We have just been informed by our publisher that our book: “Corporate Foresight: Towards a Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm” can be preordered now. Shipping will begin in October. Click here to find the cheepest bookseller.
The full reference information are:
Rohrbeck, R. (2010) “Corporate Foresight: Towards a Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm“, Physica-Verlag, Springer, Heidelberg and New York.
In this year’s Annual Conference of the British Academy of Management one track has been dedidcated entirly on “strategic foresight”. We hope that this track will feature again interesting presentation like we had last year.
Topics in the strategic foresight track include, peripheral vision, prospective sense making, methods of foresight, and foresight for decision making.
In a recent article we aimed to establish to what extent corporate foresight supports the innovation effort of a company. We build on our sample of 20 case studies to identify three roles that can be played by corporate foresight. In the figure below we show where along the innovation process a contribution from corporate foresight is possible.
The three roles can enhance the innovation capacity of a firm in different ways:
- In the strategist role, corporate foresight directs innovation activities by creating a vision, providing strategic guidance, consolidating opinions, assessing and repositioning innovation portfolios, and identifying the new business models of competitors.
- In the initiator role, corporate foresight triggers innovation initiatives by identifying new customer needs, technologies, and product concepts of competitors.
- In the opponent role, corporate foresight challenges the innovators to create better and more successful innovations by challenging basic assumptions, challenging the state-of-the-art of current R & D projects, and scanning for disruptions that could endanger current and future innovations.
As our first blog entry I would like to introduce Organizational Future Orientation.
To tackle the questions how companies become future oriented and thus ensure long-term survival and success, scholars have worked on different levels (see figure below). Some have done research on
- foresight methods such as scenario technique, delphi analysis, etc., that allow us to explore the future, identify alternative futures or make predictions and
- others have worked on corporate foresight as a process. These scholars imply that there is a corporate foresight function, possibly also a corporate foresight unit that generates insights into the future and channels these to other corporate functions such as innovation management, strategic management, corporate development, marketing, or controlling.
- When we talk about organizational future orientation we appreciate that this ability can be build upon a corporate foresight unit, that utilizes foresight methods, but we also include the possibility that a firm builds its future orientation upon other means, such as encouraging all employees to look for external change and empowering them to respond to this change with individual initiative, possibly through corporate venturing schemes.
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