Strategic Foresight and Porter's Five Forces: Towards a Synthesis

Scholarly Research Paper from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: -, Technical University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: Strategic Foresight is a relatively young field of research. Although, plenty of different definitions, recommended methods or process approaches exist. Based on a literature review, this thesis tries to systemize the literature to shed light onto the current state of research. Strategic Foresight, as a part of the strategic management, should be strongly related to one of the basic models of strategic management. The targeted object will be building a bridge to one of the most popular and practical models invented by Porter. Still today, there are no approaches that combine Porter's Five Forces with Strategic Foresight. In the literature, often the impact of complexity and dynamics is discussed in regard to Strategic Foresight, but a certain model to evaluate and measure complexity does not exist yet. Neither organizational nor environmental complexity has been included in current Strategic Foresight literature. After analyzing, systemizing, defining, and merging both models by dint of Strategic Foresight considerations, the development of a complexity model will accomplish the attempt to provide a holistic approach to measure complexity in regard to Strategic Foresight for further research.