Learning From an Envisioned Future - An Empirical Account

Innovation processes require organizations to transcend current boundaries. These include not only technological as well
as social limitations but "above all" the way we address the future. We are used to face the future with our existing knowledge and
experiences from the past. This strategy, however, can hardly lead to knowledge off the beaten path. We therefore suggest a new
learning approach for organizations, which enables to literally envision a desired future scenario and thereby, allows for the
creation of radical new knowledge. We argue that the created knowledge yields a higher degree of novelty and radicalness. Along
with an enhanced theory of learning including learning from the future, we present our empirical findings from comparing the
outputs of Learning from an Envisioned Future and learning from the past. For this purpose, we use data from two organizational
learning projects; one, which was conducted with a high school in Austria and another one, which was conducted with members of
the Austrian Economic Chamber. Our findings from both case studies suggest that Learning from an Envisioned Future does
produce significantly more paradigm challenging knowledge compared to the output gained from conventional learning from past
experiences. We conclude that the combination of both learning sources may lead to best learning outcomes in organizations.