1âIntroduction
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 organizationâs 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 â healthcare and environment â 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 â intelligence phase â 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 LionsBotâs cleaning robots among local cleaning companies, they wondered if the value of underlying MSRR technology could be further enhanced by the young companyâs 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, Singaporeâs 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 teamâs 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.