Innovation with Foresight: Anticipating Alternative and Creative Responses in Strategic Organizational Decision-making

This chapter provides a review on key issues and their implications caused by rapidly changing business environments which have prompted a call for new strategic organizational decision-making capabilities in innovation. Looking at the problem through the lens of the financial services (FS) landscape, thematic analysis points toward traditional FS players that are faced with uncertainty and disruptions triggered by technology-enabled financial solution providers (FinTech) and their new business models devised for 21st-century client-integrated ecosystems. The analysis highlights that, amid accelerating environmental complexity, business leaders and educators are called upon to become more forward thinking and to develop their creative and strategic innovation capabilities. Considering the foresight and design literature, the hypothesis is that a systematic and collaborative futures thinking function can improve the strategic innovation direction of the enterprise. This chapter is divided into five sections that describe, at a high level, the FS landscape in the context of China; introduce the role of strategic foresight and design in innovation; and outline the four stages of integrating their synergies, which are exemplified by stories of real-case scenarios derived from FS futures studies over the medium-term time horizon.