Compare methods

	VERGE Futures Framework	Environmental Scanning for Foresight
Field	Futures Foresight Studies	Futures Foresight Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	2003
Originator	Richard Lum and Michele Bowman	Joseph Voros (generic foresight process framework); Millennium Project / Futures Research Methodology
Type	Scanning-and-ideation ontology for organizing signals of change across six domains	Input-stage scanning pipeline for the generic foresight process
Seminal source	Glenn, J. C., & Gordon, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0. The Millennium Project. ISBN: 9780981894119	Voros, J. (2003). A generic foresight process framework. Foresight, 5(3), 10-21.
Aliases	VERGE Framework, VERGE General Practice Scanning, Define-Relate-Connect-Create-Consume-Destroy, VERGE Ethnographic Futures Framework	Foresight Environmental Scanning, Strategic Environmental Scanning, Foresight Input Scanning, Voros Input-Stage Scanning
Related	3	4
Summary	The VERGE framework is a general-practice scanning ontology developed by foresight practitioners Richard Lum and Michele Bowman to organize signals of change and stimulate ideation across six fundamental domains of human experience: Define, Relate, Connect, Create, Consume, and Destroy. Rather than sorting scanning material by the conventional STEEP categories — social, technological, economic, environmental, political — VERGE organizes it by the basic ways people make sense of and act in the world: how we define reality and meaning, relate to one another, connect across distance, create and produce, consume and use, and dispose of or destroy. This human-centered ontology is designed to surface changes and cross-domain interactions that category-based taxonomies tend to fragment or miss. Catalogued among the scanning and ideation methods of the field, VERGE serves both as a way to file environmental-scanning hits and as a generative lens for thinking through the implications of change.	Environmental scanning for foresight is the systematic surveillance of an organization's external environment to collect, filter, and interpret the signals of change that feed a structured foresight process. In Joseph Voros's 2003 generic foresight process framework, scanning is the input stage — the activity that gathers the raw material on which all subsequent analysis depends — and the quality of that input bounds the quality of everything that follows. The method is deliberately broad and continuous: it casts a wide net across many channels, sifts the resulting flood for what is relevant, and interprets the survivors into emerging trends and issues. As codified in the Millennium Project's Futures Research Methodology, environmental scanning is the foundational discipline of strategic foresight, valued because foresight that rests on a narrow or stale view of the environment is foresight built on sand, however sophisticated the downstream methods.