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OPEN FORESIGHT WORKSHOPS FOR OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION

Christiane Rau

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Fiona Schweitzer

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Oliver Gassmann

University of St. Gallen

The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson, as cited in The Economist, March 7, 2013

Strategic foresight is a key task of innovation management. It enables management to develop and maintain a clear understanding of current and future developments in the corporate environment. Managers can use these insights to assess the company's current innovation strategy and to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks that possible future developments may pose. While forecasting focuses on estimating and anticipating a probable future, foresight aims to identify several potential futures. Foresight allows managers to explore uncertainties and to develop action plans for alternative strategies in different future scenarios. Foresight is a learning process through which a company investigates possible future developments and prepares for them. By taking active steps toward the realization of one or another future development, a manager is, to a certain extent, even capable of influencing the future.

Chesbrough (2006, p.1) defines Open Innovation (OI) as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand the markets for external use of innovation.” Opening up foresight processes means involving an increasingly diverse set of perspectives, which can in turn enhance foresight results. Foresight processes can profit from OI approaches, because the interactive process of discussing possible futures with external sources and then planning innovation strategies based on these discussions allows innovation managers to access a broader knowledge base.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with different foresight workshop designs for collaborative opportunity identification. We focus on foresight workshops as a means of opening up the foresight processes and enabling collaborative action. Foresight workshops are workshops in which participants depict, describe, and discuss possible scenarios of the future and develop strategies to successfully navigate through these possible futures. Such workshops include scenario workshops, expert round tables, future workshops, and idea delphis. They are judgmental opportunity identification tools.

The following sections first introduce the basic procedure of foresight workshops. Second, we lay out the different stages in which a company can open up the foresight process and reasons why this pays off. Third, we discuss pitfalls that companies must avoid in order to fully seize upon the potential of open foresight processes. Fourth, we explain how to successfully plan and carry out an open foresight process. Finally, we provide closing thoughts on the use of open foresight workshops for opportunity identification.

2.1 Corporate Foresight Workshops and Processes

Workshops provide an opportunity for concentrated ideation, reflection, and interaction. They offer employees time to focus collaborative efforts on a joint topic during a concise time frame. Foresight workshops are an integral part of corporate foresight processes. They are centered on information previously gathered within corporate foresight processes. As shown in Figure 2.1, a corporate foresight workshop will typically involve four steps: (1) pre-foresight, (2) recruitment, (3) generation, and (4) integration.

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Figure 2.1: Foresight Workshops in Context

In the pre-foresight phase, the objectives and scope of the workshop are developed. Objectives can be, for instance, to identify priority areas for future inquiry or, more specifically, to develop scenarios enabled by a particular new technology. It needs to be clarified which scope the workshop targets, i.e., how many years do we strive to look into the future and how many possible “futures” do we strive to develop? The length and agenda of the workshop, the methods and tools used in the workshop, and the number of participants required depends on the object and scope. As soon as management agrees on objectives, scope, and budget, workshop organizers prepare a workshop storyboard, a detailed description including all workshop activities, required background preparation, and resources needed. This storyboard ensures a structured way of generating insights. Furthermore, organizers gather secondary information to inform participants and design a strategy to capture the discussions within the workshop. While outputs of these workshops often are important, the discussions that emerge can be particularly insightful and should be captured to inform future strategy building. Capturing strategies can range from having someone take notes to audio recordings or video recordings, whereby video recordings are most desirable.

In the recruitment phase of foresight workshops, the organizers generate a general pool of names of potential participants. In “closed” foresight workshops, this pool usually consists of employees from departments related to innovation and strategic planning (e.g., innovation management, new business development, product management, etc.). In this phase, organizers prepare a workshop brief for potential workshop participants and send it to the participants together with an invitation letter. The brief includes the objectives, scope, context, agenda, and administrative details (meeting date, time, and location) of the workshop. It can also make sense to provide information about the method applied in the workshop, as getting to know a new method can motivate certain employees to participate more eagerly in foresight workshops. When opening up foresight workshops, recruitment must change depending on the degree of openness. External participants can be recruited and external recruiters can be used to select apt participants. The different stages and its implications will be discussed in the next part of this chapter.

In the generation phase, the workshop takes place. At the beginning, moderators introduce the objectives, scope, and context of the workshop. In addition, they establish clear social rules in order to create a safe environment in which they encourage controversial opinions and provide “a license to dissent.” Regardless of the methods used in the workshop, moderators support employees by asking provoking questions to stimulate them to think beyond the most evident and comfortable future developments. Cunha and colleagues (2006) argue that foresight takes place between the need to know and the fear of knowing. Moderators strive to support participants to overcome this fear.

In the integration phase, organizers and managers need to integrate the output of the workshop into the corporate strategic planning process. Therefore, workshop organizers document the insights developed in the generation phase and present the insights to key decision makers within the organization. Furthermore, they assist in translating the output into a format that is useful for strategic planning.

2.2 Opening Up the Foresight Process

Foresight has long been a closed process, involving only a very limited number of top-level decision makers from the firm. Traditionally, internal players have been responsible for scanning the environment, gathering external and internal information, processing it into forecasts, and presenting these to top management. This procedure provides top management with information that facilitates decision making on current and new business development in general and innovation activities in particular. Many companies now are finding that opening up this process can be a worthwhile endeavor, enabling them to identify new trends and business opportunities and prevent organizational blindness.

FIVE MAIN MOTIVATIONS FOR COMPANIES TO OPEN UP THEIR FORESIGHT PROCESSES:

  1. 1. Gather diverse insights into future trends and evoke perspectives on possible opportunities (diverse insights and perspectives)
  2. 2. Sensitize employees to watch for future developments (sensitize)
  3. 3. Identify interesting partners for innovative research projects (interesting partners)
  4. 4. Detect blind spots (blind spots)
  5. 5. Create commitment, build trust, and strengthen relationships (commitment, trust and relationships)
  • Gather diverse insights into future trends and evoke perspectives on possible opportunities. A central endeavor of every foresight process is to gather insightful information on potential futures, to develop future scenarios, and to develop action plans in the event that one of the scenarios unfolds. When participants in the foresight process have very similar knowledge on and attitudes toward trends and developments, they are prone to develop monotonic scenarios. Opening up the foresight process to a higher number of participants with diverse knowledge and skills serves to make the scenarios much richer environments. Fresh new insights from external sources often challenge basic assumptions on technological development, future customer needs, and changes in the environment of the company. New insights help to create more diverse scenarios, which either stimulate or endanger current and future innovation.
  • Sensitize employees to watch for future developments. In open foresight workshops, employees can learn about the importance of weak signals. Weak signals are unstructured information that appears ahead of upcoming changes in the environment. If managers recognize weak signals, they can take advantage of the changes lying ahead, for example, by identifying new business opportunities. The experience of varying interpretations of different experts can stretch employees' imaginations on how the future of the company might develop. Moreover, the discussion of alternative views helps employees develop a tolerance for inconvenient insights; employees are challenged to look and act beyond their comfort zone. A confrontation with insights that shake the very foundations of their assumptions about the future, and the joint discussion of action plans to handle such insights, increases employees' awareness, willingness, and ability to detect and act upon weak signals in their daily jobs. These employees are then likely to inform corporate foresight processes and enable an ongoing monitoring of the environment. In addition, a sensibility for future development can also support employees in actively shaping the future.
  • Identify interesting partners for innovative research projects. The inclusion of external individuals into foresight workshops provides insights into specific areas of knowledge and interest, thought processes, and future perspectives of the external participants. In the foresight workshop, individuals reveal a great deal of information about their feelings, needs, and attitudes. If organizers invite customers as external partners, foresight workshops can thus be used to identify the latent needs of key customers. Moreover, in these workshops external partners not only enumerate and evaluate perceived trends, they also discuss possible reactions to such trends. In these discussions, the foresight team can quickly learn which topics drive different external partners and can get a better understanding of the specific areas of knowledge and skills of these partners. These insights enable the team to identify external partners who qualify as interesting partners for innovative research projects. They are apt to contribute effectively to the innovation-oriented utilization of the results of the foresight workshop.
  • For example, BASF has developed innovation networks in selected technology fields. Since they cannot be sure about the “right” technology for the future, they have systematically identified leading experts and organizations worldwide in various technological fields. Since innovation is mostly the result of communication, BASF expects to better understand the future if they stay in ongoing interaction with these leading partners. BASF has built up innovation networks with strong linkages to a range of important players in the field and has become the center of these networks.
  • Detecting blind spots. Often corporate sensors are calibrated toward current business and overlook “weak signals” in the company's environment. This internal focus results in “competitive blind spots” (Porter, 1980). Zahra and Chaples (1993) identify six particularly serious blind spots: (1) misjudging industry boundaries; (2) poor identification of the competition; (3) overemphasis on competitors' visible competence; (4) overemphasis on where, not how, rivals will compete; (5) faulty assumptions about the competition; and (6) paralysis by analysis. Management history is full of examples where blind spots in foresight lead to serious threats for a company's survival. For instance, pharmaceutical companies overlooked the threats from startup biotechnology companies until chemical firms formed strategic alliances as a reaction toward increased competition, thereby transforming the pharmaceutical industry. In a similar vein, mini-mills have over several years gained ground in the North American steel market, outsmarting traditional steel manufacturers, and have eventually captured 60 percent of the market. Traditional steel manufacturers focused on the value dimensions of their core customers and systematically underestimated the potential of the new technology. Opening up the foresight activities to externals is a promising way to detect blind spots. Externals who have a perspective beyond the traditional industry view can heavily enhance the ability to detect blind spots.
  • For example, the pharmaceutical contract manufacturer Lonza realized at one point that they would have to create more foresight and innovation in the area of cellular biology. They defined fields in cell biology in the area of manufacturing and testing, opening them up for academic cooperation. In their corporate initiative for radical innovation, the company developed “roadshows,” which they showed at leading universities in the United States and Europe in order to attract scientists as a way of enabling their innovation engine and better understanding their future trends.
  • Create commitment, build trust, and strengthen relationships. A foresight process is only successful when the results of the process materialize in appropriate corporate action. For this to happen, employees responsible for taking actions to implement the strategies derived from the foresight process need to be committed to these actions. The best way to achieve full commitment is to directly involve employees in this process. Open foresight processes involve not only employees, however, but also bring external stakeholders (suppliers, customers, shareholders) into the foresight process early on with two important results: First, stakeholders and employees jointly discuss possible futures and possible future actions in foresight workshops and this joint experience increases the likelihood that stakeholders and employees create a common vision, understand the necessity of taking certain actions, and are committed to realizing them. Second, invited stakeholders feel that their opinion is appreciated. The workshop setting intensifies personal contact between the corporation and its stakeholders and strengthens their relationship. Opening up the foresight process to a wider group of employees and external stakeholders increases trust and improves the relationship between the stakeholders involved, who might then feel that their own needs and opinions are reflected in corporate actions. In this way, open foresight workshops increase commitment and trust and ultimately contribute to the effectiveness of the foresight process.

2.3 Stages of Opening Up the Foresight Process

The identification of opportunities can take place through foresight workshops with members of a specialized internal department, or by opening up the workshop setting to integrate other departments in the process and even players outside the company.

The opportunity identification model in Figure 2.2 shows the main stages of opening up. The inner part of the circle depicts the traditional situation in which opportunity identification merely takes place within a specialized internal department. The model has a circular shape, suggesting that opening up means adding circles of actors instead of replacing others. The model consists of the following four stages of openness:

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Figure 2.2: The Four Stages of Opening Up the Foresight Process

In the following discussion, the main stages of openness are described.

Family: Integrating (Selected) Internal Experts (Stage I)

A first step in opening up is to integrate (selected) internal experts from other business units into the foresight process. Nearly everyone who has dealt with Open Innovation has heard of the famous quote by Henry W. Chesbrough: “In a world of abundant knowledge, not all smart people work for you”. While this is obviously true, a lot of smart people may indeed be willing to work with you, only you might have not yet benefited from their foresight. Striving to find fresh insights that already exist within your own company to complement the expertise found in specialized departments can be a first step toward opening up your foresight process. The benefit of integrating experts from different business units is the range of experience, perspectives, and expertise that they bring to the workshops. Apart from their expertise, these participants also bring a wide range of external input to the workshops. Consider an employee from Purchasing; by interacting regularly with suppliers, this employee might in his or her daily work routine receive insights about future developments, while an employee from Customer Service might recognize weak signals by observing customers' behavior.

People learn through participation in their professional and private communities. These communities can be formal or informal and consist of people who interact on a regular basis. Research into communities of practice shows that innovative knowledge often diffuses more easily within such communities than within the company in which this knowledge is developed. “Knowledge often travels more easily between organizations than it does within them” (Brown and Duguid, 1998, p.102). While organizational boundaries, be they between departments or constituted by hierarchy, often inhibit the free flow of knowledge. Knowledge flows more freely within communities of practice. That means, for instance, that information about a new development or scientific progress might spread very fast and quickly reach an employee in your R&D department, as they might have their own (private) network of people with similar interests, but then not diffuse quickly to other R&D employees with different interests.

Such knowledge is often tacit, and therefore not explicitly available or formally written down, but rather is a set of rules and skills that individuals implicitly develop over time and are often not consciously aware of. Tacit information that employees gather in their daily business may be difficult to retrieve for a central foresight team. Foresight workshops can present a good opportunity for central foresight departments to exchange with these employees and collect such tacit information.

As such, the challenges for companies engaged in foresight activities are twofold. First, they have to provide spaces in which knowledge of weak signals and opportunities can flow between departments more freely. Open foresight workshops provide such space for collaboratively thinking about future developments and emerging opportunities. Second, they have to identify and include those employees in the foresight activities who are part of interesting external communities of practice. To collect a variety of external inputs in foresight workshops, the organizers of the workshops have to include an appropriate mix of interdisciplinary experts who exchange with various external communities of practice.

A further central benefit of integrating internal experts in open foresight workshops is that their participation sensitizes the internals to detecting challenges and opportunities that arise in the future. In this way, employees simulate actions and environmental responses and develop a feeling about micro- and macroeconomic dependencies influencing their business.

Moreover, open foresight workshops can be used to motivate and train experts to increasingly integrate foresight activities into their daily work as a way to advance prospects. As a result, employees might be sensitized to watch for weak signals when meeting customers, talking to suppliers, or visiting trade shows or even engage in media monitoring (e.g., by watching trend websites, blogs, or subscribing to RSS feeds). For instance, the Universal Music Group organizes regular meetings in which a group of internally trained trend scouts meet and discuss their insights.

The strength of Stage I (Figure 2.3) open foresight processes is that potential participants are relatively easy to identify, motivation and trend-awareness of participants is raised, and such processes further intra-organizational information flows on trends and new business opportunities. In addition, the risk of information leaks and intellectual property issues is minimized, as such foresight processes are restricted to internal participants.

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Figure 2.3: Benefits of Stage I

In particular, three of the above-mentioned reasons speak for opening up the foresight process to internal experts: (1) provides insights and perspectives, (2) builds trust and stronger relationships, and (3) allows for sensitization.

However, a major weakness compared to the steps farther up in the open foresight hierarchy is that people within an organization often think alike and share a common “world view.” Social identification stabilizes shared cognitive frames and reinforces the individuals' bounded rationality. When accurate foresight is the aim, focusing on internal experts might be dangerous, as weak signals which are contrary to the established opinions and perspectives are often not considered sufficiently. Hence, opening up further might be advisable as a way to overcome the conformity of opinions and perspectives often prevalent in firms.

Friends

Tapping External Sources (Stage II)

From Stage I to II, the circle of input providers is further widened to go beyond organizational boundaries. In Stage II, external stakeholders, who can provide input on specific topics addressed in open foresight workshops, are included. Valuable external sources include partners (e.g., partners in R&D projects or vendors of complementary offerings), suppliers and customers, as well as scientific experts. Hence, more diverse insights and perspectives are included (compared to Stage I). In Stage II, foresighters engage in a dialogue with external sources prior to or in-between two workshop sessions in order to gather crucial information to inform internal workshop sessions. The foresight team of a company usually gathers information from external experts via traditional interviews or idea delphis prior to actually carrying out a foresight workshop. Such prior integration of external experts enriches internal foresight capabilities by including qualified external sources into the insight gathering process. In a multi-workshop foresight process, external experts can be also integrated between two foresight workshops. For example, in an idea delphi, internal experts generate hypotheses about potential opportunities in a first workshop. External experts are then contacted and confronted with these hypotheses. Their answers are categorized, summarized, and re-submitted to all experts with the request to provide statements building on the results. To control for biases based on the prestige of renowned experts and their potential status as opinion leaders, results are anonymous. The process is iterated as long as experts provide substantial changes or insights. These insights are then used as an input to inform corporate foresight workshops.

In Stage II, the focus is on gathering general insights on the development of the global or industry-specific economic landscape. A company-specific strategic inquiry should not be part of this stage.

By including externals beyond the boundaries of the company, blind spots can be identified (Figure 2.4). It can be argued that individuals within a company share certain perspectives and beliefs, which might be provided by corporate culture. Stage II can provide a first idea on possible corporate blind spots. A comparison of internal and external statements can reveal that internals and externals differ strongly in their beliefs about possible developments, which might point to corporate blind spots. Nevertheless, for a deeper understanding, a dialogue between internals and externals is needed; this is the essential idea behind Stage III.

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Figure 2.4: Benefits of Stage II

External sources are often tapped when a particular need for information is identified in workshops. If the search for individuals or organizations that are knowledgeable in a particular field is successful and their work is considered to be relevant for the future, knowledge exchange can be a first step toward future collaborative research projects. Hence, this first integration in the foresight process can be the beginning of potential cooperation.

Even if it is sometimes enough to tap external sources for information before or in-between workshops, at other times an in-depth dialogue between different parties might lead to more fruitful discussions. By adding information, sharing perceptions, and challenging assumptions, more nuanced scenarios of the future might be developed. Thus, the next step of opening workshops can provide additional value.

Integrating Selected External Experts (Stage III)

The next step in further opening up the foresight workshop process is the direct integration of external partners into the foresight workshop. In this stage, selected external sources are invited to participate in the workshop sessions.

Integration candidates are business partners (e.g., customers, customers of customers, suppliers) as well as industry and trend experts. An important goal of integrating this audience into the foresight workshop is to open up for trends and insights that might otherwise be overlooked by internal experts and to gather improved and more diverse insights on future trends and developments. In other words, Stage III enables a better detection of corporate blind spots compared to the previous stages. Workshops with internals and externals are especially useful for the detection of blind spots, as assumptions, beliefs, and perspectives can be compared. To detect blind spots, Wulf and colleagues (2011) suggest asking internals as well as externals individually to enumerate factors that will strongly influence the industry in the future. Afterward, answers are consolidated and in a second round all input providers are asked to assess the extent of influence of each factor on a scale. Answers from internal and external experts are then compared, and a blind spot is constituted when external stakeholders consider a factor very relevant while internal stakeholders do not. Factors that were not named in the first round, but are considered to be highly relevant in the second round, constitute weak signals.

The immediate interaction between internals and externals provides room to clarify expert comments. Compared to Stage II, misunderstanding or misinterpretations of expert comments can be avoided, or at least reduced.

Moreover, Stage III workshops enable a company to follow marketing targets and to improve and maintain customer relationships. For example, voestalpine Stahl, a leading Austrian manufacturer of high-quality steel, carried out a three-day joint conference with an interdisciplinary team from a key client company. Through this conference, voestalpine Stahl not only uncovered interesting ideas for new business development but also increased mutual understanding and trust between the two companies. The shared experience of the foresight workshop intensified the relationship between the two companies and improved and led to a joint understanding of key challenges and trends in the industry.

Joint workshops with external sources provide room for knowledge sharing among internal and external experts. In working together, personal relations can be built and shared interests can be identified. This can be the basis for later joint research projects. For instance, at IBM open foresight workshops often are the starting point for so-called “first of a kind” (FOAK) projects.

The key challenge in this stage is the appropriate selection and motivation of external sources. First, it is important to clarify whether trend identification or vision-sharing and trust-building are the primary goals of the workshop. Second, a list of selection criteria is helpful. In the case of a trend identification priority, the identification of lead users and experts by criteria such as access to information at the forefront of research or previous meaningful contribution to innovation projects makes sense. In the case of a vision-sharing and trust-building priority, criteria such as influence on networks, or intensity or impact of collaboration may be useful. Third, methods for identifying appropriate partners have to be selected and applied. Methods that proved useful for the search of lead and expert users include pyramiding, netnographic approaches, and identification via virtual stock markets. For the identification of key business partners, an internal search process in the Sales, Marketing, and R&D departments to identify key partners and key customers is the most promising selection process.

In this stage, foresight processes are supported by a diversity of externals whose perspectives are included. Nevertheless, companies might face a selection bias. People responsible for foresight workshops might select those individuals who more or less follow their perspectives. If the focus is too narrowly set on experts in the ecosystem of a particular industry, prevalent industry logic might further limit foresight capability and turn into biases. Moreover, the personal integration might support psychological group effects such as groupthink, leading to a conformity of opinions. Hence, it can be useful to further extend the scope from people who provide input for foresight processes to include those beyond the direct ecosystem and even to those who are not considered experts in the field. Relying on a high number of strangers, the crowd might even enhance foresight quality by fostering distributed knowledge exchange among a high number of individuals with specific knowledge and perspectives (Figure 2.5).

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Figure 2.5: Benefits of Stage III

Strangers: Integrating Unknown External Sources (Stage IV)

To gather a maximum of insights and perspectives, unknown users are integrated prior to or in-between workshop sessions. Step IV allows for the greatest variety of insights and perspectives on future trends and developments for foresight processes. Compared to the previous stages, the potential scope of participants is broadened significantly. While experts are chosen selectively in Stages II and III, in this stage participants are mainly self-selected.

Integrated users have no or only a very distant relationship to the company. They can be potential customers, experts from other industries, or people who have no relation or interest in the company at all, but are motivated to contribute their insights. Motivations for users to contribute or even engage in a dialogue are diverse. A professional or private interest for the field a company chooses for foresight inquiry is a strong motivator. The organizers of the foresight platform “Future of Health” discovered that more than 60 percent of all registered users have a professional background in healthcare, including pharmacists, health consultancies, and healthcare administration staff (Maguire et al., 2013). Other motivators, such as monetary rewards or peer and company recognition, are also found to be highly relevant in online communities. In any case, maintaining high motivation throughout the foresight process is not an easy task.

In Stage IV, community-based and crowdsourcing approaches in particular are applied. Both approaches rely on the possibilities of modern information and communication technology to enable a large number of users to contribute, thus enhancing foresight quality. Communities and crowds can be placed on two extremes of a continuum. The latter is assumed to focus on the fulfillment of similar but independent tasks toward a shared goal by a large number of users who are not known to each other. For instance, using online real-time information markets, users can generate possible future scenarios and evaluate the likelihood of their emergence. Both tasks are done independently. The basic idea of online real-time information markets is to enable a diverse group of actors to trade different expectations of the future by releasing stocks of specific events on a virtual stock market (Soukhoroukova and Spann, 2006). By stimulating market mechanisms the accuracy of forecasts is increased. As mentioned before, Volkswagen AG combined scenario generation with these online real-time information markets in one of their foresight workshops. This procedure allowed Volkswagen to integrate a variety of different internal perspectives and knowledge bases. At the “Strangers” stage of opening up foresight workshops, such information markets can include external partners to include external perspectives.

Surowiecki (2005) argues for the superiority of crowds compared to experts when it comes to forecasting quality. He speaks about the wisdom of crowds and argues that a crowd of diverse individuals (with private opinions) deciding independently can, in sum, make more accurate predictions than experts in a certain field.

In contrast, communities are formed by a shared interest. Users are committed to the goals of the community and to each other. Consider taking the idea for open foresight workshops to its extreme by implementing global foresight workshops. This is already reality in massive multiplayer forecasting games, such as the game “superstruct,” designed and run by the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto. The organizers stated that between September and November 2008, more than 8,000 players forecasted the future of humanity. The starting point was a scenario developed around the story that a supercomputer calculated that humans have only 23 years to save the world before a combination of threats will cause the system to collapse and lead to extinction of the human species. Five superthreats were identified: (1) Quarantine, (2) Hunger crisis, (3) Power struggle, (4) Outlaw planet, and (5) Generation exile. Players were immersed in a video scenario and invited to submit stories. During the game's run, players received information about the scenarios via an assortment of media channels, such as blogs, chats, Facebook, and wikis. In total, over 1,000 stories were collected. Since its upload in 2008, the immersion video on YouTube has been viewed by approximately 52,000 users.

Tackling a less dramatic challenge, but also of great interest, are more recent examples of how this method is applied to specific contexts. For instance, recent games have invited players to submit perspectives and exchange thoughts and ideas with others around the globe on topics such as the future of hospitals (Maguire et al., 2013) and smart grids (Cherry, 2011). Consider the 24-hour game “Smart Grid 2025.” It was run by the Institute for the Future together with IEEE Spectrum in 2011. Immersed by video into a future scenario, players started communication by submitting cards (i.e., tweet-like microforecasts) offering statements and ideas on the future of smart grids. Other players were invited to comment, adapt, and build on these ideas. In total, 681 users from 97 countries registered and played 4690 cards (Cherry, 2011). A player was successful when other players responded to the cards provided. The game is a bottom-up process of collaboratively forecasting the future, tapping into the wisdom of the crowd.

Through Stage IV foresight workshops a company also can identify interesting partners for joint future innovation activities. A web-based open call for innovative ideas in a specific field of interest serves as a self-selection mechanism and usually attracts exactly those individuals who are interested in this topic. Individuals who contribute good ideas in such open calls constitute ideal candidates for innovative research projects in the specific area. In the example of Siemens, a public idea contest is combined with a call for proposals that addresses universities (see Example sidebar, Siemens Corporate Technology). The positive effect of this approach is that an overview of future topics is gathered and partners with congruent aims for future projects are selected at the same time. With increasing openness, issues of confidentiality become more relevant. Which information can be revealed to the public, and which needs to be kept behind closed corporate doors? These pressing questions have to be addressed and thought through in advance. Siemens decided on several levels of openness. In the first step, a very broad task was announced to students in an online idea contest. In a second step, an open call for research proposals was announced. Winners received funding for cooperative research projects. Before revealing critical company knowledge, prospective research partners signed nondisclosure agreements.

Approaches integrating a high number of “strangers,” i.e., crowdsourcing or community-based virtual foresight workshops, are particularly beneficial as contributors are self-selected instead of preselected on those seeking input. Self-selection is a vital tool to circumvent filtering and selection biases. Such bias is intrinsic to all other selection processes where persons who select others have a tendency to seek people who share their opinions and assessments instead of looking for contradicting views. This is a major obstacle if the aim is to detect blind spots. When a large number of strangers are included through self-selection, foresight workshops deliver a greater variety of different perspectives and a better understanding of future threats and opportunities than when these workshops are limited to a preselected group of participants. See Figure 2.6 for Stage IV benefits.

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Figure 2.6: Benefits of Stage IV

2.4 Pitfalls to Avoid

Assuming Participants Are Naturally Motivated to Contribute

A major pitfall to avoid is believing that contribution is solely a matter of infrastructure. Of course, a well-planned workshop setting is necessary and easy-to-use web 2.0–based IT tools facilitate virtual foresight workshops. Nevertheless, internals and externals need to be motivated to contribute to open foresight workshops. First, to motivate internals and externals alike, the structural conditions to participate have to be set in place. For internals, participation must be supported by their supervisors. As such, organizers of Stage I workshops (integrating selected internal experts) have to ensure management support of all levels from the start. Second, knowledge exchange across internal boundaries profits from influencing individual contributors' sense-making processes. Internal experts have to free time in their often already tight schedule to participate in foresight workshops. In several OI projects that we know of from industry, internals who were invited to workshops reacted with “playing possum,” i.e., not showing up in workshops, not replying to emails, and so forth. To prevent this behavior, workshop organizers can provide a detailed and reasoned justification on the necessity for internals to contribute to foresight activities. The rationale behind a diverse set of experts can be outlined or experts' particular expertise necessary for inquiry can be made explicit. Third, organizers have to pay special attention on ways to motivate external contributors. For instance, depending on the setting and the topic of the inquiry, externals can be motivated by monetary compensation (e.g., in Stage II), the exclusivity of generated insights (e.g., in Stage III), or by mere interest in the topic (e.g., in Stage IV).

Emphasizing the First and Overlooking the Next Steps

Underestimating the time and resources needed to evaluate and act upon the insights received is another common pitfall. With an increasing number of contributors, the number of suggestions and possible areas of future inquiry likely will increase. This means that opening up the foresight processes to outsiders might lead to more suggestions, which have to be evaluated in a next step. At the extreme, the integration of “the crowd” might lead to a very high number of suggestions for further inquiry. This challenge is well known from OI initiatives. In 2008, for its tenth anniversary, Google announced the project 10^00, an idea challenge to receive ideas on how to change the world and help as many people as possible. Google funded the ideas with a total of $10 million. Finally, users submitted more than 150,000 ideas, which were then evaluated by 3000 Google employees (Google, 2009). Put differently, broadening the scope of insight providers automatically leads to higher coordination needs. To be able to handle the insights you receive, you might wish to carefully design the following process steps. In particular, a well-defined and efficient review process is needed.

2.5 Keys to Success

Up to this point, this chapter has discussed the various stages of open foresight workshops and which tools might be used to conduct the workshops effectively. It has been shown that each stage has merits and limits when it comes to the five main reasons of opening up: (1) gather diverse insights into future trends and evoke perspectives on possible opportunities; (2) sensitize employees to watch for future development; (3) identify interesting partners for innovative research projects; (4) detect blind spots; and (5) create commitment, build trust, and strengthen relationships. To take full advantage of the proposed stages (I to IV), companies need to combine these stages. Multistage approaches are particularly powerful if they successfully integrate internal and external capabilities. In such multistage approaches, workshop organizers can include internal and external experts in several workshop sessions (Stages I and II) and receive additional external impulses before, during, and after the workshop sessions from renowned experts (Stage III), and/or the crowd (Stage IV). See Figure 2.6.

For instance, in-between two workshop sessions, crowdsourcing approaches can be used to evaluate and complement trends that were identified in a first Stage I workshop session. The trends that were ranked as very important in the crowdsourcing approach can then be worked with in the second workshop session (e.g., to transfer the identified trends into new product ideas). Multistage approaches can set in motion a fruitful dialogue about future developments. An increased future orientation of participating employees can be the result, and a holistic perspective on possible future developments can inform strategy development.

The Example sidebar of Scout24 shows the integration, which sensitizes employees not only to future developments, but also in particular to the valuable input that can be gathered by externals.

However, understanding the different stages and combining them individually is not enough to conduct successful open foresight workshops. Companies have to thoroughly plan and execute them and ensure the implementation of the workshops' results. Several activities and decisions have to be taken along the following four phases: (1) pre-foresight, (2) recruitment, (3) generation, and (4) integration (Figure 2.7).

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Figure 2.7: Process Phases and Corresponding Activities

In each of the four phases of the foresight process, organizers of open foresight workshops can take deliberate actions to support the process.

Pre-foresight

Many foresight processes fail because of the pre- and post-foresight phases. To avoid failure in the pre-foresight phase, organizers should think carefully about the expected outcome at the outset of a foresight workshop: Are fully developed scenarios about the future expected? Are ideas for new product development based on the scenarios expected, or is the aim to receive a first feeling about trends? Clarity about the outcome is central, as the organizer can only select the appropriate participants in the foresight process and the appropriate foresight method if the expected output is clarified. For instance, a collaborative foresight game delivers a high number of micro, tweet-like statements, which might provide a feeling for trends in the future. The method is not so appropriate for creating an integrated scenario that includes dependencies between stakeholders, competitors, and the like. Hence, organizers have to clearly define the expected output and—similarly important—ensure management support for these goals. Moreover, the organizer has to determine the level of openness, e.g., is it sufficient to open up only internally (Stage I) or is it necessary to include externals in the process (Stage II through IV)?

Taking this decision, the organizer has to consider prior experience in Open Innovation projects within the company and within the team organizing the open forecast workshops. With increasing openness, the complexity of coordinating different input providers increases. The problems that come with complexity of coordination are often underestimated. The organization and moderation of open foresight workshops can confront the team with new challenges. A reason to conduct open foresight workshops is to gather diverse insights into future trends and evoke different perspectives on possible opportunities. Participants bringing diverse insights and different perspectives mostly have different backgrounds, often possess different needs, and apply different communication styles. Hence, what enhances forecast accuracy—the range of experiences and attitudes of diverse participants—potentially creates challenges. These challenges, if not handled effectively, can significantly reduce the overall productivity of foresight workshops. Hence, workshop organizers must estimate available competences and actual constraints of the participants and handling strategies. If a lack of experience in handling such a diverse set of participants is identified, it may be reasonable to hire professional assistance. Specialized consultants or professional innovation intermediaries can provide the necessary expertise in handling OI projects. Hence, they can complement internal resources when it comes to organizing and moderating open foresight workshops.

Recruitment

The key to success in recruiting participants is to attract and motivate people to contribute to your workshop or to provide input.

This question is similarly important for Stages I through III; only Stage IV constitutes an exception in this regard. Individuals who participate in Stage IV foresight processes generally self-select to participate through a crowdsourcing approach. We will first discuss successful selection principles for Stage I through III. Afterward, we will provide ideas on how a company can successfully influence contribution even in Stage IV foresight processes.

In Stage I through III processes the consideration of track records and personal networks is important. You might wish to invite individuals who have a track record of being visionary, open, and innovative. Moreover, open forecast workshops can benefit from having boundary-spanning individuals included. These “boundary spanners” are individuals with a large network that is loosely coupled to a variety of externals. Communicating with a large variety of people, they learn about different perspectives and experiences that they can bring to the workshops. The same is true for experts, who are active in particularly interesting communities of practice inside or outside their own organization. Remember to support these individuals in-between the workshops in their striving to acquire external knowledge.

In the Stage IV context, a two-step approach is suitable for attracting participants. The first step is to attract a critical mass of participants who attract others. A good way to find such participants is for organizers to contact individuals with whom they have strong personal relations. Contacting the most active bloggers in the field of interest or advertising on social network sites or micro-blogs may be another option. Previous research in the field of online communities suggests that if a certain number of participants are active on a platform, word-of-mouth effects come into play. Thereby, other users are attracted as information spreads in networks. This critical mass evokes a certain level of engagement and creativity on the platform. The second step is to use two-way communication channels. Interaction and collaboration begins in the recruitment phase. Organizers and moderators should engage in a dialogue with potential participants, evoking interest for the topic addressed and the method being used.

Generation

The generation stage is the heart of the foresight process. In this stage, insights about the future are generated. As such, blind spots are revealed, future opportunities are identified, and a vision of the future is generated.

Depending on the approach chosen, a high number of ideas of how the future might develop can be received. Consider the crowdsourcing game on the future of humanity described in Stage IV. Participants submitted 1000 stories about the future. To be able to cope with the input, it is necessary to carefully plan how to analyze, interpret, and process the input received. A viable option is to not only generate input through a crowdsourcing approach but also to rely on the crowd for evaluating gathered concepts. Different means with varying complexity exist to do so. A very simple means is to provide the function to “like” inputs (well-known from Facebook) and count users' likes. Prediction markets are a more complex means for evaluation (see Chapter 4 in this book).

Another challenge is the potential diversity of participants in open foresight workshops. There might be a disparate group of people with diverse backgrounds, practices, and interests collaborating in foresight workshops. This can lead to various challenges in communication. To support communication you might wish to include boundary objects, e.g., visualizations of future scenarios as joint objects around which discussion can emerge. This is also necessary if you decide for platform-based online approaches. For instance, in the case of “massive collaborative foresight games” video scenarios are provided which support the creation of shared understanding among the very diverse participants.

Integration

The final step in a workshop process is the formulation of strategies and actions to seize the gathered insights. The foresight team has to discuss the implications of different lines of action and has to take the necessary steps to realize the best lines of action.

For successful implementation, all relevant stakeholders have to be informed about the open approach and have to be committed to this approach. A lack of commitment can be caused by a lack of integration in earlier phases. To avoid this, consider who is using the output. All parties who will work with the results should be integrated into the workshops to ensure that a sense of ownership is developed early on in the process. This sense of ownership can extend beyond the company's premises if external partners are actively integrated. A joint foresight workshop of external business partners and a company's own employees are powerful tools to gain a common understanding of the future challenges and future strategic actions. As a result, external stakeholders and employees feel committed to these actions and join forces to realize the strategies.

In addition, open foresight workshops have to be integrated in a company's strategic planning process. Hence, interfaces have to be defined accordingly. Finally, results need to be communicated as well as marketed internally. Consider Siemens, which has its own magazine “Pictures of the Future,” to communicate future developments. With this approach, company-wide awareness is provoked. With increased sensitivity, further consideration of a workshop's results becomes more likely.

2.6 Conclusion

This chapter claims that open foresight workshops are a valuable means of enhancing foresight processes. Beyond sensitizing for future developments, we have provided several important reasons for opening up corporate foresight processes and described four stages with an increasing degree of openness. Various examples show how companies like Siemens, Greiner Perfoam, or Volkswagen implemented open foresight workshops and benefited from the positive effects of integrating external partners in their foresight processes.

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About the Contributors

  • Christiane Rau is Professor of Innovation Management at the Centre for Innovation & Product Management (IPM) at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Her research focuses on organizational behavior in innovation processes, and in particular on opportunities and challenges at the boundary between external and internal project partners. Her research has been published in journals such as R&D Management and Technology Analysis and Strategic Management. She received her PhD at the University Erlangen, Institute of Innovation and Value Creation (Professor Möslein) and joined a research project at the Imperial College London to work on a cooperation project under the lead of Professor John Bessant (InnovationLab). She has a background in industrial engineering.
  • Fiona Schweitzer is Professor of Marketing and Market Research at the Centre for Innovation & Product Management (IPM) of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Her academic research focuses on Open Innovation, customer integration into the innovation process, the front end of innovation, smart products, and technology acceptance. Currently, she is working on a funded three-year research project on the development and implementation of customer integration tools in the fuzzy front-end phase of innovation projects in small and medium-sized manufacturing companies. She has won three best-paper awards and has presented and published her work at various scientific conferences and in academic journals, such as the International Journal of Innovation Management and Research Technology Management. She has a background of product management in profit and nonprofit organizations.
  • Oliver Gassmann is Professor of Innovation Management and Managing Director of the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. After completing his PhD in 1996, he led the Schindler Corporation's corporate research in Ebikon, Switzerland. His research focuses on how companies innovate and profit from Open Innovation and on global R&D management. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Research Policy, R&D Management, Journal of Management, Long Range Planning, IJTM, Journal of World Business, and MIR. He is the author of many books including the well-known book Managing Global Innovation. He is a member of several international boards in academia and industry and he was awarded the 1998 RADMA prize (Research and Development Management Prize) for his leading commitment to research with practical relevance in innovation management. In 2009 he was designated one of the most active top 50 researchers by IAMOT in Orlando, Florida (USA).