Opening the corporate foresight activity: Coopetition as a special type of collaboration

Resilience is an important asset for companies. Being able to understand and anticipate future events can help companies in being more invulnerable but also more competitive in the future market. Companies’ strategy and innovation operations should also be always steered towards future. Though, being able to make sense of the future can be difficult alone. Companies are restricted to limited resources, in addition to being captive of company’s own mental models that inevitably take away from grasping the future to the fullest. For that reason, it can be important to exploit external sources in aiming at understanding the future better. The thesis aims at understanding the corporate foresight activity as an open approach, mean- ing that companies execute corporate foresight activity in collaboration with external actor(s). A particular interest is steered towards understanding a special type of collaboration, coopetition, in the context of corporate foresight. Existing literature on collaborative foresight is in its early stages, whereas the literature around coopetition and futures research is nearly non-existent. To meet the research objectives of this thesis, a survey strategy for Finnish companies was used. The empirical part of the thesis was conducted in two samples, one from nuclear industry and one non-industry specific sample. The thesis states that nuclear industry companies might benefit from foresight due to recognized foresight-driven safety regulation, and thus nuclear industry companies were expected to have high foresight maturity. A hypothesis was also made that com- panies with higher corporate foresight maturity also use the support of external sources more often. Overall, the empirical part was based on 28 answers. The thesis aimed at meeting the research objectives also by conducting literature review on futures research, collaborative fore- sight, and coopetition fields of literature. Gaining external knowledge assets and improving company’s own capabilities are the most common drivers for corporate foresight being executed as an open approach. Similarly, improved understanding of the future is acknowledged as one of the most important benefits that companies engaging in open corporate foresight activity have experienced. The results also indicate that open corporate foresight has benefitted the companies’ appearance in terms of better competi- tiveness and market position. In the context of coopetition, external pressure is more visible cat- alyst whereas in collaboration with non-competitors the motivation stems mainly from companies’ internal incentives and willingness. Regardless of the type of collaboration, the collaborative activity took most often place on the top-level of organization. Though, future understanding induced decisions tended to shape equally companies’ strategic and operational level activities, thus indicating that strategic level decision-making falls to operational level activities. Other resources in addition to information were shared rather seldom, but regarding information the sharing happened most often openly. Though, in the context of coopetitive corporate foresight, a slight inclination towards more selec- tive and cautious information sharing was visible. This thesis introduces empirical evidence on the existence of beneficial coopetitive corporate foresight. Thus, the suitability of coopetition strategy in the context of corporate foresight is justi- fied. The thesis contributes by filling the research gaps related to coopetition and futures research, in addition to building on the relatively early foundation of collaborative foresight research.