Foreseeing the industrial future: aspects of the theory

The importance of foreseeing the industrial future is due to the special importance of modern industry for national competitiveness, innovation and employment, as well as the fundamental shifts taking place in the world in connection with the deployment of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. New industrialization opens up fundamentally new development opportunities associated with the integration of digital and material technologies, but at the same time creates new threats and risks for life safety, employment, environment, etc. Therefore, it is so important to engage in systematic research in this area, which should be based on an appropriate theoretical foundation. Forecasting activities in an industry are represented by various types of practices aimed at predicting the future. It has been established that the initial premise of this activity is the principle of continuity of development, the meaning of which lies in the fact that for a certain time certain aspects of the culture and institutional structure of society remain without significant changes, maintaining their continuity. In this regard, it becomes possible to identify common – and, therefore, rather long – factors (causes) and trends (consequences), that have already manifested themselves in the present and are likely to continue their action in the future. Based on the knowledge of these factors and trends, it is possible to define the patterns of future development. It was revealed that the main methods for studying the future of the economy in general and industry in particular are strategic foresighting and long-term forecasting. Both of these methods combine in that they are designed to explore the long aspects of development and establish what might happen rather than what decisions to make. And their difference lies in the fact that foresight is engaged in the construction of predominantly qualitative images of the future, the creation of anticipatory alternative scenarios for the development of events, while forecasting is usually quantitative in nature, characterizes the future, based on the regularities characteristic of a given object sphere. Both foresight and forecasting are based on the use of economic and mathematical modelling tools. But in the case of forecasting, the results of calculations are usually interpreted as information about what is expected (within confidence intervals), and in the case of foresighting, as information about possible scenarios for the development of events designed to identify new opportunities and threats to development. Given the current state of geopolitical turbulence and strategic uncertainty, in the near future in Ukraine, strategic foresight may become the most popular tool for studying the industrial future.