Inter-organizational collaboration for foresight

coverCreating insights into the future is an demanding task. But from a corporate perspective early understanding of potential change can also yield many benefits, including being the first mover in a new market and being able to demand premium prices, capture a high market share and establishing a dominant position in the emerging market.

To increase the ability to make reliable predictions about trajectories of emerging markets it might be a good idea to talk to your neighbours or to people you know who might have a different perspective. Following this logic firms have started to collaborate on joint foresight capabilities. In our research we came across three different ways:

  • executive circles where typically the CEO meets with other CEOs to identify and discuss changes in the environment
  • joint foresight, where typically firms have a buyers-suppliers relationship or are connected through their scout networks
  • multi-organizational foresight circles that combine companies from different industries to discuss emerging change from different perspectives

The first two examples we discuss in our article  “Opening up for competitive advantage – How Deutsche Telekom creates an open innovation ecosystem” (you can access the article as an open pre-print version or as the  final article published in R&D Management). If you are more the visual type, you can also access a presentation given at the OECD.

The example of multi-organizational foresight projects is discussed in our book and illustrated below, from the perspective of one firm.

collaborating for corporate foresightWe are looking forward to your views on the feasibility and good practices of collaborative foresight projects.

One Response to “Inter-organizational collaboration for foresight”

  1. Are corporate foresight and open innovation related concepts? | Organizational Future Orientation

    […] of Deutsche Telekom, we found that looking into the future, sometimes takes the form of a collaborative foresight exercise. You will see in our presentation below that Deutsche Telekom engages in foresight workshops with […]

Comments are closed.