Strategic Foresight for Innovation Management: A Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

The concept of strategic foresight has come to dominate contemporary management discourse in recent times with a remarkable upsurge in the number of scholarly papers reporting a positive influence of strategic foresight on innovation. This causal link has served not only as a point of convergence for many empirical and conceptual studies, but also the starting point for theorizing the relevance of strategic foresight in organizing. Drawing on an exhaustive sample of 258 academic publications from 1990–2014, this paper provides a comprehensive review of strategic foresight and its influence on innovation. Our review suggest that strategic foresight rather than directly resulting in innovation tend to rather influence it by shaping and giving form to innovation management tools, and future-oriented knowledge creation, which in turn cumulatively drive innovation performance. Our proposed integrative framework therefore specifies the conceptual linkages between strategic foresight and innovation performance.