In recent years, many countries have carried out foresight exercises to better exploit scientific and technological opportunities. Often, these exercises have sought to identify ‘critical’ or ‘key’ technologies or, more broadly, to establish research priorities. In this paper, we consider the potential of multicriteria decision‐making methods in this kind of priority‐determination and examine the limitations of these methods in the foresight context. We also provide results from a combined evaluation and foresight study where multicriteria methods were deployed to support the shaping of research and technology development activities in the Finnish forestry and forest industry. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.