Understanding your teams' foresight job-to-be-done

What is it?

To be successful and leverage the application as best as possible, you need first to get the concept right. This includes a clear understanding of what is expected from you and your team. Based on this, you can define how to best fulfill such needs. In the following, we show possible conceptual directions that should help you to get the concept right before you translate it into your ITONICS Innovation OS.

How does it work?

In general terms, the job of continuous foresight is to explore and inform about changes in your corporate environment. As new trends and technologies emerge constantly, it is crucial to prepare for a larger diffusion of such changes and build a company-wide position towards such changes. 

Does anything need to be adjusted as a new development will threaten your existing operations? Is there any opportunity to increase profits by leveraging the change?

In this respect, foresight teams can have different more specific jobs. To be clear on what route to take, it is crucial to understand your internal customers' needs and how you can fulfill those. 

As a foresight team, you can have the job to:

1. discover, evaluate, and recommend new opportunities, i.e., attractive areas of the business to focus on, or
2. craft reports/ an intelligence hub and provide deep-dive information to interested parties on emerging trends, technologies, competitors, or start-ups

If you have clarity on this, you can start defining the job roles and processes needed to fulfill the respective needs. The following template(s) (download here) ought to help you to map your current or aspired process. With this mapped out, you have greater clarity on how to approach the different roles and what functionalities in the tool will be most important for whom.  

The jobs and roles along the foresight process

Below we have summarized the typical roles, their jobs to be done, and what the profile of a candidate for a role typically looks like. Depending on your organizational setup, it might be that one person wears multiple heats, i.e., takes different roles at the same time.