Assessing the Future: Methods and Criteria

Abstract

As time-to-market is getting shorter, customer needs have to be identified as early as possible in product development. Correctly applied, corporate foresight can give a glimpse into the future to anticipate such needs and thus gain a competitive advantage. A support tool to choose the appropriate method of foresight is not available yet. Thus, a literature study on foresight methods in industry is performed and a novel decision support tool is proposed which avoids high entrepreneurial risks. Based on the findings, potentials for future work are identified for different types of methods.

Die Informatik und die Krise

“…Diese Entwicklung bringt jedoch neue Herausforderungen mit sich, insbesondere im Umgang mit unstrukturierten Daten [24]. Es gibt keine quantitative Methode für alle Anwendungsfälle, vielmehr wird die Auswahl je nach Art der Daten und dem Ziel der Vorhersage getroffen [25]. Quantitative Methoden, die heute überwiegend in der Krisenfrüherkennung eingesetzt werden, sind neuronale Netze und die logistische Regression [4,26].…”

Designing Solutions for Uncertain Futures: A Checklist for Choosing Suitable Scenarios

“…This paper focuses on future scenarios, hereafter referred to as 'scenarios.' The development of scenarios usually derives from three different schools (Gräßler, Thiele, and Scholle, 2020): (1) intuitive logics (Chermack, 2011); (2) cross-impact thinking using trend extrapolation; and (3) consistency-based approaches. In this paper, we focus on narrative-based methods in the intuitive logics' tradition due to their conceptual alignment with futures studies principles (Gall et al, 2022).…”