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This paper aims to present “Bouncecasting,” a seminar gaming foresight approach useful for examining “wicked problems” where the path to the future is uncertain and malleable and where major stakeholders may have different preferences for different futures. The approach gets its name because it goes back and forth between forecasting and backcasting, provides for give and take among different groups of stakeholders and creates and compares multiple scenarios depicting plausible futures.

After defining Bouncecasting, presenting its main features and providing a recommended way of conducting Bouncecasting studies, the approach is illustrated by four Bouncecasting projects conducted between 1998 and 2004.

The four projects taken together show that Bouncecasting can be used to address a range of wicked problems in a practical way. The projects considered in sequence show the evolution of the method.

Bouncecasting is a way of doing foresight that examines in an integrated way multiple characteristics of a policy problem, thereby providing promising solutions for complex issues. Although there have been over a dozen Bouncecasting studies conducted by the author and different sets of colleagues, this is the first general description of the approach.

The science of Foresight differs from the commonplace notion of what a science is because it is a metadiscipline – a logical type of science higher than the logical type of disciplinary sciences. It is practical, uses transdisciplinary processes that combine scientific disciplines and often examines counterfactuals in a scientific manner. This study aims to demonstrate that Foresight is a science, by presenting a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science.

The methods of scientific education that have served us well in the past are inadequate for metadisciplinary sciences such as Foresight. The paper discusses what metadisciplinarity is, using a variety of examples, and distinguishes it from disciplines and ways of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Understanding the essential characteristics of Foresight as a metadisciplinary science leads to identifying current best practices and possible educational innovations in undergraduate education that will facilitate obtaining Foresight skills. Throughout the paper, examples are drawn from the education and professional experience of the author in the USA and Europe.

This paper demonstrates that Foresight is a science and presents a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. It identifies barriers to those innovations and approaches to overcome them.

This viewpoint paper clarifies the meaning of the terms interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity to identify the essential characteristics of Foresight as a science. Then, it identifies and advocates needed changes in North American higher education to provide earlier and more efficient opportunities for Foresight researchers and users to obtain the skills they need.