The phrase "a forerunner for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to indicate something that serves as a precursor or an early example of something that follows.
Example: "The invention of the telephone was a forerunner for the development of modern communication technologies."
Alternatives: "a precursor to" or "an early example of".
"It almost felt like a forerunner for The X Factor or something.
The formula was clearly a forerunner for such hedonistic successors as Las Vegas.
In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if this paper was a forerunner for practical work being done to develop prototypes.
The commercials are a forerunner for what Ms. Hirschhorn and Ms. Maroun describe as a major new campaign for Met Life, to come later in the year.
Brooks is a forerunner for a new generation of novelists for whom status updates and midget porn will be as unremarkable features of life as pavements and trees.
The restaurant was also a forerunner for upscale Southern cuisine and has done a great job of giving old-school recipes a twist.
His mother, Beatrice Ferguson, has a doctorate in mathematics, and he learned game theory from his father, Thomas Ferguson, a UCLA professor emeritus in mathematics, who brought home strategic games such as Nim and Reversi--a forerunner of Othello--for him and his brother to play when they were growing up.
As Makinson 1993 notes, it was also a forerunner of semantics for defeasible conditionals generally (cf. "if p, normally q").
She later worked as a reporter in Washington, first for the International News Service, a forerunner of United Press International, and afterward for The Washington Post, where she wrote features about the White House.
It was composed by Vasily Agapkin (1884-1964), a regimental trumpeter who served in the Russian/Soviet army and the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB, for 62 years.
In its way, the Ascii standard was a forerunner of the standards for exchanging and reading data that enable communication across the Internet and World Wide Web.
