مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بررسی سیستماتیک تحقیق پیش بینی استراتژیک

مقاله سال 2016

This article reviews existing research on the use of strategic foresight in firms. Strategic foresight involves understanding the future and applying future oriented insights to an organization’s strategic activities and decision making. Rohrbeck et al. (2015) gives an historical background of the foresight research field, from its birth in the 1950s through scenario building in the 1960s–1970s, to organizational integration from 2000 to present. Different terms have been used to relate foresight thinking to strategic decision making in corporations. Hamel and Prahalad (1994) define industry foresight to be deep insights into trends that can be used to create new competitive space. Slaughter (1997) uses the term strategic foresight to represent a fusion of futures methods with those of strategic management. Ahuja et al. (2005) use foresight as a personal power of foreseeing. They define managerial foresight as the ability to predict how managers’ actions can create competitive advantage. Rohrbeck et al. (2015) use the term corporate foresight as a practice that permits an organization to lay the foundation for a future competitive advantage through value creation.

In 2010, the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change devoted a special issue to strategic foresight (vol 77, Issue 9). To introduce the concept of strategic foresight, Coates et al. (2010) use the French concept ‘la prospective’ as the starting point: “la prospective is foresight when we add the adjective strategic in English, i.e. strategic foresight.” The reason to look at the French approach to foresight is the emphasis that is put on human decision-making, action consequences of future states, and the participation of the decision-maker in the whole foresight process. With this perspective, strategic foresight has a clear link to strategic management and should be “understood as the processes that assist decision makers in charting the firms’ future course of action.” (Vecchiato, 2012). On this basis we decided to do a literature review on the term “strategic foresight.”

Common to the various foresight terms referred to above, strategic foresight is a dual purpose task of 1) observing, perceiving, and capturing factors that is likely to induce future changes, and 2) dealing with these changes by deciding appropriate organizational responses, as illustrated in Fig. 1. According to the la prospective approach, these two processes should not be dealt with separately where the futurist performs the foresight part and the decision-maker the strategy part. It is an integrated process where the decision-maker participates in the foresight process and vice versa.