New Evidence on the Value Contribution of Corporate Foresight Capabilities

Technological Forecasting & Social ChangeIn a recent article we report on the results of a survey among 77 large multinational companies. We were interested to investigate which value firms get out of their corporate foresight activities.

We differentiated 13 items along four dimensions:

  • enhanced perception of emerging change and discontinuities
  • enhanced strategic management by for example fostering strategic discussion and creating the ability to adopt alternative perspectives
  • enhances innovation management by for example enhancing customer understanding and reducing the level of uncertainty in R&D projects
  • overall value contributions in terms of facilitating organizational learning and an improved ability to shape the future

Overall we find that firms generate significantly positive benefits from their corporate foresight activity. By matching the value creation date with firm performance we further reveal that top performing companies get considerably more value of their corporate foresight practices than their less performing peers (see figure 1).

Value creation from corporate foresight

Figure 1: Value created from corporate foresight activities, overview.

In the future we plan to investigate further which kind of corporate foresight activities contribute the different value creation categories.

For the detailed results and discussion of the finding you can download the full article at: Rohrbeck, R. and J. O. Schwarz 2013 The Value Contribution of Strategic Foresight: Insights from an Empirical Study on Large European Companies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 80(8):1593-1606.

 

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