Foresight of Information Society: The Knowledge-Based Economy. An attempt at measuring with the use of the example of spatial diversity of Poland's voivodships (2009-2015)

The aim of the article is to present a new approach to forecast trends of long-wave development: economy, society, education and culture. This approach is called Foresight. There have been many attempts to define Foresight. The lack of an unambiguous definition of this concept leads to many approaches to its measurement, which have not yielded the right results so far. Better results are defined by the concept of Knowledge-Based Economy KBE), which is based on the following pillars: human and social capital, technical infrastructure, research and development and institutional and legal factors. The analysis of these pillars helps to gain a competitive advantage (region, industry, national economy). The applied Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM), developed by the World Bank in 1999, is one of the methods for measuring the degree of development of KBE. It is connected with the development of a set of indicators describing the functioning of individual socio-economic dimensions, grouped in four categories: economic and institutional, education and human resources, information system and new technologies, information technologies. The second part of the article presents the analysis of the fourth pillar - information technologies, as an example of the impact of the development of information technologies on the growth of individual regions (voivodships). Synthetic indexes for voivodships of Poland in 2009-2015 were calculated. The research results present a significant spatial difference in the development of information technologies. Changes in this diversification of voivodships was presented for 2015 in relation to 2012 and 2009.