Does good science inexorably lead to new products and economic growth (the ‘science push’ model)? Or conversely, does a dynamic industrial base act as the spur for novel scientific ideas (‘technology pull’)? For the past five years, Britain's Technology Foresight exercise has attempted to finesse this conundrum by suggesting a third approach, namely that innovation and growth emerge from a complex interaction between science and the market place, involving close communication and substantial feedback between actors in the two separate fields.

Certainly the apparent success of the exercise, indicated by the British government's recent announcement that it is launching a second programme, called merely Foresight (see page 8), has confounded sceptics who initially complained that it would inevitably place a strait-jacket on British science, and degenerate into a doomed attempt to pick technology ‘winners’. Success is based on the way Technology Foresight has become a device for injecting a user dimension into debates on scientific priorities that has proved acceptable to political parties of both left and right. At its best, Technology Foresight can represent the ‘bottom-up’ approach to setting research priorities that fits well with the flexible, competitive economies of the late 1990s. It is perhaps not surprising that similar techniques are now being explored in countries as diverse as India and Germany (see page 7).

But Britain must not rest on its laurels. There are still plenty of problems with the implementation of both Technology Foresight and its successor, such as a failure to penetrate sufficiently the small and medium-sized businesses that represent the most innovative sector of the economy. The effectiveness of targeting Foresight activities around broad social goals, as proposed for the second exercise, has yet to be proved. Finally, careful prioritization is no alternative to the adequate funding of the science base. The cultural change in British science over the past five years means that additional funding is now more important than ever — not that it is no longer required.