Bibliometric analysis and literature review on strategic foresight

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Berlin (Institut für Technologie und Management), language: English, abstract: Rapid changes in technology and growing competition in consumer as well as business customer markets are forcing industry to explore new ways to foster product and service innovations. Especially multinational companies need to identify developments and trends in their technical, political, competitive, and consumer environment early in order to be capable of acting. Strategic Foresight is a framework, which allows the identification of weak signals of changes and reacting to these. This thesis identifies and analyzes the existing literature concerning Strategic Foresight by means of bibliometric analysis and literature review. For the bibliometric analysis the Science Citation Index and additional databases of journal publishers have been selected. These databases have been searched for journal articles and conference articles related to Strategic Foresight. The identified journal articles have been categorized concerning research field, research perspective, and discussed subjects. Journal articles have been analyzed for the most active authors and for journals with the highest number of articles related to Strategic Foresight. Conference articles have been analyzed concerning conferences dealing the most with Strategic Foresight. In result, a growing scientific activity in the field of Strategic Foresight is shown. Seven highly relevant conferences, 15 highly relevant journals, and 12 major authors in the field of Strategic Foresight have been identified. Furthermore, seven key aspects revealed, which are dealt with in literature: methods, goals, process, actors, organizational structure, elements, and value creation of Strategic Foresight. A different emphasis on each of these aspects has been noticed. While many articles are describing methods used for foresighting, only a small number of articles are discussing the value creation of Strategic Foresight. In addition, the literature review revealed research gaps in how to select appropriate methods and how to measure value creation.