Adopting Diverse Perspectives in the Fostering of Innovation Activities

Although foresight has often supported shared vision-building and generic priority-setting, it can also foster diversity in perspectives, collaborative relations and ideas on innovations. While such diversity can be supported by soliciting weak signals from different stakeholders, the mere mapping of weak signals may result in an extensive set of fragmental issues that are difficult to compare and interpret in terms of suggested actions. In contrast, novel ideas about prospective innovations can be viewed as more focused and action-oriented reflections of weak signals which can be more readily interpreted in the context of innovation processes.