The impact of corporate foresight on strategic decisions – a case of a European bank

In increasingly competitive, complex and volatile environments, the urge to fully understand the future and to thereby deduce insights for strategic processes has - over the past decades - always been of great interest to academics and practitioners. Corporate foresight related research has, however, provided only limited insight to date. The following thesis is based upon a trichotomous analytical framework which scrutinises corporate foresight and its impact on strategic decisions in order to investigate how managers, organisations and the environment influence the phenomenon and its manifestations. The intermediary concept of judgement thereby intends to explain how corporate foresight results can possibly be integrated into strategic decision-making processes. The research data is collected via formal and informal interviews, document analyses and observations within a European bank consisting of multiple business units and segments. The findings reveal that corporate foresight manifests itself in numerous forms and locations. Moreover, it was ascertained that manifold influences from both the internal and external environment affect corporate foresight and its impact on strategic decisions. Further findings additionally illustrate that future perceptions occur in a more quantitative fashion in a banking context. This study finally suggests that the integration of corporate foresight into strategic decisions is not only specified by the phenomenon's manifestation, but also by strategic decision-makers' judgements regarding corporate foresight itself