As Innovation Changes, So Must Foresight

A capability for foresight improves innovation. It allows companies to anticipate new consumer needs, evaluate market shifts to deliver new value in new ways, and to recognize when market assumptions are wrong and projects must pivot. A recent study by the University or Aarhus found that companies with a strong foresight capability have a 200 percent higher growth rate than average (Rohrbeck 2018). As companies migrate to open, customer-focused innovation and making innovation part of everyone’s job description, they are training more of their employees on the techniques of foresight to enhance their ability to make innovation decisions in flatter, more decentralized organizations. The instinct of foresight is a defining human ability. We take action—or do not—after our brains imagine different alternatives and choose actions to maximize outcomes for us or our communities. As the complexity of human societies has increased throughout history, this ability has become more difficult. The level of uncertainty introduced by so many different influences on our local environment has outstripped our native foresight capabilities. The rise of scenario planning in the 1950s in the United States and within corporations in Europe in the late 1960s acknowledged the need to augment our instincts with social and technological innovation. However, access to the knowledge of foresight business processes and technologies for forecasting has been limited primarily to specific roles inside corporate and government spheres. With innovation expanding across the enterprise, foresight techniques must migrate out of the siloes of corporate strategy and R&D. But just as innovation has radically changed over the last decade, foresight tools must also adapt to the faster, iterative business processes establishing the cadence of growth and change inside companies. Initial foresight for companies was famously adopted by Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1960s and involved studies that encompassed the world, hundreds of remarkable people around the world, an internal analysis team, and three years of work to develop scenarios to inform the company’s strategy (de Geus 1997). These types of investments in foresight are still needed for companies that need to establish a shared global point of view of the future across their executives and are equally important to establish portfolios for longer-term innovation in R&D. However, generally companies today are looking for insights about the future to inform innovation and strategy projects that are moving much more quickly. This poses two challenges for modern foresight applications for innovation. First, more people in the organization need to be acquainted with the tools and perspective of the craft. Second, the craft must evolve to meet the pace, scale, and scope of innovation needs today. There will always be a role for the experienced foresight practitioner. Expecting internal employees tasked with innovation to have the experience and education in foresight that professionals bring is not realistic. Many professional futurists now have advanced degrees in foresight that expose them to a broad range of research methods and applications. Most foresight practitioners have significant experience learning and applying the tools of the craft across disciplines and industries. Even after extensive training, companies cannot expect foresight to become something their innovation workers can do completely unassisted. Foresight professionals can adapt and customize approaches to meet the needs of the project while avoiding the common traps and mistakes those less experienced often fall into. Traps and mistakes include trusting quantitative models without questioning the assumptions about the future used to create them; making scenarios without the input of leadership and subsequently trying to “sell” futures to them that challenge their existing experience about the market; and treating foresight as a project not a process, so that assumptions used to create insights are not continually monitored with the understanding that the future is always changing and prediction is impossible. Foresight is too important to leave exclusively to those who know and use it on a part-time basis as part of a larger role in the company. However, the level of support for foresight can drop DOI: 10.1080/08956308.2023.2141048 Christian Crews has more than 20 years of experience applying foresight to innovation and strategy for large corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. He designed and implemented the IRI2038 project for IRI in 2012– 2013 and is a leading practitioner and innovator in scenario planning methods. Christian is the head of Wavepoint and a founding member and previous board member of the Association of Professional Futurists. He holds an MS in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston–Clear Lake and a BA in English from the College of William and Mary. crews@wavepoint.net