Forecast of Discontinuities: Tipping Points

The European Futurists Club Lucerne, being the organizer of the European Futurists Conference Lucerne, is looking for approaches as to how tipping points (discontinuous developments, trend disruptions, trend inflection points, scale changes of developments) can be recognized early or even predicted at different time scales.

They are looking for rational prediction models, theories, and approaches. Based on the submitted papers, a committee of the advisory board of the European Futurists Conference will decide those to be invited to a three-day workshop in Switzerland in the spring of 2011.

They will also directly invite researchers and scientists who have already published promising work in forecasting, early warning, or early recognition. The goal of this workshop will be to explore the possibilities of coming up with a theory of tipping points by combining various different approaches.

The long-term goal is an international research institute for tipping points. The European Futurists Club cannot accomplish this using its own means alone. So based on the results of the workshops, they will look for foundations and other supporters that would fund the initiative.

The Futurists Club is planning to use the European Futurists Conference Lucerne for the development of the tipping point model. They believe that a broad conference is a suitable forum to explore the idea of the research institute and discuss applicable areas for further exploration.