In increasingly competitive, complex and volatile environments, the urge to fully understand the future and to thereby deduce insights for strategic processes has over the past decades always been of great interest to academics and practitioners. Ultimately though, foresight is used to develop a view of the future relevant to your organisations context to inform decision making today. Strategic foresight and its most common tool, scenario planning, have been used successfully at the corporate planning level for decades. The thesis recommends improving strategic foresight methodology, building foresight capacity, and raising.
Major corporate companies have been leveraging the power of foresight for years. Adam gordon, an instructor on aalto university executive educations strategic foresight program, the problem with forecasting lies not so much in the quality of the data analytics but in a fundamental misunderstanding about where quantitative analysis is an appropriate tool for inquiry and where techniques for qualitative. Experiments with social media, foresight and you we hope. Strategic foresight group anticipating and influencing. There is also evidence of a growing number of foresight exercises in latin america and. Strategic foresight methods in the public and private sectors. Strategic foresight has been used more than 70 years to anticipate transformational change, and prepare the organization for responding to or for influencing and promoting transformational change in industries and societies coates, durance and godet, 2010. The impact of corporate foresight on strategic decisions. In this case study, we look at how having a clear view of whats changing in the outside world empowers an organization with the confidence and agility to reorient its strategy for longterm resilience and sustainable growth. Unpublished masters thesis, university of waikato, hamilton.
View strategic foresight research papers on academia. These changes will significantly alter how the emergency management community will do its job in the future and will require creative and collaborative thinking and action. Andy hines in his article, strategic foresight, identifies six critical steps to develop the foresight you need to navigate in this rapidly changing environment. Strategic foresight and porters five forces publish. Scanning is the process of looking internally and externally to identify what is on the horizon that may impact the organization relative to the issues you framed in the prior step.
Due to digital information overload, manual information. Whats your futuresix steps for gaining strategic foresight page 2 scanning the second step is scanning. Based on this knowledge the case of the eu research project foresight and modelling for european health. A study of how companies enhance their strategies through. Introduction to foresight and foresight processes in. Our research is grounded in established qualitative methodologies that address complex systems in transition. If you have undertaken foresight research, or are doing so currently, you may contact barbara bok who is our director of foresight phd research, or karen arvidsson, director academic programs, so your work can be listed and shared.
First, as foresight is a quite ambiguously defined and understood entity, we shortly present our understanding of what foresight is. Strategic foresight centers on the idea that leaders at all levels conduct an environmental scan and make an assessment. Pdf strategic foresight for collaborative exploration of new. Strategic foresight, leadership, and the future of rural. Every system and its parts are indirectly connected to every other system. The second part is an introduction to foresight processes in practice. Pdf strategic foresight process improvements for the. Services provided by thinking futures are underpinned by the generic foresight process framework joseph voros, a generic foresight process framework, 2003, shown in the following diagram. Strategic foresight, also known as futures studies, is a discipline organizations use to gather and process information about their future operating environment. It focuses on generating analyses of possible futures and alternative strategies, based on available intelligence. Successful health ecosystems of the future will need to be customerdriven, more affordable, and techsavvy. In the crisis response and disaster resilience 2030 report, sfi established a framework for foresight. One famous example is the energy petrochemical giant royal dutch shell.
The conclusions of the report, which focused on the opportunities and concerns of senior managers, included a recommendation to utilize strategic foresight to stay ahead of the curve. Strategic foresight is an element of futurology and a concept under the strategic planning umbrella. Over the years, governments and corporations started to conduct foresight studies in order. Decisionmakers will have to make strategic decisions surrounded by risk and uncertainty, and their experience, skills and the way they manage risk will. Forest service, united states department of agriculture, 1992 folwell avenue, st. This information can include, for example, trends and developments in their political, economic, social, technological, and legal environments. Framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning, and. Principles for thinking about the future and foresight.
Corporate foresight related research has, however, provided only limited insight to date. The preforesight or scoping phase is where strategic and early process decisions are made. Foresight between uncertainty and convention uio duo. Inspired by the work of a number of projects in the open foresight space, we are attempting to further develop social media foresight methods.
Summary of findings open pdf 52 kb the strategic foresight initiative sfi is a collaborative effort of the emergency management community facilitated by the federal emergency management agency fema. Strategic foresight and porters five forces towards a synthesis daniel roy research paper undergraduate business economics business management, corporate governance publish your bachelors or masters thesis, dissertation, term paper or essay. Strategic foresight efforts at both the broad contextual and sectorspecific levels can interlink and reinforce each other as part of an ongoing system of integrating futures thinking into policymaking. Foresight as a specific term emerged in us military strategic planning after the. Not a report a carefully designed and purposeful intervention strategic foresight is a learning process. Strategic foresight process improvements for the hungarian ministry of defense thesis pdf available june 2016 with 2,706 reads how we measure reads. Common to the various foresight terms referred to above, strategic foresight is a dual purpose task of 1 observing, perceiving, and capturing factors that is likely to induce future changes, and 2 dealing with these changes by deciding appropriate organizational responses, as illustrated in fig. Principles for thinking about the future and foresight education david n.
Strategic foresight is generally focused at the mid or longterm time frame. Strategic foresight research network aarhus universitet. Strategic foresight enables leaders to ask better questions about the future, make strategic choices explicit and support the discovery, design and consideration of more and better options for action. English is the dominant language, the term foresight, introduced in the 1990s, was adopted. Strategic foresight is a process of creating useful conversations about possible futures. In this article the value of twitter data analysis for a strategic foresight exercise is discussed. In broad terms, strategic foresight can be practiced on three levels. The article offers an overview of twitters basic functionalities, previous twitter research and related studies on using twitter in foresight projects to date.
Whats your futuresix steps for gaining strategic foresight. They identify elements that are not easily observed, difficult to. Pdf to ensure longterm competitiveness, companies need to develop the ability to explore, plan, and develop new business fields. Founded in 2002 to create new forms of intellectual capital, our body of work today encompasses over 50. More research is needed to fully understand not only. Introduction to strategic foresight systems thinking strategic foresight looks at change from a systems perspective. Among the pioneers of foresight, one finds the rand corporation and the hudson institute founded by h. Strategic foresight group sfg is a think tank engaged in crafting new policy concepts that enable decision makers to prepare for a future in uncertain times. Kearney 2017 views from the csuite report focused on adapting to disruption. Foresight as a strategic longterm planning tool for. Look for this icon to find more strategic foresight.
The thesis then concludes with chapter vi, which gives recommendations based on the research. Summary information packet open pdf 194 kb the world is changing in profound ways. Strategic foresight, as a discipline, has been around for decades. Strategic foresight is wellestablished in many advanced economies, including the european union, japan and singapore. Strategic foresight october 2019 strategic foresight for. An overview of strategic foresight, and several futures tools that can be used to build a strategic foresight capacity. Strategic foresight although many definitions and interpretations of strategic foresight exist, we can. Strategic foresight offers a foundation in the conceptual and methodological basics of the foresight field, which can be applied to deepen thought around any product, service, indus. A brief overview of strategic foresight workshop slides. Strategic foresight advice should be broadly based, and wherever possible backed up by empirical evidence, so that it can be contested and debated by others in the policy domain. The impact of corporate foresight on strategic decisions a case of a european bank by claudio gomez portaleoni a thesis submitted to the university of birmingham for the degree of doctor of philosophy birmingham business school the university of birmingham 2011. We see strategic foresight at the nexus of strategy, leadership, and innovation, and we are also closely allied with cognate fields such as design thinking, business model innovation and corporate venturing. Its a theme that underpins the 2017 major projects association conference.
Among the brics nations brazil, russia, india, china and south africa, foresight programmes at the government level are increasingly common. The concept of a system implies that parts or subsystems are part of a larger system. Pdf chapter on the foundations of the popular strategic foresight class created and taught by the author within the mba in design strategy at. Presentation at aair forum, sydney, nov slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. Ramos and colleagues have a new project that combines foresight and social media. Strategic foresight analysis usually involves the following stages. The benefits of strategic foresight planning kreischer. First, strategic foresight, a discipline i describe in more detail, provides the vitally needed mindsets and frameworks required to plan in uncertainty. This presentation and the strategic foresight playbook were. To effectively spot new trends, strategic foresight teams need to have a much wider range of information sources than. Twitter data analysis as contribution to strategic. During the oil crisis of the late 1960s, shell altered its strategy and successfully propelled itself to the top of. Bengston, strategic foresight group, northern research station, u.
The aim of this thesis is to amplify and complement the corporate foresight process and adjacent research streams by extending the environmental scanning and the identification of opportunities and innovations into the startup context. Strategy, foresight, change, uncertainty, coping with change, biases. Impact of corporate foresight on strategic decisions. I dedicate this thesis to my husband gard and our children vilde franziska and felix. Strategic management does parttime work make employees more efficient. In so doing, they can identify strategic threats to avoid or mitigate as well as new opportunities to exploit. Information management involves the process of information. Strategic foresight analysis can help decision makers map the future. Maximizing the power of strategic foresight washington.