If you’re responding to seismic shifts within your industry or attempting to adopt a longer-term approach, changing your company’s future orientation can bring significant advantages. Research has demonstrated that companies with a strong future orientation are more productive and innovating. To become more future-oriented you can encourage your employees and managers to develop new strategies and processes that assist the company in planning for the future.
To develop future-oriented innovations the use of a dialogue approach is needed to identify potential obstacles and business opportunities. This can be accomplished by using a framework of futures literacy that encompasses futures knowledge and awareness as well as the ability to predict the future. Futures literacy refers to the ability of an individual or a company to identify, construct and articulate futures and is based on the idea that the creation and articulation of futures is an inter-disciplinary endeavor that involves different domains, spheres, and stakeholders. Futures awareness is the capacity to recognize the possibility of future possibilities and is based on an individual’s awareness of their personal perception of the world around them.
Future-oriented technology can be created by creating products and services that improve the lives of people. These improvements are the result of collaboration between a variety of high-tech procedure stakeholders, and require a complex assessment of the current issues and possible alternatives. This type of innovation requires an utter epistemic transparency and the capacity to listen to suggestions for the foreseeable future.
