We are a student-run foresight clinic. We take on a handful of pro-bono engagements at a time — for civic organisations, public agencies, mission-driven companies and cultural institutions — and produce foresight work of the kind consultancies charge for, in exchange for the freedom to learn out loud. Some projects are short and sharp; others run over months. We scope each one to fit the question.
If your organisation is sitting with a question that is too long-horizonfor the next quarterly review — a regulatory shift you can sense but not yet describe, a technology curve you suspect will fold in on you, a constituency whose needs are changing faster than your services — we would like to work on it with you.
The clinic produces deliverables of real use: scenario sets, strategic narratives, backcasts, decision trees, visual models, workshop designs, and synthesis reports. The work is conducted by students under faculty supervision, and shaped by direct conversations with you.
In return, we ask three things: time for two or three working sessions, candour about the question, and permission to use the work (anonymised if needed) as a teaching artefact for future cohorts.
A handful of methods, used in combination. The brief and the cohort shape which of these we lean into for any given clinic project.
Plural, contrasting futures held in tension — used as a way to stress-test strategy, not predict it.
Begin in a preferred 2040, then walk backwards into the choices that must be made between now and then.
Half-day to two-day sessions with your team, designed to surface assumptions and stretch the horizon of attention.
Lightweight visual models, role-playing artefacts and “objects from the future” that anchor abstract talk in something you can hold.
Signals scans, weak-signal clustering and synthesis assisted by AI — kept under critical, human judgement.
The Foresight Clinic exists because the questions that matter most to public institutions rarely fit inside a quarter — and because those questions deserve more than a rushed answer.
The clinic is part of a larger effort, carried forward by the Government Innovation & Technology Initiative at the TUM Think Tank, to build strategic foresight as a core governance capability. The question driving that work is not predictive but anticipatory: how do democratic institutions learn to see what is coming, in time to act?
The people doing that work, project by project, are students who want to spend their time on something meaningful. TUM draws from an unusually wide range of disciplines — management of technology, computer science, political science, philosophy, ethics and more — and from many different countries and professional backgrounds. The clinic is built on that breadth, and connects to a wider ecosystem of student clubs and TUM networks. This is Edition 01. The students who join now are building it as they go.
The clinic is guided by Nicklas Berild Lundblad, who researches how institutions adapt in an age of artificial agency, and Nadine Schön, who has spent years working to make strategic foresight a practical capability inside government — both Fellows of Practice at the TUM Think Tank. They are here to hold the standard and push the thinking, not to run the projects. Markus Siewert and Lara Blittersdorf from the TUM Think Tank team support the operation.
Applications close on a rolling basis