to the longer term prospects of the technologies and products that will not only help the companies to improve their services but also help them serve their customers in a most economical fashion. 12.8.1 Background First pioneered in the United States (since the 1950s) and later in Japan (since the 1970s), Technology Foresight (TF) has then spread to the rest of the world. Since the 1990s, the world economies have been confronted with new opportunities and challenges at a much faster pace then ever before. To address these challenges, high tech companies need to give more concrete efforts to technology foresight and to the critical technology selection processes [24-26]. Foresight is, on the one hand, guided by strategy and innovation goals; on the other hand it provides important inputs for the formulation of strategy and innovation programs. This reciprocal relationship manifests itself for instance when discontinuous innovation areas are discovered in foresight activities. For example, the mini-computer disrupted mainframes in computer hardware industry which led to a redefinition of many strategy and innovation objectives. Forecasting also includes continuous monitoring of technological developments leading to an early identification of promising future technology fields (for e.g., 3G-LTE) and validation of their potential (trials by many operators). TF is a tool that assist decision makers to optimize the decisions on R&D at a strategic level [27]. 12.8.2 Process At a high level a sound TF process consists of two phases - (a) foresight activities determining future areas of customer needs and (b) "backcasting" where actions are determined based on future customer needs. The aim of backcasting is to relate future states to the present with a focus on how desirable future situations can be attained. The backcasting approach is applied and modified according to company requirements. The important elements of the model are the links between customer needs, functionalities and technologies, and bottlenecks in the