This study investigates the relationships between corporate foresight and management decision-making processes in organizations. It provides an extensive analysis of extant theories of corporate foresight and strategic management, brings in new insights, and presents an in-depth case study exploration of corporate foresight of a European bank.

In increasingly competitive, complex and volatile environments, the urge to fully understand the future and to thereby deduce insights for strategic processes has - over the past decades - always been of great interest to academics and practitioners. Corporate foresight related research has, however, provided only limited insight to date. The following thesis is based upon a trichotomous analytical framework which scrutinises corporate foresight and its impact on strategic decisions in order to investigate how managers, organisations and the environment influence the phenomenon and its manifestations. The intermediary concept of judgement thereby intends to explain how corporate foresight results can possibly be integrated into strategic decision-making processes. The research data is collected via formal and informal interviews, document analyses and observations within a European bank consisting of multiple business units and segments. The findings reveal that corporate foresight manifests itself in numerous forms and locations. Moreover, it was ascertained that manifold influences from both the internal and external environment affect corporate foresight and its impact on strategic decisions. Further findings additionally illustrate that future perceptions occur in a more quantitative fashion in a banking context. This study finally suggests that the integration of corporate foresight into strategic decisions is not only specified by the phenomenon's manifestation, but also by strategic decision-makers' judgements regarding corporate foresight itself.

The world changes like the patterns in a kaleidoscope: trends expand, contract, break up, melt, disintegrate and disappear, while others are formed. Change – as opposed to stasis – is our normal condition, the only certainty in our lives, hence the need to create tools that provide organizations with the means to tackle change and navigate complexity. We must accept the reality of constant change and be prepared for a heavy shift in perspective: interconnection versus separation, acceleration versus linearity and discontinuity versus continuity. Anticipating the future requires more than the traditional predictive models (forecasting) based on the forward projection of past experiences. Advanced methods use anticipation logic (foresight) and build probable scenarios taking into account weak signals, emerging trends, coexisting presents and potential paths of evolution. Corporate foresight is fundamental to interpret and lead change. The two cornerstones of foresight are organization and management. As concerns organization, the authors advocate the separation of research (oriented to the market of tomorrow) from development (oriented to the market of today), the establishment of a foresight unit and the concentration of research activities mainly on the acquisition and recombination of external know-how. As regards management, after an overview of state-of-the-art literature on forecasting methods, the authors propose the implementation of a "future coverage" methodology, which enables companies to measure and verify the consistency between trends, strategic vision and offered products. These organizational and managing tools are then tested in a case study: the Italian company Eurotech SpA, a leader in the ICT sector.

Have you ever wondered why even large companies fail when faced with changes in their environment? Would you be surprised to learn that the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company is below 50 years? This book presents findings from 19 case studies in multinational companies such as Siemens, Volkwagen, General Electric, Philips and Deutsche Telekom. René Rohrbeck proposes a Maturity Model to assess how prepared a company is to respond to external (disruptive) change. He uses data from 107 interviews with board members, corporate strategists, innovation managers, and corporate foresight professionals to present and discuss best practices. Using illustrations to show the complex interaction of corporate foresight with other units such as innovation and strategic management, René Rohrbeck provides the reader with rich insights on how to make an organization agile and reactive towards change. For scholars this book proposes multiple hypotheses and frameworks for future research.

This study investigates the relationships between corporate foresight and management decision-making processes in organizations. It provides an extensive analysis of extant theories of corporate foresight and strategic management, brings in new insights, and presents an in-depth case study exploration of corporate foresight of a European bank.

This is a practical (field) guide to foresight and foresight tools for leaders in business, the public sector and NGOs, to aid their practice in strategy, decision making and change.