Foresight to Develop and Support a Mission - The Case of the European Mission on "Conquering Cancer - Mission Possible"

In 2019, the European Commission set up five so-called Mission Boards to define, refine and strategize missions for future research and innovation. The missions were supposed to be demand-driven and broad enough to develop motivation to act as guardrails for new research programmatic. One of the Mission Boards was supposed to develop the mission on fighting "cancer". To open up the view for the long-term, a Foresight team from the "Foresight on Demand" (FOD) projects accompanied the mission defining process. In the paper we discuss what role Foresight can play for taking on a key function of reflexivity in the governance of STI to give input to significant systemic change. The Foresight part described here in three approaches marked the start of the process, the Mission Board went on with consultations and several participative activities