Inside Research: Forecasten Sie noch oder Foresighten Sie schon?

This publication is based on the findings of the master thesis of Michael Austerer, which won the 1st Price of the „Excellence in Financial Leadership”-Research-Award from the CFO-Club Austria in March 2016. The financial crisis of 2007/08 represents a distruptive event that occured unexpectedly for most companies. This article investigates if, how and why strategic foresight activities of selected ATX and DAX listed companies have changed since then. The theoretical foundation is Rohrbeck's Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm and Müller/Müller-Stevens's Foresight Capabilities. The results show that all selected companies have adapted and improved their foresight activities. Suprisingly, despite the rising awareness for an increasing complexity and dynamic of company-external contextual factors, most adaptions in foresight activities were not exclusively triggered by them, but primarily caused by company-internal contextual factors such as changes in management and strategy. This demonstrates that is vital for corporations to focus on both, exogeneous and endogenous context factors, simultaneously. Especially supervisory boards of listed companies need to be aware that foresight capabilites and culture might change with the appointment of a new CEO or CFO. Hence, to ensure the continuation of good foresight practices, the boards should assess new C-suite executives according to their sensitivity to foresight.