Conference on strategic foresight for the financial industry, Luxembourg, 19-21 September 2012

Posted on March 18th, 2012 by René Rohrbeck

From 19-21 September 2012, Luxembourg will the venue for the 2nd edition of the ISPIM Summit for Innovation in the Financial Services.

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.

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How to systematically explore new business fields?

Posted on February 10th, 2012 by René Rohrbeck

In a recent article we report on a strategic foresight project where we worked with multiple companies to explore a new business field. Below you find a short presentation which illustrates our approach.

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.

Strategic Foresight for Collaborative Exploration of New Business Fields

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)

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Conference on Strategic Foresight, Strategic Agility, and Future Orientation, 17-20 June 2012, Barcelona, Spain

Posted on January 16th, 2012 by René Rohrbeck

While we have been running our own conferences independently in the past, we have now decided to team up with ISPIM to invite a broader audience. Within the next ISPIM Conferences and Symposium we will have our own Special Interest Group meetings and run a track dedicated to:

  • 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!

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WikiProject “Futures studies”

Posted on January 15th, 2012 by René Rohrbeck

Recently Wikipedia has launched a new initiative to provide a framework for improvement and organization of future-related articles.

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.

Posted in Theory | Leave a comment

British Academy of Management conference with dedicated strategic foresight track

Posted on January 3rd, 2012 by René Rohrbeck

Following a good tradition the British Academy of Management will run in this year’s conference again a dedicated strategic foresight track. The growing community has also already produced the nice “Handbook of Research on Strategy and Foresight“.

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!

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