The use of foresight in corporate innovation

Foresight methods have proven useful for improving innovation processes and outcomes in corporations. Strategic foresight tools including scenarios, backcasting, and design ethnography help firms create empathy with future customers, manage innovation portfolios, and enable innovations to reach the market. This chapter reviews how foresight addresses common innovation challenges. Scenario planning builds understanding of future contexts where innovations must succeed. Incasting projects user personas into these futures to uncover latent needs. Backcasting then sets external milestones for the innovation’s market readiness. These techniques create headroom for long development times and indicate when to persist or pivot investment based on changing conditions. Foresight also builds urgency for change and pathways for innovation to reach customers. While historically used in strategic planning, foresight is now applied earlier in ideation and portfolio management to maximize innovation success. This chapter shares examples demonstrating how firms obtain competitive advantage by anticipating change with foresight. It provides an overview of foresight applications in corporate innovation and highlights benefits documented through recent scholarly research.