Today, one of the big challenges for technology companies is to quickly respond to technological changes and competitive trends: The speed of scientific progress, the acceleration of product life-cycles, the inter-connection of previously independent business sectors and the innovativeness of sophisticated technology solutions characterize the modern business world. In order to constantly adapt to these ever-changing conditions, companies must be able to detect changes early and react on them.
What is Open Foresight?
Therefore, the process of examining future events (foresight) while considering multiple sources of innovation has become an essential challenge but also an opportunity for value creation. To ‘open up’ a foresight process by integrating external sources (e.g., suppliers, users, or communities) – and their respective store of knowledge – holds great potential. This is the very idea of Open Foresight.
What is the value contribution of Open Foresight?
Participants of the Open Foresight process will be given the chance to benefit from the multi-faceted and complementary information stock that is held by the representatives of various companies in the cluster and set-up a collaborative foresight process. The goal is the early identification of relevant changes. By doing so, strategic reaction patterns can be derived to protect organizational competitiveness, e.g. by mitigating financial risks, allocating resources more efficiently, and anticipating customer requirements while developing customized product solutions before others do.
In addition, participants may deliberate upon actively shaping the future markets by encouraging new strategic partnerships or by engaging in joint projects.
What is the project’s agenda and what are the objectives?
The project got funded by the Hamburg Ministry of Science and Research and is conducted in co-operation with the University of Hamburg (UHH), the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and the Hyve AG, Munich. The research partners strive to develop a collaborative and open foresight process comprising several companies from different technology clusters in the Hamburg area.
Primary research questions are:
- How to organize a collaborative foresight process that is both efficient and effective
- how to attract and integrate external actors and
- what potential does Open Foresight have for both the individual company and for business networks?
If you are interested as a company or business cluster to participate in our project, please do not hesitate to contact us (see below). More information can be found in our flyer (only available in German):
In addition to our research in the clusters, we want to determine how online communities can be used for foresight. With the help of netnography, we already analysed some online communities regarding their potential for foresight. Besides that we are currently examining in the field of open source software and operating systems how online communities can be used actively in shaping the future, eg. in the form of an idea contest.
Funding authority:
Partners:
Contact:
Reimo Jahn, M.Sc.
Michael Zeng, M. Sc.
Letzte Änderung: 15. April 2018