پیش بینی شرکت و تاثیر آن در عملکرد شرکت: یک تحلیل طولی Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis

1. Introduction The research and practice of strategic foresight (to which we refer as corporate foresight) has a tradition that reaches back to the late 1940s (Coates et al., 2010). Such practice in organizations had already seen a golden age in the 1950s, driven in particular by the “La Prospective” School of Gaston Berger in France and the works of Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation in the US (Rohrbeck et al., 2015). Since then, many firms have invested in building corporate foresight (CF) units (Battistella, 2014; Becker, 2002; Daheim and Uerz, 2008), including Cisco (Boe-Lillegraven and Monterde, 2015), Daimler (Ruff, 2015), Deutsche Bank (Rollwagen et al., 2008), Deutsche Telekom (Rohrbeck et al., 2007), France Telecom (Lesourne and Stoffaes, 1996), L’Oreal (Lesourne and Stoffaes, 1996), Pepsi (Farrington et al., 2012), Siemens (Schwair, 2001), and SNCF (Lesourne and Stoffaes, 1996). The expectation is that CF will enable these firms to spot trends ahead of competitors, gain deeper insight into how such trends will affect their organization and identify the most effective response, and ultimately gain a competitive advantage (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994; Hines and Gold, 2015). Despite the long tradition of applying CF practices, evidence on their impact on firm performance is scarce. The case study research has provided us with some insights into the causal links between corporate foresight practices and firm performance, and anecdotal evidence has been presented to determine its impact (Rohrbeck, 2012; Ruff, 2006; Ruff, 2015). The main reason for the scarcity of conclusive evidence on the impact of CF is the difficulties associated with measuring it. For example, establishing a causal link over time, whereby the impact can often be expected to play out over several years, is confounded by many other factors. Industry rivals may eventually find ways to offset the advantages that are gained through CF, macroeconomic factors may shift again, reducing the impact of CF-triggered actions, and the rulesof-the-game in the industry might change with the entry of new rivals (Helfat et al., 2007). With this paper, using a longitudinal research design, we investigate the impact of CF on firm performance. Using data on CF maturity from 2008 and firm performance data from 2015, we are able to investigate the impact with a time-lag, which can be judged as sufficient for the impact of CF to play out. In addition, we propose a new construct, which we call future preparedness and which is built by comparing the CF need with CF maturity. Our paper is structured into five main sections. In Section 2, we conceptualize future preparedness and introduce the main constructs of our measurement model, CF need, CF maturity and firm performance. In Section 3, we describe our research design. In Section 4 we report our findings. In Section 5, we discuss the limitations of our research and suggest future research trajectories. Finally, Section 6 summarizes our contributions.