• Strategic Agility
• Environmental Scanning
• Peripheral Vision
• Corporate Foresight
• Organizational Future Orientation

How to participate

To register click here.

In addition to participating in the audience you can also participate as a speaker:

• Practitioners can propose presentations on own practices or provide short papers and presentations on best practices.
• Scholars can choose to present early stage research as short academic papers (max. 2500 words) or final research results in full academic papers (max. 5000 words)

To propose a contribution please submit an outline of

• 600-700 words for practitioner presentations and short academic papers
• 900-1000 words for full academic papers

For the next conference in Barcelona, 17-20 June 2012 you can submit your contributions for our Special Interest Group until 29 February 2012 to submissions@futureorientation.net.

You can also download the full call for papers here: Call for Papers “Strategic Foresight, Strategic Agility, and Future Orientation”

We hope to see you in Barcelona or in one of our future conferences!

This is

• a good sign that ‘foresight’ and ‘future orientation’-knowledge is becoming more interesting for the general audience and it is also
• a nice opportunity for anyone interested in the topic to help building a sound framework for future-related knowledge.

To support the project click here.

The conference will be on the 11-13 September 2012 in Cardiff, UK.  A preliminary Call for Papers can be downloaded here.

Hope to see you there!

I met Delia early on her road trip that took her to some of the many inspiring people who work on exploring the future and making sense of today’s dynamic changes.

For newbies this book provides a great first overview of relevant terms and an introduction to the basic concepts that shape future orientation. For us familiar with the topics it provides an external, honest and unbiased perceptive on our fragmented field. And with her authentic writing style Delia provides us with a particularly pleasant reading experience.

For a first impression you can also check out Delia’s video below:

Next spring we will offer a 3 day module on Corporate Foresight. This module is part of our Flexible MBA program, but you can also join the course without following the whole program.

Main topics include:

• Introduction: Why Corporate Foresight is needed and where is it employed?
• Method briefing
  • Overview of all methods
  • Group work on scenario analysis, roadmapping and trend portfolios
  • Structuring and working on complex consulting tasks
• Working with the case companies: running a workshop, desk research, doing a scenario analysis and presenting to the company
• Reflecting on practical case and on theory of Corporate Foresight

The dates:

• 11-Feb-2012: Introduction and methods
• 2-Mar-2012: Meeting with case companies and joint workshop for defining project objectives and scope
• 5 to 23-Mar-2012: Group work on projects: Working with trend databases and methods of corporate foresight
• 30-Mar-2012: Final presentation to partner companies

How to join?

• To be eligible to join the course you need to have completed at least a Bachelor education and have three years of working experience
• You can check availability and ask about conditions by contacting Rita Madsen.
• For any questions on content and course structure you can contact me.

Given that we have even put the term ‘corporate foresight‘ in the title, I am wondering if the documented interest is also a sign for a growing academic interest in foresight from a firm perspective. This would be certainly great news for the corporate world as clearly the interest from managers has been growing firmly in the last decade. We could also witness this growing interest in our LinkedIn group, which has grown from 121 members a year ago to 320 today.

Full reference of the article: Rohrbeck, R.,  Gemünden, H. G. 2011. Corporate Foresight: Its Three Roles in Enhancing the Innovation Capacity of a Firm. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 78(2), 231-243. (open access version) (read a summary in our blog post)

For example it can be witnessed that many successful innovations have emerged not only by the creative push of an innovator, but through the continuous challenge from an opponent. The opponent might for example identify technical flaws or expresses his concerns about the customer value.

In successful companies these interactions are frequent and constructive. Steve Jobs of Apple has been known to act himself as the opponent, interacting frequently with his product development teams to push them through iterative cycles of feature extensions and product enhancement.

These and other micro processes can be expected to be crucial for the innovation performance and we are well advised to fine tune our innovation management practices to support, rather than prevent, these micro processes.

Papers and practitioner presentations can be submitted to the following tracks:

• Action for Innovation (Conference Focus Theme)
• Collaboration for Innovation (incl. Open Innovation)
• Creativity & Idea Generation
• Entrepreneurship, Business Models & Financing Innovation
• Innovation Training, Education & Learning
• Methods, Tools & Measurement for innovation
• Networks & Clusters of Innovation
• Sustainability in Innovation

Submission deadlines are:

• Outlines: 31 December 2011
• Full papers: 4 May 2012

For more details visit ISPIM’s Call for Papers. For information on other interesting conferences visit our Calls for Papers page.

1. Anne-Wil Harzing publishes not only an overview of various journal rankings, but has also created a nice tool, which allows to analyze the citation data of Google Scholar for individual scholars and journals*.
2. The ranking of the German Business Newspaper “Handelsblatt” is one of the most comprehensive rankings around.
3. For a more selective list the Financial Times ranking is also very useful.
4. Another comprehensive list comes from our French colleagues.
5. Scholars interested in a perspective from the southern hemisphere, might also find the Australian journal ranking useful.
6. Scholars working in Germany, Austria or Switzerland should also check the ranking by the professional association of university teachers in business education (VHB).

* Anne-Wil has also written a nice book: The Publish or Perish Book: Your Guide to Effective and Responsible Citation Analysis

We will also keep that list updated as a permanent page.

Based on a literature review we identify three groups of potential value creations:

• Trigger organizational responses, including identifying relevant external change, start new innovation initiatives and challenge innovation development to ensure state-of-the-art
• Start and facilitate strategic discussions to enable strategic change, including challenge and change existing mental models, moderate strategic discussions, promote participation and support breaking away from path dependency
• Identify and support acquisition of needed strategic resources, including identify resources, decide on development of acquisition

Within our case studies we find evidence for activities that have led to these impacts. We can thus link specific corporate-foresight to our value creation groups. We find that:

• Consumer scouting activities have triggered innovation initiatives
• Future business workshops that included scenario analysis and roadmapping have led to the development of a new business
• Technology scouting activities have led to the acquisition of new key technologies and to the creation of start-up companies

By cross-case analysis we identified also four success criteria:

• Design the foresight activity on the basis of committed individuals, putting particular emphasis on using mutually valuable exchange relationships such as in the scouting network where all four actors profit from the activity
• Ensure a high level of communication and participation such as in the case of the consumer-scouting activity
• Use methods that allow for modeling and interpreting of the system of influencing factors (such as the scenario technique), rather than rely on methods that build on linear cause-effect relationships
• Experiment with methods and processes until you have found a practice that works for your company and takes into account the special requirements in your context

Full reference of the article: Rohrbeck, R. 2011 Exploring the Value Creation from Corporate-Foresight Activities, Futures, forthcoming.

For anyone who would like to get an overview of academic work on foresight there is a last minute opportunity.From 24-26 August foresight researchers from Europe the US and Australia will meet for a conference in Istanbul. I have just recently looked at the program which now shows a great line-up of researchers and interesting presentation.

Unfortunately I will not be able to make it this time, but maybe you can.