Corporate foresight has been conceptualised by strategic foresight practitioners and academics working and/or studying corporations as a set of practices, a set of capabilities and an ability of a firm. It enables firms to detect discontinuous change early, interpret its consequences for the firm, and inform future courses of action to ensure the long-term survival and success of the company.

Motivation

To overcome three major challenges

There are three major challenges that make it difficult for organizations to respond to external change:

Need

In addition to the need to overcome the barriers to future orientation a need to build corporate foresight abilities might also come from: To operationalize the need for "peripheral vision", a concept closely linked to corporate foresight George S. Day and Paul J. H. Schoemaker developed a questionnaire with 24 questions.

Implementation

The five practice dimensions

Based on case study research in 20 multinational companies, René Rohrbeck proposes a "Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm". Its five dimensions are: The model is operationalised through 20 elements which have four maturity levels each. These maturity levels are defined and described qualitatively, i.e. by short descriptions that are either true or not true for a given organization.

The three process steps

Organisations need to build foresight through three core process steps, which build on specific practices: Corporate foresight can be expected to be a determinant of the quality of strategic conversation. It will also, in line with digitalisation of other organisational processes, be driven by online platforms that allow broadening the scope of the people who can get involved in defining new courses of action.

Innovation management

Through an empirical investigation Rohrbeck identified three roles that corporate foresight can play to enhance the innovation management of a firm: The study also showed that only a small number of firms have implemented the third role. In the majority of firms the aims of an innovation development project that have been defined are not challenged after the initial decision has been taken. This carries the risk that changing environmental conditions threaten the success of the innovation in development. Additionally, von der Gracht and Vennemann have developed a portfolio-approach, the so-called 'Future-Fitness-Portfolio', which enables companies to qualitatively compare amongst others and identify organizational improvement potential. The authors base their framework on both, corporate foresight and innovation management.

Foresight and external search

External search, understood as all organisational activities that involve the creation and recombination of knowledge from a wide range of external sources outside the boundaries of the firm, has recently been suggested as one of the key research frontiers for corporate foresight. Corporate foresight utilising external search for knowledge entails the usage of novel methods to monitor external development. Among these novel methods, Social Media Analytics for external search for knowledge and open foresight that enable firms to tune in to weak signals and scan the periphery has been shown to hold particular potential.

Benefits

Firms that have applied corporate foresight have received a number of benefits: On a higher level it has been documented that firms will be able to More recently a longitudinal study, that tracked 83 companies over a period of 7 years, has found that firms that have the right maturity level of corporate foresight practices (high future preparedness) can expect an on average 33% higher profitability and a 200% higher market capitalisation growth, when compared to the average.

Case studies

In recent years corporate foresight has become more professional and widespread. Documented examples of organizations applying corporate foresight practices include: Such organizations typically use corporate foresight to support strategic management, identify new business fields and increase their innovation capacity.

Scientific Journals