The foresight radar is a SaaS (Software as a Service) from Futures Platform Ltd., developed by experts of strategic foresight. It aims to help organisations become forerunners in their respective fields and to build up abilities for constant foresight activities that rely on the competence of individuals within the organisation, a database of change phenomena created by futures experts, and a teamwork platform that allows for knowledge and interpretations to merge and lead to rapid decision-making.
For organisations investing in strategic foresight is increasingly important, because field-specific discontinuity cycles are faster than ever. In practical terms this means that ways of operations and competitive edges may grow old or redundant very rapidly and at the same time ideas and issues that just yesterday sounded like science fiction may turn into competitive advantages, a whole new market, or a way to boost one's own operations.
Strategic Foresight
The main goal of strategic foresight is to help decision-makers identify the most important issues that require attention or action from changes in the operative environment. These issues may challenge current (ways of) operation, create whole new opportunities, or entail greater systemic changes whose impacts may be difficult to pinpoint beforehand. The methods by which foresight data are produced vary greatly between fields, organisation types, and between different traditions of knowledge utilisation.
Futures Platform and Its Unique Way of Operation
A common and prevalent way of producing and presenting foresight information is to pick and choose well-known, trend-like development paths (such as robotisation) or single interesting notions (e.g. the continuous increase in the efficiency coefficient of solar panels) and to offer these ideas in relative solitude without highlighting or even paying attention to the connections to other issues and ideas, without much depth in the analysis of the impacts of the given trend or issue, with no prognosis into the maturation timeline of the trend, or without providing a variety of viewpoints to the issue under examination. Further, it is extremely rare for foresight actors to provide a comprehensive aggregation or collage of change phenomena, which could allow the reader to identify the "big picture" or to make sense of issues that are "bubbling under" in a given field. Instead, foresight is too often reduced to a straightforward listing of issues that are currently developing and to a compilation of highlighted issues from different fields.
The methods Futures Platform uses to create strategic foresight data differ from common foresight practices in that we aim to create a comprehensive picture of the overall changes in the operative environment and also in that we place foresight data on a timeline and structure the data hierarchically. The Futures Platform database contains hundreds of peer-reviewed, iterated, interconnected phenomena, all of which are actively updated. The contents of the phenomena pool are published through various channels. One channel is the megatrend radar, which provides a prioritised, comprehensive view of overall change in society by including all the greater issues that are changing. Thematic radar screens offer deeper insight into changes that are either directly or indirectly related to the developments of a given field.
© Futures Platform 2019