ABSTRACT

Corporate foresight (CF) is mostly used by companies to describe their research activity on the future. It concerns the medium to long-term analysis of business environments, of markets and new technologies, and of their implications for corporate strategies and for innovation. CF is a participatory and systematic process which looks at the future with a medium to long-term vision identifying threats and opportunities in political, sociocultural, competitive and technological environments in order to support decision-making, to nurture the innovation process, to identify new business models and to build scenarios for communication. It therefore scans both the company's business environment and the macro-environment surrounding it, assessing technological trends, exploring future developments in the behavior of competitors and customers, evaluating the development of political, economic and legislative trends. CF helps companies build a vision that will help them understand the complex forces that drive change, take the right decisions and orient strategy and research and development (R&D).