by I’m pleased to note that my piece on the organizational futurist role I put together with colleague Jeff Gold has been published in a special issue on “Corporate Foresight” of Technological Forecasting & Social Change coordinated by Dr. Rene Rohrbeck. My piece draws from my dissertation. The goal is to characterize the organizational futurist role. We review and critique my decade of experience as an organizational futurist in the 1990s and 2000s and suggest key questions to explore going forward. It is my personal view that if foresight is going to flourish in the years ahead, we simply must expand the ranks of organizational futurists. We can’t do it all from the outside! So, we need to provide some help to our organizational partners — this article provides some useful concepts for right now (I hope) as well as outlining some topics I think we need to explore. Be interested to hear from an insiders– I can provide a research or review copy of the piece.
Highlights
- Describes why integrating foresight into corporations has been challenging
- Reviews and critiques previous work on organizational futurist role
- Proposes an organizational futurist role to facilitate integration
- Offers new conceptualizations of the organizational futurist role
- Proposes research agenda to enhance the organizational futurist role
Abstract
Integrating foresight into corporations has proved to be challenging and rare. The paper proposes an organizational futurist role as an internal champion and broker to facilitate the integration process. It builds on the direct experience of one of the authors in crafting the role by revisiting and critically reviewing the papers reporting on findings from that experience. A literature review is then used to reflect on the gaps identified and to stimulate new conceptualizations in order to ground the role in a more suitable academic approach. The paper proposes several tangible approaches for how an organizational futurist role might respond to three principal challenges to the integration of foresight identified and confirmed by a review of the literature. The paper concludes with a research agenda to explore those approaches. Andy Hines
hi andy …. you mentioned being willing to share your piece on the role of corporate futurist … if you’d be so kind, let me know the mechanism for getting it… we do struggle with that here, as you know from the past… dave
hi Dave, nice to hear from you!!! will shoot the paper to you!