Corporate foresight

The Strategic foresight aims, through the identification and analysis of weak signals in a corporate setting to detect discontinuities, technological trends and changes in the market environment. The recognition is the preparation of decisions that will enable the company early to take advantage of opportunities and to react to hazards. The main business sectors that rely on the Strategic foresight, are strategic management, technology management, controlling, and innovation management.

• 3.1 The five dimensions of the Strategic Foresight
• 3.2 Roles of the Strategic Foresight in Innovation Management

Distinction between

The concept of Strategic foresight has developed after Krystek, Müller- Stewens (1993 ) in four generations:

Motivation

In business there is the motivation to introduce Strategic Early reconnaissance systems, for two reasons:

• The difficulty of large companies to respond to external upheavals. Thus, the average life expectancy of Fortune 500 is estimated to be under 50 years, for example, in a study by de Geus, because companies in times of rapid change not react fast enough to maintain their competitiveness.
• Companies need new business opportunities when their current business unprofitable. The Strategic foresight can help to identify new business opportunities and prepare for their development here.

Overcome three fundamental barriers

It has been shown that the inability of companies to respond quickly enough to changes caused by three fundamental barriers:

• The high rate of change, which is characterized by ( 1) shortening product life - cycles, (2) faster technological change, (3) higher rate of innovation, and (4 ) indicates rapid diffusion of innovation.
• The ignorance of changes in the environment, which on (1) too long planning cycles, ( 2) lack of external sensors, (3) information overload, (4) lack of internal information flow, and ( 5) systematic filtering by resource management, which sponsored their current business, is due.
• The organizational inertia, the complex by (1) internal structures, (2) complex external structures, (3) lack of willingness to cannibalize current business, and strong focus on the current fiscal, which leads to cognitive inertia.

Need for Strategic foresight

In addition to overcoming the barriers may need for a strategic perspective also be caused by the following reasons:

• The business strategy, especially if innovation leadership is sought
• High complexity of the business environment
• High volatility of the business environment

For the operationalization of the need Day and Schoemaker have proposed a model with 24 questions.

Implementation of the Strategic Foresight

The 5 dimensions of the Strategic Foresight

Based on case studies in 20 multinational companies suggests Rohrbeck before a maturity model for organizational future orientation. This measures the ability to systematically breaks in the corporate environment to respond along five dimensions:

• The use of information that describes the data to be used by the strategic foresight
• The methodological sophistication, which describes how the data is interpreted and how strong the communicative and integrative potential of the methods used
• Informal organization, which describes how through personal networks information and knowledge is diffused within the company and contribute to the triggering of activities.
• Formal organization, which describes the degree of formalization of processes, bodies and intra -organizational management systems
• The culture, which describes the extent to which the corporate culture supports or hinders the ability for strategic foresight.

To operationalize its model Rohrbeck uses 20 items that are measured, each with 4 levels of maturity. The maturity levels are hereby describe qualitatively, ie there exists for every level of maturity, a statement that must be evaluated in each company as true or false.

Roles of the Strategic Foresight in Innovation Management

Through an empirical study of various value added by the Strategic Foresight to the innovative capacity of firms could be observed. Rohrbeck proposes a division into three roles (see chart):

The three roles can be along the innovation process order:

• In the Input feed roller helps the Strategic foresight, both the market side new customer needs as well as other technology to identify new technologies. It also supports the monitoring of competitors. An example of this is the technology scouting, what new technologies, identified by expert networks, evaluated and gegebenenfallst in the acquisition of technology support.
• As a strategic tool, the Strategic foresight scans the environment by emerging business fields and poking through the appropriate systems renewal and Neupositionierungsprozess to. When Siemens AG, for example, a method was developed that enables the strategic review of the business units and is used for the exploration of new business areas. This method, which is operated under the name of Pictures of the Future from the central region Corporate Technologies, consists of scenario analysis, trend extrapolation and roadmapping.
• The continuous service, the Strategic Foresight uses the findings from the environment observation to evaluate research and development projects. This arises, for example, the question of whether the project on the state of the art, or whether the addressed customer needs are still valid.

In the examiner Tung of Rohrbeck was found that the average company put too little emphasis on the third roll. The rule is still that R & D project decisions on the technologies used, functions included, as well as which customer needs are addressed, are made at the beginning of the project and these are then later no longer revediert even with better knowledge. Here, therefore, there is potential for further improvement in the use of the Strategic Foresight and potential to increase the innovation capacity of enterprises.

Credentials

Conferences

• European Conference on Strategic Foresight Forum for Strategic foresight in companies