Jose M. Ramos

Empowering Entrepreneurship Through Foresight And Innovation: Developing A Theoretical Framework For Empowerment In Enterprise Programs

This study explores how education and development in the skills and knowledge of foresight, innovation and enterprise (FI and E) relate to the empowerment of young individuals with respect to creating a new venture. In 2003, three groups of young persons aged between 13 and 18 years participated in a program designed for empowerment. An evaluation was conducted nine months later that provided useful insight into the impact of the education design, content and delivery. This research provides deeper insight into the way FI and E education can be used to create empowerment through the derivation of a framework that addresses entry, process and agency factors.

The Inner Game of Futures

This essay details my own learning and experiences with respect to intuition and futures studies. The essay is in part an auto-ethnographic narrative that attempts to situate my own personal experiences in a broader cultural context. It also describes intuitions’ pivotal role in both bringing me to futures studies and guiding me within futures studies. I employ the voice dialog perspective of Hal and Sidra Stone (1989) to shed light on intuition’s place in an ecology of ‘inner’ selves, and I also employ the action research framework developed by Reason and Bradbury (2001) to make sense of intuition’s place in an approach to triangulation for futures research.