Benchmarking Report: Strategic Foresight in Multinational Companies

Abstract:     
The results of this study indicate that companies have built strong capabilities for collecting information. However, their ability to interpret information, disseminate gained insights and trigger management reactions leaves room for improvement: Only 23% of the participants state that SF insights are rapidly diffused, which implies that future insights might not reach relevant decision-makers. Only 54% of the analyzed companies choose methods deliberately. This indicates that 46% of companies take the risk of having inadequate method portfolios, endangering their ability to interpret information. Only 28% of companies regularly challenge basic assumption, implying a low level of alertness towards discontinuous change. The comparison of top performing companies with all participating companies shows that top performers invest significantly more resources in gathering data from restricted sources, utilize more qualitative methods, and more often select methods deliberately. Furthermore, top performing companies engage in more bottom-up triggered foresight activities, which should raise the overall level of alertness as well as their scanning reach and scope. Compared to findings from previous studies a continuing enhancement of corporate foresight systems can be attested. However, towards the ubiquitous installment of systems that allow systematically detecting discontinuous change and triggering appropriate actions, there is still a long way to go.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 38

Keywords: corporate foresight, strategic foresight, maturity model, benchmarking

JEL Classification: E17, M1, M19

working papers series