The phrase "forerunner for" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to indicate something that precedes or serves as a precursor to something else.
Example: "The invention of the telephone was a forerunner for the development of modern communication technologies."
Alternatives: "precursor to" or "predecessor of".
"It almost felt like a forerunner for The X Factor or something.
He was so different, and the forerunner for the Channel 4 revolution that came later.
Quality circles are also said to be a poor forerunner for more participative approaches to management.
The formula was clearly a forerunner for such hedonistic successors as Las Vegas.
The first-order Lax Friedrichs scheme (P. D. Lax, 1954) is the forerunner for such central schemes.
He was thought to be the forerunner for The Tonight Show after Johnny Carson retired in 1992.
Although best known for the three-panel fold-ins that Mad magazine has run since 1964, he has also produced work for Timely Comics, the forerunner of Marvel, for Playboy and Esquire, for the short-lived satirical magazine Humbug, and for The Moshiach Times, a Jewish family magazine that has carried his secret-agent strip "The Shpy" for the last 25 years.
The forerunners for this excursion into soft-focus eroticism are the ballad albums of Peggy Lee and Julie London.
The match started out very exciting, with all 3 forerunners for the Golden Boot pitted against each other.
Irrespective of the existence of the ICC or its forerunners, for about the first hundred years cricket was run by England and Australia.
2) One of the two reactors Areva is building as forerunners for the 12 that will supposedly be built in the UK, the Olkiluoto plant in Finland, has fallen far behind schedule and over budget and the French company is locked in a legal battle over the overruns with the end user, the utility company TVO.
