There is notable but not complete overlap between foresight and strategic planning, change management, forecasting, and design thinking.
It encompasses a range of approaches that combine the three components mentioned above, which may be recast as: Much futurology research has been rather ivory tower work, but Foresight programmes were designed to influence policy - often R&D policy.
Much technology policy had been very elitist; Foresight attempts to go beyond the "usual suspects" and gather widely distributed intelligence.
These three lines of work were already common in Francophone futures studies going by the name la prospective.
In the 1990s, an explosion of systematic organisation of these methods began in large-scale technology foresight programmes in Europe and elsewhere.