Futures studies

About: Futures studies is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2996 publications have been published within this topic receiving 49505 citations. The topic is also known as: futurology & futurism.

Effective Management Performance A Competency-Based Perspective

Abstract: of thought in futures studies and major business forecasts in order to highlight the key areas of change in business environment and management. A survey questionnaire was designed and administered to determine the perceptions of managers about managerial competencies and effective managerial performance. The findings revealed that managers’ performance in the coming decade is primarily measured against the quality of their relationships with customers, followed by communication, team-building, goal accomplishment competencies. Effective management performance is essentially linked to managers’ ability to manage relationships, processes and time.

Into Blue Skies—a Transdisciplinary Foresight and Co-creation Method for Adding Robustness to Visioneering

Abstract: Expectations play a distinctive role in shaping emerging technologies and producing hype cycles when a technology is adopted or fails on the market. To harness expectations, facilitate and provoke forward-looking discussions, and identify policy alternatives, futures studies are required. Here, expert anticipation of possible or probable future developments becomes extremely arbitrary beyond short-term prediction, and the results of futures studies are often controversial, divergent, or even contradictory; thus they are contested. Nevertheless, such socio-technical imaginaries may prescribe a future that seems attainable to those involved in the visioneering process, and other futures may thus become less likely and shaping them could become more difficult. This implies a need to broaden the debate on socio-technological development, creating spaces where policy, science, and society can become mutually responsive to each other. Laypeople’s experiential and value-based knowledge is highly relevant for complementing expertise to inform socially robust decision-making in science and technology. This paper presents the evolution of a transdisciplinary, forward-looking co-creation process—a demand-side approach developed to strengthen needs-driven research and innovation governance by cross-linking knowledge of laypeople, experts, and stakeholders. Three case studies serve as examples. We argue that this approach can be considered a method for adding social robustness to visioneering and to responsible socio-technical change.

Corporate Foresight in Multinational Business Strategies

Abstract: The paper explores corporate foresight as a new important tool within the strategic management system of multinational corporations (MNCs). The author directly connects the recent rise of corporate foresight with MNCs’ growing need to fill the gaps in traditional corporate strategic management, which struggles with the challenges of today’s global turbulent business-environment (known as VUCA world characterised by unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). From this perspective, corporate foresight is capable of providing a number of viable responses. They include the significant expansion of the horizon of MNCs’ long-term future vision, enhanced capabilities of business-environment scanning (identifying not only clearly visible trends but the so-called weak signals as well) and strengthening intra-firm communications over the course of the strategy development process, thus contributing to the implementation capacity of multinational corporate team. Within the analysis of the actual corporate foresight practices of major multinationals, special attention is paid to the common features of foresight organization (standard process phases, the typical set of methods used) and peculiarities related mainly to different MNCs’ sector-specific environment characteristics, including the complexity and dynamics of change. An attempt is also made to describe the actual impact of corporate foresight activities on the effectiveness of the key functions of MNCs’ strategic management. The author draws the conclusion that corporate foresight is becoming a core element of the strategic management architecture of multinational businesses, striving to protect and strengthen its global market positioning in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable environment. For MNCs’ top management, trying to find the right strategic course in a radically changing competitive landscape, this powerful tool is increasingly playing the same role as a GPS navigator for car drivers lost in an unfamiliar city.