Applying Futures to innovation and entrepreneurship is different. That not only has to do with foresight being foremost implementented to suite the needs of uncertainty-averse bureaucracies, government and corporates alike. Up to this day the vast majority of employed foresight professionals work for organisations older than x years. X percent of foresight employees work for organisations with an annual budget or revenue of X mio. EUR, and staggering X percent of foreisght employees work for companies making more than X bio Eur per year.

To contrast that, Y percent of innovation professionals work in orgs older than Y years, and Y percent work in orgs with a budget of Y revenue. Just Y percent are employed in companies whose an annual turnover exceeds 1 bn Euro.

Foresight in particular, is a game played by large, incubment organisations.

Recent attempts have been made to bridge this gap by creating, what I call a Process-Model of Foresight-Driven Innovation. Foresight, also in some cases Futures more broadly, are seen as a seperate stage that informs downstream innovation activities. This mechanistic view of looking at the futures-to-innovation value creation stream yet does not account for the classical pitfalls that haunt organisations of the dimensions most Foresight preofessionals work for: silos, different cultures, constraints.

Above the many that come to mind, one peculiar strikes out that most professionals in foresight have not received proper instruction in to inform innovation: That is the Innovator’s Dilemma.

The innovator’s dilemma describes…

Bridging the gap

Foresight and futures professionals that aim to introduce their methods into Innovation, however do so with the implicit assumptions that the existing firm is organisationally capable and willing to pursue alternative futures in which they seek to discover new business models and opportunities for future growth.

And without regard for this hidden institutional decision architecture, any attempt to reason outside the constraints of the dominant organisational logic run at risk of succumbing to window-dressing.

Moreover, those who pursue foresight and futures as professional services, and consulting and research work tend to favour reasonably the most coveted customers in the market, which are in fact solvent, large firms. This further skews economic dynamism in favour of large, existing firms being seen as the primary applicants of foresight-driven innovation.

How Financial incentive structures constrain futures

With it also arise second and third order implications. The main one being that methodologies created for large, legacy organisations tend not to be suitable for anyone but them. It rings most apparent when comparing accounting of small firms with those of large, multinational corporates. Corporate foresight vastly overdelivers: its technicality, its outputs, language, and costs are not fit for the needs of smaller firms. This renders its applicability to the circumstances in which they operate difficult. Of course there are certainly excemptions to that observation, yet the general managerial principle to apply is that of Contingency Theory – management appraoches and methodologies depend on the context, generalisable recommendations, or best practices, cannot be transfered to other organisaitons the more their context differs from that one studied.

Futures practioners that work for commercial projects assume that 1. the large existing firm is the best customer to serve, without considering the decisions and instutional constraints that regularly deliver ‘Innovator’s Dilemmata’ – thus the effectiveness of truly transformational work looking to offer alternatives to the business-as-usual is obliberated by that very mechanism, and financial incentive structures which corporate innovator’s already face, even without introducing transofrmational alternatives to their stratgic consideration.

Secondly, given that futures practioners – in consulting or corporate – deliver their work to a customer who economic conditions very vastly from that of young innovative firms, they position their work from a state of relative organisational certainty and alienated from decision-making and risk.

This not only widens the gap for futures to be adopted outside its implicit, yet dominant market logics, that is to work for corporates, its methodologies are geared towards suiting these types of organisations – at the expense of other organsitional archetypes.

Entrepreneurship is an alien

As we will see, entrepreneurship takes this to the extreme.

The entrepreneurial venture possesses a unique mandate that established firms do not: to create and establish the new, under adverse conditions such as the heigtened exposure to uncertainty, and by carrying the entire economic risks involved in that pursuit.

Current futures approaches do not addresses these core functions with regards to innovation. To become productive for the purposes of innovation (such as economic growth, societal transformation) it is thus prerequsite for futures and foresight to become established, thus seeking the most successful strategies that help them achieve that. In this regard it is almost paramount to understand the organisational and strategic conditions that are likely to lead to failure beforehand.

Corporates as the default customer

And as it concerns those futures practitioners motivitaed to establish viable alternatives through innovation, undestanding of what reliably leads to innovators dilemmata is on the one hand a practice to avoid entering these paths towards failure before any ideation can actually take place. Theory in this case serves as a filter to deselct costly, and likely innovation failures beforehand. On the otherhand, the Innovator’s Dilemma not only introduces itself as a descriptive theory of how, and why organisations fail to respond to innovation. It also offers a prescription: the Theory of Disruptive Innovation, which offers a strategic design framework to build winning alternatives that would otherwise be cannibalised by the host orgnisation or by competition. A chief concern of entrepreneurship is indeed not just to establish a but an organisation capable of asserting itself under adversity.

And as it concerns trulytransformational futures, ideas are rather likely to stirr some feathers. It is thus savvy to position oneself to win such inevitable confrontations even before they arise. As a result, of transofrmational futures being technically unlikely (not impossable, but improbable) to emerge from organisations give that their instiutional design (business model, governance, incentive structures, power relations etc.) is perfected to maintain the status quo, and eliminate uncertainty. Alternative futures need alternative organisations. And despite the many weaknesses entrepreneuial venturing possesses, it is the most advanced, best studied, most broadly available type of social organisation to embrace, not suspend, uncertainty to find opporutnity in it, and reduce risks systematically until an economic-organisational equililibrium (also known as product-market-fit, or break-even-point) has been achieved. Very few other disciplines achieve that (the other being the military and the arts).

To deliver transformation, however, requires a reconfigration in the way we think of entrepreneurship, how we organise it, and how we alter one of its core function for rigorous managerial application: Opportunity.