Value Contribution of Strategic Foresight Methods for Market-Related Corporate Decisions

Strategic foresight aims at creating a competitive advantage by identifying trends and understanding their impact on the company, its industry, and the wider environment ahead of the competition in order to prioritize certain actions at an early stage.  Due to the high uncertainty and high rates of change in today's business environment, strategic foresight is an important trend in business strategy.

While previous research suggests that there is a positive impact of foresight on the success of companies. However, the question of how foresight needs to be concretely organized in companies and integrated into decision-making processes in order to actually create added value for decision-makers – for example, in the area of new product development or marketing – is still largely unanswered by research.

The aim of the joint research project between NIM and the Bavarian Foresight Institute is therefore to gain insights into how strategic foresight can be used in companies to make better decisions in markets. In order to identify success factors for value creation through foresight, we need to determine what current practice looks like and what role foresight plays in decision-making processes.

To answer these questions, two empirical studies were conducted in parallel in December 2022:

1. A qualitative interview study with n=24 participants. For the qualitative study, a semi-structured interview guide was created, which was used to interview experts.
2. A quantitative CATI study with n=400 participants. For the quantitative survey, a questionnaire was developed which already provides answer options and therefore determines the statistical analysis of the generated data.

The two studies targeted both corporate foresight specialists and corporate foresight users (marketing, product development, innovation, and business development decision makers) in companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list of the world’s largest companies from the following four industries, representing both more long-term (lt) and more short-term (st) business environments: Finance and Insurance (lt), Automotive (lt), Retail (st), and Food and Agriculture (st). The studies cover the U.S. and the EU, including the U.K. and Switzerland.