Let’s have a brief look at brands using foresight. Today, it’s PepsiCo.

Many large and forward-thinking companies have established capacities specialising in strategic foresight, scenario planning, and trend analysis. These teams or individuals are responsible for identifying emerging trends, potential disruptors, and long-term opportunities and threats, actively contributing to the corporate long-term strategies. While it’s challenging to provide an exhaustive list, we present a series of examples of companies known for their investment in foresight activities helping them to achieve long term goals and desired futures.

In 2008, PepsiCo began exploring how foresight methods can be used to influence a company’s research portfolio, offering a complementary approach to common portfolio management methods. In that year, the company formed two new research departments to pursue breakthrough innovations in the areas of ingredients, processing, and packaging for its global food and beverage businesses.

This Research Foresights Initiative was designed to help researchers address a range of challenges commonly faced by long-term innovation programs inside large corporations, including learning about markets that don’t yet exist, finding breakthrough ideas, transitioning innovation to operations, embedding a portfolio orientation in project management for breakthrough innovation, allowing for reciprocal influence between innovation and strategy, and avoiding a stop-and-start approach to breakthrough innovation efforts.

The foresight process involved: Internal Futures Audit, Implications Wheels, Inductive Scenarios, Point of View Options, Weak Signals Environmental Scan, Technology Forecast and Participatory Futures.

The process identified markets that do not exist now but will be robust in 5 to 10 years, and it created content about the future that enabled the company to invest in innovation platforms based on new breakthrough ideas. The scenarios have been broadly communicated across the organisation, influencing the strategic intent of other businesses and smoothing the way for future transitions of innovations to the operations management.

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