If you are a PhD researcher on foresight, you should reserve the 17-21 September 2012 in your calendar!

In September we will run a course entirely focused on foresight in the beautiful city of Copenhagen. The course is organized by the Danish Technical University in collaboration with the Aarhus University.

Content

In the course we will cover foresight from multiple angles:

• Foresight methods
• Long waves in technology & the economy, expectations & visions, trends & megatrends
• Foresight in practice – reflections on two cases
• Foresight in science, technology and innovation policy
• Foresight in firms
• Design of foresight exercises
• Facilitating experts and trans-disciplinarity in foresight exercises
• System definition, mapping and scanning
• Delphi, scenarios and strategic roadmapping

How to apply

The application should be emailed to the course’s secretary Jette Gents (jege@dtu.dk) and should include (max 1 page):

• Name and contact information
• Institutional affiliation
• Brief description of the PhD project. The project description must include project title and description of the project’s subject including theoretical-analytical approach, empirical focus and which foresight elements are considered for inclusion in the project.

More information

For more information you can contact Per Dannemand Andersen, (+45) 4525 4535, pean@dtu.dk or me and also download the full course outline here.

We hope to see many of you in Copenhagen in September!

The goal of this special issue is to explore how future orientation can be build by

• enhancing corporate planning to make the firm better capable to deal with fast-emerging issues and multiple possible futures
• abandon mid and long-range planning altogether and build resilience and strategic flexibility through structural means.

To discuss contributions ahead of the formal review process and to facilitate exchange between authors we organize special tracks within the next ISPIM events:

• ISPIM Annual Conference 2012, 17-20 June 2012, Barcelona, Spain, http://conference.ispim.org
• ISPIM Innovation for Financial Service Summit, 19-21 September 2012, Luxembourg, http://luxsummit.ispim.org/
• ISPIM Symposium 2012, 9-12 December 2012, Seoul, Korea, http://symposium.ispim.org
• ISPIM Annual Conference 2013, June 2013

In addition you can also submit idea outlines to submissions@futureorientation.net.

For more information on this special issue you can access the full call for papers here.

The Estonian capital of Tallinn and birth place of Skype will host the European Innovation Academy. From the 16-20 July 2012 the course “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” will provide a platform to learn and try out innovation management in an entrepreneurial way.

The fourth day will deal with trend and technology analysis and the role of corporate foresight in innovation creation.

For more information you can download a short presentation and visit the website.

Our graduate school at the Aarhus University offers every 6 months PhD scholarships that cover both living cost and tuition fees. To apply see more information here.

The application deadlines are

• 15 April
• 15 October

For further information you can visit the website of our graduate school or contact me.

For that purpose my colleagues Cinzia Battistella, Eelko Huizingh and I will edit a special issue on “Corporate Foresight”. We are very happy that with Technological Forecasting and Social Change, we have the leading journal in the field as our partner for that project.

We invite contributions from both practitioners and scholars. If you consider contributing you can submit working versions of your paper to our special track at the next ISPIM conferences (see our calls for papers for more details) and  submit idea outlines to submissions@futureorientation.net.

For more details you can access the full call for papers here.

During the conference we organize

• a track that will focus on what strategic foresight can do for risk management and opportunity recognition in the financial industry
• a workshop in which we will discuss the role of foresight and trend monitoring in the management of financial institutions.

The workshop will be kicked-off by a panel of 5 practitioners from both the banking and insurance industry. We will discuss on methods, tools and practices of corporate foresight as well as on an example of a foresight project. In the second part of the workshop we will split into groups to work on topics that we have chosen jointly in the first part.

To register for the conference click here.

To submit your academic or practitioner contribution, download the call for papers and submit your outline here until the 17 April 2012.

We hope that we will see many of you in Luxembourg for exciting discussions and benchmarking of foresight practices.

We combined different foresight methods into an integrated business-field-exploration approach, to gain a holistic picture and validate the business potential from different perspectives.

We used

• use cases to describe potential products and services in generic terms
• with Godet’s MACTOR analysis we evaluated if key stakeholders would be likely to form an effective value network
• through scenario analysis we explored future market configurations and identified barriers and drivers
• using target costing we assessed the financial feasibility.

We share our approach here in the hope to learn about similar projects and share lessons learned. We believe that systematic approaches to explore new business fields will become even more important in the future, as companies are increasingly forced to look for new growth areas.

Full reference to the article:

Heger, T. and R. Rohrbeck 2012 Strategic Foresight for Collaborative Exploration of New Business Fields, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 79(5), 819-831. (open access version)

• 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!