Future-oriented innovations are a range of products companies, techniques and firms that can enhance people’s lives. They can help improve areas such as healthcare and space technology, or boost a company’s competitiveness. To create these, it requires an enormous amount of effort from various high tech technique stakeholders. It also requires a paradigm shift as well as a major epistemic awareness. It is crucial that the leadership and staff of the company are open to learning from the long-term trends and paying attention to them.
The biggest obstacles to fostering forward-looking innovation are fear of the unknown and resistance to change as well as a focus on short-term gains. In an organisational setting, these challenges can be overcome with the cultivation of a growth mindset and creating an environment that encourages innovative thinking. Employees will also feel motivated to work towards a goal for the future. This is commonly referred to as phronesis, which is the belief that people need an incentive to take risky decisions within their work and can lead to higher retention rates for employees in companies with a future-oriented attitude.
It is becoming more apparent that innovation ecosystems can benefit from an understanding of future possibilities. This can be high tech strategy accomplished through the integration of foresight into innovation ecosystems, building stronger structural ties between strategy-building processes and research programs, and raising awareness of the possibilities for the future through dialogue. The foresight-wheel model is a methodology model that can be used to address these needs in an effective and adaptable manner. This article discusses this new method of developing forward-looking innovations.