CORPORATE FORESIGHT: A NEW FRONTIER FOR STRATEGY AND MANAGEMENT

This article introduces the construct of corporate foresight to a strategy and management scholars' audience. Corporate foresight is a dynamic, firm-level capability that allows firms to evaluate future scenarios of the business environment, including systematic doomsday collapses. Corporate foresight is defined, situated in the broader epistemological underpinnings of futures studies, theoretically inscribed in the dynamic capabilities' framework, distinguished from related constructs, and deconstructed in its main components. Its main antecedents and outcomes are elaborated, and further research directions are discussed. It is argued that corporate foresight is of fundamental relevance to strategy and management scholarship due to four reasons: (a) corporate foresight can integrate with, enrich, and expand the dynamic capabilities framework by considering an additional, underinvestigated, future-oriented firm capability; (b) the emergence of corporate foresight is an organizational phenomenon, closely aligned with the contingency theory of the firm; (c) corporate foresight can favorably affect important organizational outcomes including learning, creativity, innovation, and performance via a mechanism to create competitive advantage that has not been previously explored by strategy and management scholarship; and (d) further investigating corporate foresight from a strategy and management point of view opens a rich research agenda.