Special issue on ‘corporate foresight and innovation management’

ABSTRACT

This special issue examines corporate foresight and innovation management in contemporary organising. Contributing to a growing body of research on the other-centeredness and interconnectedness of foresight and innovation, the papers in the issue examine the practice of corporate foresight, how it may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation, and the complex processes and conditions that enable (or impede) the capture of value from corporate foresight. Representing an interesting mix of empirical, conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative methodologies, the papers offer innovative theorising to extend our understanding of the logics of corporate foresight, their interactive effects and contribution to innovation management.

Emphasising anticipation and prescience, corporate foresight is an organising practice involving the creative identification, exploration, and exploitation of opportunities and limits otherwise glossed over by competitors. In fast moving business environments characterised by ambiguity and change, the practice of corporate foresight has become an annual ritual in many forward looking firms (Hodgkinson and Healey 2008; Vecchiato 2015). Following the logic that more of it will lead to companies finding a path that leads to the future, the practice is increasingly conceptualised as a learning process rather than an episodic intervention tool (Bootz 2010; Cunha, Palma, and da Costa 2006). In this regard, a plethora of firms now treat corporate foresight as an everyday practice of combining relevant past, present and future insights into meaningful, future-oriented knowledge (Wright and Cairns 2011; Sarpong and Maclean 2016). This shift has not only altered how firms views and organise in the present to compete in the future. It has led to firms investing in a variety of corporate foresight methodologies ranging from scenario planning, road mapping, competitive intelligence, and business war gaming (Rohrbeck, Battistella, and Huizingh 2015; Daheim and Uerz 2008). Developed and advertised by practitioners, consultants, and researchers as a strategic process of handling the effect and response uncertainty of technology and social drivers of change (Rohrbeck and Gemünden 2011; Vecchiato and Roveda 2010), decision makers are frequently called upon to integrate these exercises into their organisational processes. In response, many organisations now support and conduct scenario planning but continue to struggle to measure their effectiveness or know what kind of future they sometimes want for themselves (Mietzner and Reger 2005).

An expansive view of the corporate foresight ‘playing field’ now points to inter-organisational collaboration as a strategic means to managing the future. This new turn to participatory foresight projects in clusters and innovation networks seek to mobilise and harness the differential visions of potential competitors and partners to detecting discontinuous changes and interpreting their consequences (Bas and Guillo 2015; Nikolova 2014; Ramos, Mansfield, and Priday 2012). These projects, often sponsored by governments, may have diverse participants, including experts, citizens, and stakeholders whose contributions help the network to expand and build a proprietary ‘image of the future’ to drive breakthrough innovation (Adegbile, Sarpong, and Meissner 2017; Scuotto et al. 2017). In this regard, this strand of the literature primarily addresses how corporate foresight may stimulate radical and disruptive innovations in innovation clusters (Keller, Markmann, and von der Gracht 2015; van der Duin, Heger, and Schlesinger 2014; Borch, Dingli, and Jørgensen 2013) but have focussed less on extending our understanding of the dynamic interactions between participating firms, the complexities involved in mapping their tasks, connections, architectures, and transaction costs involved in managing such networks.

While it is widely acknowledged among foresight scholars that the link between cause and effect can be elusive, recurrent theme of recent theory on corporate foresight, both on firm and cluster levels, has increasingly found a positive relationship between corporate foresight and innovation (Gershman, Bredikhin, and Vishnevskiy 2016; Ruff 2015; Zeng, Xie, and Tam 2010). Those that do not report direct causal link often identify flexible organisational outcomes such as ambidexterity, peripheral visioning, second-order learning (See for e.g. Paliokaitė and Pačėsa 2015; Rohrbeck and Schwarz 2013; Sarpong and Maclean 2014). These derived outcomes have strategic implications for creation and capture of sustainable value for competitiveness. The emerging consensus, we argue, has come to represent something of a conundrum. Those that have attempted to examine the causal link between corporate foresight and innovation frequently struggle to show exactly when and how foresight exercises may lead to innovation while others simply neglect the complexities involved in mapping the connections and linkages between foresight practices and innovation (Sarpong, Maclean, and Davies 2013; Rohrbeck and Gemünden 2011; Miles et al. 2017).

We accept that strategic foresight as a discipline is still in its pre-paradigmatic stage but the conceptual landscape has become extremely fragmented with the potential to obfuscate theoretical leaps aimed at improving the practice in organising. In particular, theoretical and empirical specifications on how strategic foresight may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation remain sparse (Rohrbeck and Gemünden 2011). As noted in the original call for papers, the purpose of this special issue, therefore, is to contribute to the progress being made by the broader foresight literature and augment recent conceptual and empirical developments that examine the limits and potentialities of corporate foresight as a bridge to innovation and innovation management in general.

Overview of articles in this special issue

The papers contained in this special issue do not only reflect the current state of the corporate foresight and innovation literature. As a group, these articles demonstrate the extent to which foresight scholars are contributing to new ways to stimulating and improving organisational foresightfulness. We delineate the nine papers in this special issue along three themes reflecting new thinking about corporate foresight and innovation management: Leveraging innovation from corporate foresight at the firm level; inter-organisational participative foresight and the identification of opportunities for innovation; and inclusivity in corporate foresight and innovation. Table 1 is a summary of the papers contained in the issue.

Table 1. Overview of contributions.

Authors	Research questions	Theoretical lens	Empirical setting (data and methods)	Key findings
Jeewhan Yoon, Youngjun, Kim, Nicholas S. Vonortas and Sung Won Han	What is the effect of corporate foresight on innovativeness?	Foresight, Resource Based View (RBV), and dynamic capabilities	South Korea based manufacturing firms; Quantitative survey	Built on a model that shows that the influence of corporate foresight on innovativeness is mediated by organisational learning. The indirect effect they found is conditioned by organizational learning and integrative capabilities of the firm.
Albrect Fritzshe	How do the translation practices of open laboratories contribute to corporate foresight?	Contemporary turn to translation in cultural theory	Open laboratory in a major European city; Processed-based qualitative	Open-laboratories bring contrasting under-standing of innovation to life by opening up opportunities for corporate foresight exercises to understand different stakeholders’ attributions of meaning inside and outside the firm.
Jonathan Calof, Rubén Arcos and Nisha Sewdass	What is the current state of competitive intelligence (CI) in European firms?	Competitive intelligence (CI) and foresight practices	Competitive intelligence (CI) practices in European firms; Comparative survey	CI in European firms has evolved beyond competitor analysis to R&D and new product innovation. The study also found similarities between foresight and CI in terms of objective setting and the use of scenarios and environmental analysis in developing images of the future.
David Sarpong and Daniël Hartman	How do organizing process and routines lead to the dissipation of strategic foresight among middle managers?	Strategic foresight as a distributed capability	Single case study of a European retail firm; qualitative interviews	In examining how organizing processes and routines may dissipate foresight in practice, the study highlights how the legitimation of rhetoric, instrumental rationality, suppression of creative freedom, and the formulations of grand solutions in search of problems may cumulatively lead to the dissipation of strategic foresight among middle managers.
Melanie Weiner, Regina Gattringer and Franz Strehl	Which types of corporate cultures are likely to foster or inhibit a firm’s openness for collaborative open foresight?	Open-innovation and competing values framework	Two Austrian firms with experience in collaborative foresight projects; Interviews	Organizations characterised by clan or adhocracy cultures tend to foster openness. At the extreme end of the continuum, market and hierarchy cultures inhibits openness for collaborative open foresight participation.
Yulia Milshina and Konstantin Vishneevskiy	How can collaborative foresight help SMEs to become competitive?	Strategic foresight and innovation clusters	SME embedded in a new Russian medical technologies cluster; Road-mapping	Collaborative foresight projects provide SMEs the opportunity to overcome their resource constraints to identify potential technology chains that can be translated into innovative priorities and indicators to build plausible futures for SMEs.
Jonathan Calof, Dirk Meissner, D and Anastasia Razheva	What can foresight influence successful implementation of open innovation?	Foresight networks and knowledge integration	Conceptual review of literature on foresight and open innovation	Applied at each stage of the innovation value chain, foresight and foresight networks can help in the identification of challenges in the implementation of open innovation systems.
Jacob Højland and René Rohrbeck	To what extent can business-development activities in BoP markets be classified as corporate foresight?	Foresight and innovation at the base of the pyramid (BoP)	Case studies-three Danish firms; company reports and documents, and interviews	The study found that both cognitive and experimental search elements of strategic foresight, such as probing and prospecting are important in exploring for opportunities and limits in BoP markets.
Vinh Sum Chau and Chanell Quire	What can foresight tell us about the shortage of women in innovation, and science, technology, and engineering and mathematics (STEM) sectors?	Gender in foresight, science, and technology	UK STEM sectors; Interviews with female scientists, and questionnaire	This study examined the shortage of women in the STEM sector, and how their active inclusion can improve corporate foresight in the technology sector as a whole. Findings from the study suggest that greater inclusion of women in foresight exercises in the STEM sectors will broaden the futures of the predominantly male-dominated sector. Three case-rich narratives are presented as a summary on the future of women in technology.

Leveraging innovation from corporate foresight at the firm level

Evaluating one of the fundamental assumption driving corporate foresight practices, Yoon et al. (2018) empirically examined the influence of corporate foresight on firm innovativeness of a variety of Korean manufacturing firms. Drawing on the resource-based view and dynamic capabilities, they developed a model and posited that the effect of corporate foresight on innovativeness is mediated by organisational learning, while the relationship between corporate foresight and organisational learning is moderated by integrative capabilities. The study showed that the indirect effect of corporate foresight on innovativeness through organisational learning is conditioned by the level of integrative capabilities possessed by a firm.

In taping into the crowds wisdom to strengthen corporate foresight exercises, Fritzsche (2018) draws on the recent turn to translation in cultural theory to examined the practices of ‘open laboratories’ and their value added potential to enhancing corporate foresight. Focussing on the semantic differences in the differential ways different groups of people express meaning, the study conducted in an open laboratory located in the centre of a major European city unpacks the differential perspectives of firms and their customers on how they can improve their business processes. Findings from the study suggest that translation in open laboratories can enable companies to gain insight into their own capabilities, environment, and value networks. Such knowledge, the paper argues, can be fed into corporate foresight exercises to enhance engagement and on-going (re)negotiation of a firm’s relation with stakeholders in commercial interactions.

Shedding light on how competitive intelligence has become part of everyday organising, Calof, Arcos, and Sewdass (2018) presents their very recent results of a survey of competitive intelligence (CI) practices in European firms. In comparing the recent results to a 2006 global study and a 2006 European CI study, they found that the breadth of applications for CI has grown well beyond competitors to include customer related intelligence, technology, market, etc. The go further to posit that innovation is driving much intelligence activity, in particular research and development (R&D) and new product development decisions, and CI appears to be much more formalised in European firms than it was in 2006. In particular, the study also found similarities between corporate foresight and CI in terms of objectives (development and maintenance of competitive advantage, help with decision making) and analytical techniques with scenarios being among the more frequently used analytical techniques along with STEEP and other environmental analysis in both corporate foresight studies and the CI study.

Also focussing on the meso level, Sarpong and Hartman (2018) examined organising practices and routines that potentially combine to impede strategic foresight among middle managers. Building on an explorative case study of a European sportswear retail company that has undergone ownership and structural changes on how work was organised. Extending our understanding of contextual antecedents that could lead to the dissipation of strategic foresight among middle managers in organising, the study identifies four organising processes and their associated routines (rhetoric of legitimation, instrumental rationality, suppression of creative freedom, and the formulations of solutions in search of problems) which typify the reported patterns of foresight dissipation among middle managers.

Inter-organisational participative foresight

The paper by Wiener, Gattringer, and Strehl (2018) explores the influence of organisational culture on firms’ ability to benefit from inter-organisational collaborative open foresight projects. Based on two in-depth case studies of organisations that have engaged in one of such participative projects, the study draws on the Competing Values Framework for (organisational) culture as an organising framework to examine how the collective mental programming of the firm could impact its ‘openness’ and potential to benefit from participative foresight projects. Findings from the study suggest that firms characterised as having a clan or adhocracy cultures are likely to foster openness, where as those characterised as having a market or hierarchy cultures tend to stifle openness for open foresight participation, and in turn struggle to exploit the value generated by the network to remain competitive.

The paper by Milshina and Vishnevskiy (2018) reporting on a Russian foresight project that employed road mapping as a methodological tool to examine the potential of collaborative foresight project in cluster made up of SMEs pioneering advanced medical technologies. Findings from the study suggest the project did not only provide a context for interaction for participating firms, but also enabled them to form self-organising technology chains and build linkages with research universities. In making the case for SMEs to engage in collaborative foresight projects to enhance their innovation capacity, some of the major innovative achievements of the cluster are delineated. The paper concludes that cluster driven collaborative foresight projects may serve as quintessential laboratories for SMEs, particularly, those with limited R&D budgets to pull their scarce resources together to explore emerging technologies with far reaching applications and potential.

The conceptual paper by Calof, Meissner, and Razheva (2018) combines concepts from foresight and foresight networks to explore how corporate foresight in practice could be leveraged to drive open innovation. Organised around key open innovation questions such as those related to technology selection, identifying future customer needs and scanning for disruptions, the paper provides some useful insight into how foresight can potentially be exploited to address some of the inherent challenges blighting open innovation. From this perspective, they argue that the weaknesses in open innovation lies in the strength of foresight as a tool for obtaining access to appropriate external experts and their knowledge; and making sense of the mass information that can emerge through a more open process. They conclude highlighting how foresight networks could point open innovation to new ideas in innovative collaboration forms.

Inclusivity in corporate foresight and innovation

Drawing on interviews with five senior personnel and a survey of 365 females working in a variety of firms in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) sectors, Chau and Quire (2018) investigated why there is a shortage of women in this sector and offers insights for managing corporate foresight. They found that their incisive strategic minds which could spark imaginations and audacious visions of the future are often overlooked and marginalised because they tend to inhabit lower levels of the organisational hierarchy. They suggest that their tolerance for outliner views and opinions can be harnessed to shape alternative scenarios and groupthink in organising. They conclude that greater inclusion of women in corporate foresight exercises can help shape the futures and destinies of yet-to-be-realized innovations.

Drawing on evidence from three cases studies in the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) markets, Højland and Rohrbeck (2018) explored the strategic role of corporate foresight in exploring new markets. They examined the extent to which successful business-development activities in uncertain environments can be classified as corporate foresight (CF) and the extent to which they have been intentional and systematic. Emphasising the need for corporate foresight to narrow down on experimental and cognitive search mechanisms to probing uncertain environments, findings from the their study suggest that the probing (experimental search) phase is particularly important in unknown and uncertain environments but that perceiving and prospecting (cognitive search) activities are necessary to find distant opportunities. They conclude by positing that successful business-development activities rely on multiple iterations between perceiving, prospecting and probing.

Conclusions and potential future research avenues

Taken together, the nine papers contained in this special issue do not only shed light on some of the salient theoretical and empirical foundations underlying strategic foresight and its relationship to innovation. They also indicate the current trends in strategic foresight research. The following are some directions for future research in this domain:

1. How can we assess and measure the return-on-foresight exercises and develop foresight capabilities in sustainable ways?

2. What are the institutional antecedents that enable (or impede) value capture from participative corporate projects?

3. What is the future of participative corporate projects?

4. How can SMEs leverage corporate foresight exercises to determine technology futures?

5. When do corporate foresight exercises lead to anticipatory intelligence needed to decide on competing or alternative technological pathways?

We encourage scholars to explore these research avenues drawing on the wide variety of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches in their tool kits. We are of the firm belief that the proposed directions for future research, and the papers contained in this volume will spur other foresight researchers and practitioners to continue with their efforts to bridging the epistemic gaps between corporate foresight and innovation.

Acknowledgement

Dirk Meissner’s contribution to the article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Programme at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of the subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Programme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

David Sarpong is a Reader in Strategy Management at the Brunel Business School, Brunel University London. His research interests revolve around strategic management, innovation management, organizational foresight, Heideggerian approach to ‘practice’, and micro-historia. His research has been published in journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, R&D Management Journal, International Marketing Review, Journal of Business Research, Scandinavian Journal of Management, European Management Journal, Strategic Change, Futures and, Foresight. He Co- Chairs the Strategy Special Interest Group (SiG) of the British Academy of Management (BAM).

Dirk Meissner is the Deputy Director of the Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies, Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, National Research University Higher School of Economics. He has a strong background in science, technology and innovation for policy-making and industrial management with special focus on foresight and road-mapping, science, technology and innovation policies, and funding of research priority setting. Prior to joining HSE, Dirk was responsible for technology and innovation policy at the presidential office of the Swiss Science and Technology Council. Dirk represented Switzerland and now the Russian Federation at the OECD Working Party on Technology and innovation policy.

ORCID

Dirk Meissner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4573-0376