Introduction
Strategic foresight is a discipline comprised of procedures and tools designed to assist leadership and management in broadening their perspectives on what and how future possibilities might unfold in order to analyze a variety of strategic options for making of decisions and resource reallocation necessary to achieve the medium- to long-term foreseen plan. SFM is a systemic approach because it integrates deductive and inductive reasoning with experimental, normative, and action-oriented thinking. Seven+1 “I”s are utilized to show the approach. The first to the seventh “I”s presents the flow of a procedure through a succession of activities, while the eighth “I” presents the participatory nature of foresight.
Systematic Foresight Methodology
The initial step of the SFM is focused on scoping the foresight exercise. The scanning and surveying step falls under the intelligence category. The imagination phase of SFM is a dynamic and imaginative phase in which prospective futures are investigated through near-term divergent thinking. During the integration phase, alternative futures are assessed, normative visions are stated, and goals are set. The strategy stage is frequently referred to as the interpretation stage. The SFM’s activities phase focuses on defining priorities, strategies, and next steps, which are subsequently described and conveyed to key partners and stakeholders. Impact is the step in which foresight is assessed and applied to see how well the activity met its goals, what impact it had, and what actions should be planned in the future. Because it is inclusive and participatory, foresight differs from other long-term action plans in that it encourages participation.
The book describes how Singapore’s National Robotics R&D Programme Office uses a variety of foresight techniques, including horizon scanning to gather market intelligence on provider robotics, literary works and intellectual property evaluation to develop an innovation perspective, scenario narratives to assess potential risks and consequences, and road-mapping and Delphi review then develop and verify compacted robotics R&D. For instance, in Case 1, SFM was a partner in the project “Quality and Leadership in Romanian Higher Education,” which aimed to assist Romanian universities in strengthening and expanding their scientific and educational capacities in order to better prepare them for the opportunities and challenges of the twenty-first century. In Case 2, SFM was involved in the project “Quality and Leadership for Romanian Higher Education,” which had the goal of assisting Romanian universities in improving their scientific and educational capacity to better prepare them for the opportunities and barriers of this century.An example, the national research and development agency of Singapore conducted a study titled “Reinventing product-service systems” in designed to help scientific and technological decision makers in defining key competence areas for R&D investment in order to enhance the development of the manufacturing industry in the country and regionally.
It is anticipated that SFM will be able to use these new approaches and tools as well as new tactics and methodologies, as well as their unique combinations, in order to adapt to changing foresight settings and contents in the future. A new age of foresight is beginning to emerge, marked by human-technology inventions and creativity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other new and growing innovations are the first indicators of this new era of foresight.
Market Insight: Horizon Scanning of Service Robotics Landscape
With $233 billion in contributions to the economy in 2017, despite Singapore’s limited area and scarcity of natural resources, the service sector contributed the most to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). (GDP). A CAGR of 7.7 percent was predicted for the service sector across all sorts of services, including marketing services, transportation and storage, information and communications, however the sector fell short of expectations due to a lack of qualified workers in the industry. In 2016, the National Robotics Program (NRP) was established to harness automation and robots to address labor shortages in areas with high demand for workers such as healthcare, cleaning, and manufacturing. The NRP has collaborated with a range of government agencies over the history of its existence to recognize the statements of the problem that may be handled via the deployment of robotics technology. The upcoming innovations’ acceptability would be judged on three criteria: their capacity to satisfy national expectations, their ability to overcome human resource limitations, and their ability to address the difficulties associated with an aging demographic population.
The first case study focuses on the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), which developed and implemented robots and automation technologies over a three-year period to define the region’s workforce shortages in industries requiring large number of employees such as healthcare and housekeeping. Healthcare and environmental sectors were seen as particularly attractive for robotics research and implementation, since they would boost productivity while also supporting Singapore in reaching its Smart Nation Initiative aims. Smart hospitals appeared to have enormous potential for the area of healthcare, with autonomous robots doing a variety of jobs in the hospital setting, from cleaning to deliveries to even invasive surgery. These would effectively address the issue of worker shortages, as well as the rising healthcare expenditures associated with an aging population. On the other hand, increased funding for various robotic technologies would be necessary to apply a diverse array of robotic kinds in healthcare.
The article discusses the significance of horizon scanning in intelligence collecting as the initial step of SFM, as well as the issues that may occur when putting into practice horizon scanning or other data extraction and analysis methods. A big challenge faced was the difficulty in finding potential solutions owing to the overall character of robotics technology classification and the dispersed nature of the literature. This was one of the most important challenges encountered. Another difficulty faced was the specific setting of Singapore, which made it impossible to apply tactics that had been proved successful in other nations to the local situation.
Technology Insight: Literature Review and Patent Analysis of Service Robot Research
The second case demonstrates how a national research agency used foresight approaches such as literature study and patent analysis to carry on a technology insight. The purpose of this example was to demonstrate how literature reviews and patent analysis might be utilized to identify important technologies for organizational performance during the intelligence phase of SFM. Patent data would be an excellent source of technical data for studying the evolution of technology across time. Scientific journal articles were peer-reviewed by experts in the field to verify their accuracy, quality, and trustworthiness.
Patent databases were critical for tracing the growth of ideas, discovering and evaluating the research capabilities of competitors. It is concerned with the difficulties that an organization has when doing technological research, as well as possible solutions for overcoming such difficulties. The scarcity of literature on emerging technologies complicates the task of comprehending the components of a technology in order to choose and input relevant keywords for patent search results. The extent to which an organization utilizes technology may have a significant and favorable effect on its future advancements and activities, as well as set the tone for future growth and activities. Additionally, the tale highlights how technical knowledge may be used to uncover potential areas for R&D collaboration between privately-owned enterprises and publicly-owned research institututions, enabling businesses to create crucial creative skills for competitive advantage.
Assessing Future Impact: Developing Scenario Stories
Here, a research institution appointed nationally came up with a scenario narratives to look at the future effects of soft robots on the region and to provide a path for their deployment in healthcare and industrial inspection. The NRP was to examine the findings of several workshops held in the fourth quarter of 2017 with scientists and business executives. These cross-disciplinary workshops intended to bring together people from a variety of sectors to define their views for the future of robots in society, present them in a storytelling format, and convert them into narrative scenarios. The scenario tales were created with the goal of enhancing public awareness of future societal trends as well as disseminating information about robotic technology and its socioeconomic ramifications, with the goal of boosting social acceptance of robotics deployment in a range of industries.
The company evaluated two options before making a decision. It may use a bottom-up proposal procedure or a competitive grant-making method. In the grant-call method, a wide range of researchers would be invited to submit ideas via a grant call or grant invitation. In order to choose the best ideas from a wide pool of applicants, this technique would allow it to examine and pick from proposals including competing technology or study duplication. To solve specific problems, bottom-up ideas would find and assemble a group of the world’s most knowledgeable academics to work on a plan that would be comprehensive and integrated. After analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of both options, the company was left with a difficult decision. These examples demonstrate the importance of SFM’s imagination phase in creating future scenarios and visions, the importance of identifying relevant stakeholders and engaging them through appropriate platforms to understand their perceptions and mental models, the role of storytelling in developing future visions, as well as the importance and utility of storytelling in developing the future of an organization and its related industries.
Technology Management: Building and Validating Roadmaps
After completing a ten-month R&D road mapping effort, the NRP Office was forced to move on to the fourth case. Prior to developing technology/research roadmaps in three key areas: fully autonomous robotics with integrated impression, autonomous vehicles with sensor fusion, and on-chip Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems for fully autonomous robotics, the project conducted horizon scanning, patent analysis, literature review, and scenario development. On the basis of these technology/R&D roadmaps, integrated roadmaps for two target areas, healthcare and the environment, were developed. The project team then evaluated these roadmaps using a Delphi poll of 70 industry and technology professionals. It generated useful information regarding the three technology fields’ respective national capability and societal impact. Given limited time and money, which technology topics should the organization continue to fund and which should be cancelled or placed on hold? This case discusses the significance of the integration phase of SFM, the relevance of the interpretation phase of SFM, the application of the road-mapping method to formulate strategies, and the use of Delphi surveys to verify roadmaps and prioritize resource allocation for future roadmap execution.
Commercialization Strategy with Quality Function Deployment
In the fifth and final instance, the director of NRP evaluated various R&D submissions submitted by researchers from public research institutes and university research centers in response to NRP’s financial solicitations for main areas of robotics research. Three major factors were used to evaluate these suggestions: their potential to meet national demand, their ability to address labor shortages, and their ability to deal with aging populations. During the SFM intervention phase, the national research organization was presented with three commercialization options for its technology.
The first alternative was to license intellectual property (IP), in which the research institute that owned the patent (a sort of IP) would grant commercial rights to an established corporation in exchange for a premium and royalty. Second, the corporation may consider a research and development partnership, in which the patent-holding research institute collaborates with a support group to co-develop the technology in order to boost its readiness for commercialization before converting it into goods and services. The third alternative strategy is a spin-off, in which a research member working on the idea establishes a new, independent legal business to license the IP from the original research institution for commercialization. Each of these three options offers a number of distinct pros and downsides. This case demonstrates the importance of the customer discovery process in identifying the target market, determining product-market fit, and developing economically viable business models, as well as the value of the quality function deployment process in capturing and mapping customer requirements to future product functionalities.
Conclusion
To summarize, the author emphasizes the importance of being specific in the search process and delving into the scientific specialization of technology applications, as well as the importance of organizations supplementing patent analysis with a review of scientific literature in order to connect the various pieces of information gleaned during the patent search process. They note that other countries may face the same challenge of ultra-high population density as Singapore in the future, and hence are likely to find Singapore’s solutions beneficial. To circumvent the language barrier, the author suggests gathering technology intelligence from non-traditional sources, such as attending international expositions and meetings to learn about other companies’ technological advances that have not been codified in English publications or filed as English patents. The author hopes that the book will motivate firms to adopt a methodical and thorough approach to projecting their prospective growth trajectory.
References
Cheah, S. L. Y. (Ed.). (2020). Strategic Foresight: Accelerating Technological Change. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
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