Corporate foresight in open laboratories – a translational approach

ABSTRACT

Many companies have lately started to use open laboratories for innovation. This paper looks into the added value of these practices for corporate foresight. To differentiate corporate foresight in open laboratories from innovation, the paper uses the concept of translation from cultural theory, which addresses the treatment of semantic differences in the ways how different groups of people express meaning. Based on a multiple case study, the paper collects evidence about translation practices in open laboratories and investigates how they relate to corporate foresight. The results show that translation in open laboratories enables companies to gain insight into their own situation and engage in an ongoing re-negotiation of their relation with other stakeholders in commercial interactions. This is a distinctive aspect of corporate foresight in open laboratories which has so far been widely neglected in research. It creates various opportunities for further development of foresight practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Laboratories
• open innovation
• corporate foresight
• translation

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his gratitude for the support provided by everyone involved in the service innovation initiative of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits and the innovation laboratory JOSEPHS in Nuremberg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Albrecht Fritzsche holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from TU Darmstadt and another one in industrial management from Hohenheim University, Stuttgart. He can look back at fifteen years of experience in the manufacturing industry as a systems designer and strategy consultant. He is currently affiliated to the institute of information systems at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, where he teaches innovation strategy and various other topics concerning the organizational and technical conditions of socio-economic change. At the same time, he is involved in numerous industrial projects concerning cyber-physical systems in maintenance, service-engineering in software design and collaborative innovation for cybersecurity. His current research focusses on the conceptual background of technological change, innovation, collaborative problem solving, and value creation.