Strategic foresight (PDF)

Occupying analogous intellectual space with concepts such as long range planning, strategic planning, and strategic thinking, strategic foresight has come to dominate contemporary management discourse on the creation and capture of sustainable value in complex and fast moving environments. Theorized as an organizing capability that enable firms to transcend established boundaries to capture opportunities otherwise glossed over by competitors, the topic of strategic foresight has attracted considerable academic interest in the few past decade. A growing body of evidence now suggests that strategic foresight could lead to durable organizational outcomes such as adaptive learning, ambidexterity, and innovation. Another interesting line of research indicates that strategic foresight can equip organizations to identify and mitigate the triggers of declining performance. Nevertheless, the philosophical, theoretical and empirical specifications on the management and cultivation of strategic foresight as an organizing capability remain sparse. At best, the existing literature has suggested two opposite perspectives on the cultivation of strategic foresight. First, conceptualizing managers as the locus of strategic foresight, some scholars suggest that the cultivation of foresight requires firms to episodically organize ultra-rational corporate futures exercises. This view is supported by the proliferation of corporate foresight exercises and multifarious methodologies such as scenario planning, Delphi, environmental scanning etc. Others in contrast, have highlighted the distributed nature of strategic foresight and the contingent role of 'ordinary' organizational members in the cultivation of strategic foresight by emphasizing everyday organizing practices, routines, and activities as the site of emergence of strategic foresight. The purpose of this eBook, therefore, is to explore the antecedents, logics and organizing dimensions of strategic foresight and how it could be managed and leveraged be firms embedded in fast moving environments, in different industries, and located in different geographic regions. Authors discuss topics such as strategic foresight in a new perspective, enacting a new approach to scenario analysis, strategic foresight in a changing world, state-of-the-art strategic foresight and prospects for Russian corporations, a case study from the chemical industry using scenarios in multinational companies across geographic distance, policy, planning, intelligence and foresight in government organizations, the influence of organizational routines on strategic foresight, and what we can learn from failed international companies.