One of the first and perhaps most important steps in establishing a UNESCO chair is the approval of your project by your own National UNESCO Commission. Turkey’s UNESCO National Commission gave us full support. We could not have started this project without their support.
Garry Jacobs, president of the “World Academy of Arts and Sciences”, of which I am proud to be a member, was among the first to support us. Turkish Informatics Foundation, Corporate Change Academy and many international organizations and universities provided their support letters to us.
The letter of support by Prof. Roberto Poli from the University of Trento in Italy, which has a UNESCO Chair in this field, was also very important. Istanbul Technical University of Turkey was the only university from Turkey that provided us a letter of support which also made our application more powerful.
To disseminate the use and awareness of scenario planning methods used by many developed countries and companies in the world, we will organize workshops, conferences every year in our country and abroad with our national and international partners. We would like to support and increase the awareness of decision makers at both micro and macro level in our country to make future plans by making use of “future literacy”.
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