Opening up Corporate Foresight: What Can We Learn from Open and User Innovation?
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Abstract
Organizations find themselves in a fast-paced and increasingly complex and uncertain environment. Hence, they engage in foresight to understand weak signals and developments that may affect them in the medium to long run and build up "strategic preparedness". Literature on open and user innovation has described methods to tap into external knowledge sources and some have potential to enhance foresight results, but research has not yet fully benefitted from these insights. Thus, the aim of this article is to synthesize findings from both literatures and explain why users and user collectives are a valuable knowledge source for foresight. The contributions of the paper are twofold. First, the paper provides a typology of methods, which are suitable for drawing on user knowledge. Second, the identified methods are compared with regard to their advantages, disadvantages and boundary conditions.
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