Open Innovation: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA

2 OPEN FORESIGHT WORKSHOPS FOR OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION

Christiane Rau

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Fiona Schweitzer

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria

Oliver Gassmann

University of St. Gallen

The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson, as cited in The Economist, March 7, 2013

Strategic foresight is a key task of innovation management. It enables management to develop and maintain a clear understanding of current and future developments in the corporate environment. Managers can use these insights to assess the company's current innovation strategy and to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks that possible future developments may pose. While forecasting focuses on estimating and anticipating a probable future, foresight aims to identify several potential futures. Foresight allows managers to explore uncertainties and to develop action plans for alternative strategies in different future scenarios. Foresight is a learning process through which a company investigates possible future developments and prepares for them. By taking active steps toward the realization of one or another future development, a manager is, to a certain extent, even capable of influencing the future.

Chesbrough (2006, p.1) defines Open Innovation (OI) as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand the markets for external use of innovation.” Opening up foresight processes means ...