Strategic Foresight

Accelerating Technological Change

Sarah Lai-Yin Cheah, Sarah Lai-Yin Cheah

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110672923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Strategic foresight is discipline that organizations adopt to gather, interpret, manage information about the future environment they plan to operate in. This book introduces the concept of strategic foresight and advocates a holistic and systemic foresight approach comprising five phases that are suitable for organizations in the public and private sectors. Using real?life cases as practical examples, the book demonstrates how organizations can apply a range of foresight methods and resources across the phases from intelligence to implementation.

The book offers an opportunity to learn by all key stakeholders. It enhances the understanding of the National Research Organization's Foresight exercise (as the complex social phenomenon) in its context. The case study of the National Research Organisation provides lessons and insights that can improve both the theoretical and practical implementation of the Foresight Exercise.
Dr Mlungisi Cele
Acting Head: National Advisory Council on Innovation
Department of Science and Technology, Republic of South Africa

Foresight methodologies have been widely spreading among business and research organizations worldwide during the last decades. The weakest point of many forward-looking activities so far was the lack of their practical use. The books shows, on a number of cases, how a Foresight study, being wisely designed and implemented, can become a useful navigation tool for increasing competitiveness in the fast changing environment.
Dr Alexander Sokolov
Professor, HSE National Research University, Russia
Director, Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge / International Research and Educational Foresight Centre

Very useful tool to describe how organizations assess the future and formulate strategic plans using a systemic foresight methodology
Ibon Zugasti
Managing Director in PROSPEKTIKER and Chair of the Millennium Project Node in Spain

A comprehensive source of knowledge on complex issues of technology foresight process, from conception to commercialization of key technologies, made easy to understand and useful for aspiring futurists seeking to learn more about the matters at hand.
Dr Surachai Sathitkunarat
Executive Director, APEC Center for Technology Foresight (APEC CTF)
Assistant to the President
Office of National Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation Policy Council (NXPO)
Thailand

This book provides a very good coverage of the end-to-end methodology for technology-based innovation through the use of diverse and relevant business use cases. Very often, books on this theme only expound the approaches. Sarah goes beyond in sharing the pitfalls and challenges during the different stages of the systemic foresight methodology so that readers can learn and avoid the mistakes that other companies made. The emphasis on open innovation and intellectual property management is valuable as many organizations fail to deliver the vision due to insufficient attention on these two aspects. A must read if you wish to master strategic foresight.
Dr Terence Hung
Chief, Future Intelligence Technologies
Rolls-Royce Singapore Pte Ltd

Why do people want to know the future? People want to use budget efficiently or don't want to waste time? Aside from those who see the future, like fortune tellers, how do we make the future? Foresight is known as a method of creating the future in a way that many people has been using. So how is it different between Forecast and Foresight? This book will help answer that.
Dr Kuniko Urashima
Deputy Director of Foresight Center
National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), Japan

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1 Introduction

Sarah Cheah

As companies and organizations are forced to transform in response to social, technological, economic and political changes, it is important for business leaders and managers to acquire knowledge and skills in foresight methods to competitively identify new opportunities and set an appropriate direction for the mid- to long-term time horizon. Their ability to interpret weak signals and anticipate future trends in technology and market are critical in preparing the organization for the new uncertainty ahead. Success and advantage go to those who are best at deducing the forces acting on their sector, and who are best at anticipating and adapting to avoid threats and act on opportunities.

Strategic foresight is discipline that organizations should adopt to gather, interpret and manage information about the future environment they plan to operate in. This book introduces the concept of strategic foresight and advocates a holistic and systemic foresight methodology (SFM) that is suitable for organizations in the public and private sectors. The SFM approach comprises six phases: intelligence, imagination, integration, interpretation, intervention and impact. Using real-life cases as practical examples, the book demonstrates how organizations can apply a range of foresight methods and resources across the first five phases to (a) perform horizon scanning for market insight and technology forecast in the intelligence phase, (b) develop scenarios in the imagination phase, (c) leverage expert networks to analyze investment priorities in the integration phase, (d) generate roadmaps in the interpretation phase, and (e) formulate R&D plans and commercialization strategy in the intervention phase.

This book aims to provide overview of the SFM to enable organizations to identify critical technologies and new opportunities for long-term growth. It articulates the importance of strategic foresight and its contribution to an organization’s success. The authors explain lucidly the strategies that can assist in a complex business environment and introduce tools to help address future scenarios. Robust and proven strategies are discussed with case studies, allowing the readers to gain a better insight into how the strategies can be implemented pragmatically. The authors not only trace the journey of organizations in conducting foresight through the various phases to flesh out real-life issues, but also introduce the latest management thinking and tools on foresight in strategic business decision.

This book is organized into eight chapters, with the first chapter on introduction. The second chapter provides an overview of SFM. The remaining five chapters cover one case each using a storytelling approach, before ending with recommended readings on the relevant foresight method and conceptual frameworks, as well as proposed review and discussion questions for readers to enable deeper analysis. In the final chapter, the book is concluded with several themes and implications distilled from the cases.

The Chapter 2 on Systemic Foresight Methodology in Action by Ozcan Saritas and Sarah Cheah provides an introduction to strategic foresight. It gives an overview of the discipline as well as the emergence and development of SFM. It introduces the current conceptual frameworks of SFM. Rather than focusing on a particular method, the SFM recognizes the need for a collection of complementary methods that organizations can use to guide them through its six phases. This chapter will provide an overview of the various tools and techniques that business leaders and managers may adopt in each phase. In the first phase of intelligence, methods such as horizon scanning, social network analysis, knowledge/research maps, literature review, text/data mining and patent analysis have been adopted by the public and private sector organizations. These methods provide the basic input to the next phase of imagination phase, where one or more of the following tools may be employed: scenario stories, gaming, visioning, agent-based modeling, scenario modeling and system dynamics. During the imagination phase, creative generation of ideas and information about the future takes place. These have to be then analyzed and assessed for their relative risks and benefits in the third phase of integration, where the typical techniques comprise backcasting, Delphi survey, multi-criteria analysis, risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. Following the decision on the most desirable and preferable future, the interpretation phase aims to connect this future with the present and sets out agenda and strategies for action, employing methods ranging from roadmapping and strategic planning to logic framework and linear programming. The strategic plans generated will be used as input in the next phase of intervention to create and impact policies and action plans using processes such as customer discovery and quality function deployment. In the final impact phase, it is important to review and evaluate the impact contributed by the output of the preceding phases using methods such as interviews and surveys on impacted stakeholders to gather new knowledge and gain insight that can be provided as feedback learning into the start of the next SFM cycle.

The Chapter 3 on Market Insight: Horizon Scanning of Service Robotics Landscape by Sarah Cheah is the first of a five-case series depicting the SFM that organizations generally use to gather information about future scenarios of their operating environment and formulating long-term strategies to address them. The case focuses on the first phase of intelligence, where the National Robotics Program (NRP) Office of Singapore applied the foresight technique of horizon scanning to identify market drivers, key business sectors and applications in service robotics for the country. The research team has just completed a horizon scanning study that identified two domains – healthcare and environment – as possible targets to deploy robotics technological solutions. The suitability of the technologies to be funded would be evaluated in three aspects: (a) ability to meet national needs, (b) ability to solve manpower shortage and (c) ability to address aging population issues.

The Chapter 4 on Technology Insight: Literature Review and Patent Analysis of Service Robot Research by Sarah Cheah is the second of the SFM case series that illustrates how organizations identify key technologies that are critical to organizational success. The case focuses on the first phase of SFM – intelligence phase – where the NRP has applied the foresight techniques of literature review and patent analysis to conduct technology insight. Patent data would provide valuable technical information that could be used to plot the growth trajectory of technologies over time. One of the areas that had kept the team busy was the Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robots (MSRR) research project that had seen the spin-off of LionsBot International Pte Ltd. The young company aimed to incorporate MSRR technology to provide cleaning robots as a service for commercial, industrial and public spaces in Singapore by 2019. While the team was heartened by the interest in LionsBot’s cleaning robots among local cleaning companies, they wondered if the value of underlying MSRR technology could be further enhanced by the young company’s organic growth or its collaboration with a strong player in the related technology domain.

The Chapter 5 on Assessing Future Impact: Developing Scenario Stories by Sarah Cheah is the third of the five-case SFM series depicting the imagination phase where organizations imagine scenarios of their future operating environment with the view to identifying and developing capabilities to leverage opportunities presented in the scenarios. In 2017, the NRP held a series of workshops with the scientific and business community. These inter-disciplinary workshops aimed to encourage participation from diverse industries to articulate their perception of possible futures with soft robotics in society, communicate their visions of tomorrow as a form of storytelling, and develop them into narrative scenarios. The scenario stories served to promote awareness of future societal trends and disseminate knowledge about robotic technologies and their socio-economic impact, with the view to increasing social acceptance of future robotics deployment across the industries. From the workshop sessions, several narratives had emerged. In the healthcare domain, scenario stories revolved around assistive and surgical devices, as well as wearables for possible deployment in the near future. The mental pictures articulated by the participants for the industrial inspection domain dwelled on flexible structures like snake robots that could conduct an inspection in highly complex mechanical systems. Drawing upon these scenario stories as inspiration, the team began to make plans to develop future robotics R&D and commercialization roadmap for various industries.

The Chapter 6 on Technology Management: Building and Validating Roadmaps by Sarah Cheah is the fourth of the five-case series depicting the integration and interpretation phases. The integration phase focuses on analyzing and prioritizing investment options using techniques such as Delphi that generates consensus on priorities among experts. The interpretation phase develops strategy using methods such as roadmapping. Having completed the earlier three phases of SFM, the NRP team had generated technology/R&D roadmaps in three key areas: (a) robotic end-effectors with integrated perception (or gripper robotics), (b) autonomous vehicles with sensor fusion and (c) on-chip Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system for autonomous robotics. Building on these technology/R&D roadmaps, integrated roadmaps were also developed for two target domains: healthcare and environment. The project team went on to validate these roadmaps through a Delphi survey involving 70 industry and technology experts. The survey had several findings. First, in line with expectations, autonomous vehicles were found to have the greatest impact for social and citizen well-being, while LiDAR and gripper robotics had a great impact for industry and economic growth. Second, as the team had postulated, Singapore’s strongest competence in gripper robotics, LiDAR and autonomous vehicles was evident in its availability of funding, infrastructure and design/engineering know-how, respectively. Third, LiDAR and autonomous vehicles were found to have similar forecasted realization as anticipated due to their complementarity with each other. However, widespread use for gripper robotics was projected to take a longer time than that of LiDAR and autonomous vehicles, which went counter to the NRP team’s understanding that the latter would take a longer time due to the more stringent safety regulations imposed by the local land transport authority.

The Chapter 7 on Commercialization Strategy with Quality Function Deployment by Sarah Cheah and Saiteja Pattalachinti is the last of the five-case series depicting the final SFM phase, intervention phase, where organizations develop R&D plans and commercialization pathways to create and capture future value. The NRP was presented with a project that involved the development of end-effector technology integrated with computer vision. End-effectors or grippers referred to the last link of a robot that was designed to interact with the environment, such as picking and placing objects at specific locations. They were mainly used for industrial purposes to pick and place standard-sized objects in a controlled environment. They were also used to perform precision surgeries as part of surgical robots. With advances in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), tactile sensing, machine learning and computer vision, the functions of a gripper could be significantly enhanced by incorporating them to guide its grasping strategy. The gripper technology with computer vision would stand out in a market flooded with grippers that could only handle pre-determined standard-sized objects that lacked flexibility and sensing ability to work in a complex environment. The NRP team had to choose a commercialization pathway that would be the best option for the gripper technology with computer vision.

In conclusion, through the real-life cases, this book highlights the challenges of conducting foresight in various stages, the range of foresight tools and resources available to formulate strategies to address the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the future operating environment. This book aims to become a milestone in furthering the concepts of foresight and strategic management.

2 Systemic Foresight Methodology in Action

Ozcan Saritas

Na1onal Research University, Higher School of Economics, Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies, 11, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, Russia

Sarah Cheah

National University of Singapore, Business School, 15, Kent Ridge Drive, Singapoer

Note: The contributions by Dr. Ozcan Saritas in this publication were supported within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and were funded within the framework of the subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program.

The emergence and development of SFM

Background

Recent decades have witnessed increasing complexities in societies. The world has got better for some. However, the vast majority still suffers from social and economic instability and hostility due to limited access to food, energy and water, economic recession, climate change, conflicts, and respective migration. The new global context suggests a more interconnected and interdependent world with increased flow of finance and investment as well as information and human connectivity. This transformation is accelerated by rapid technological progress in areas such as information and communication technologies (ICTs), artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, bio- and nano-technologies, and advanced production technologies among the others. The new ICT enabled and networked societal demands of inclusiveness and equity through freedom of association and expression with full protection of human rights. There is now an emerging need for new international regulations and standards to govern trade, quality, labor, environment and intellectual property rights (Saritas, 2010a), and novel ways of thinking about the future in a more complex and uncertain world.

Institutional foresight has been evolving since the early 1950s. The practice of foresight has evolved since then with the changing world situations as well as the development of the foresight theory itself in response to those changes (Saritas, 2013). One of the widely accepted definitions of foresight still remains valid to a large extent: “a systematic, participatory, future intelligence-gathering and medium- to long-term vision building process aimed at enabling present-day decisions and mobilizing joint action” (Miles and Keenan, 2002). However, due to the aforementioned transformations in the global context and technological advancements, new and more systemic approaches are required. Observing this necessity, the systemic foresight methodology (SFM) has been developed as a response to increasing complexity and uncertainty of the future, with the aim of proposing a conceptual framework for designing and implementing foresight activities. The key premises of the SFM are established on the concept of systems thinking (Saritas, 2006). The SFM considers situations by recognizing the interconnections and interdependencies between different events, actors and processes. The holistic view of the events suggests that political, economic, social, technological, ecological and legal (PESTEL) systems co-exist and are inter-linked in cascaded systems of governance from global to international, national to regional, and sectoral to thematic levels. Actors within these systems are networked with each other, and their systemic and synchronized action is needed to achieve any successful change process while meeting the expectations of the stakeholders with power, urgency and legitimacy.

This chapter aims at giving a brief description of SFM with a stocktaking of earlier work, which led to the development and further advancement of the SFM methodology process. Examples of practice are given with case studies, and future prospects for the development of SFM are discussed with new and emerging techno...