Institute for the Future

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The Institute for the Future (IFTF) was founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation and active interest and support from the following notable organizations: The RAND Corporation, The Russell Sage Foundation, The Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation, and The Conference Board.The aim of the small group that left RAND to found the Institute for the Future was to take the methodologies and content of the world's leading classified research center and apply them to the public world: the world of business, government, and the nonprofit sector. Primarily mathematicians and engineers, they believed that the right methodology would allow them not only to solve pressing social problems but also to forecast the future.IFTF pioneers include Paul Baran, who invented packet-switching, the foundation technology of the Internet; Olaf Helmer, who invented the Delphi technique for expert opinion aggregation and forecasting; and Jacques Vallée, who created the first computer conferencing system for the Internet, then called the ARPAnet.

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