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Design thinking has grown into a considerable field of management theory and practical application, helping organizations renew products, services, or even business models and strategy by way of the processes which designers have traditionally used to create and innovate. Design thinking orients itself towards the future in the sense that all design is for products, services or events that will exist in the future, and be used by people in the future. This has resulted in an “overlap” between design thinking and the domain and concerns of strategic foresight, and a small literature has grown up around how design thinking may be used to enhance future studies. This paper is informed by that literature, but particularly considers the relationship from the other point of view: how methods from the strategic foresight field may sharpen design thinkers’ perception of the users of tomorrow they are designing-thinking for, and help design thinkers create a point of view ahead of time as to how changing contextual circumstances may reshape end-users’ needs and preferences. The study rests on research into activities of 300 design thinking practitioners, investigating where and how they use future thinking currently, and suggesting how this need may be fulfilled in a richer and more theoretically grounded way [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few would disagree with the fact that the way organizations collectively anticipate, build, evaluate, and are affected by the future(s) should be at the front and center of management and strategy scholars' agenda. However, as a recently emerged topic in management and strategy scholarship despite its rich tradition in the field of futures studies, organizational foresight is currently conceptualized in various ways in our field, and if some of these conceptualizations are complementary to each other's, others may seem mutually antithetical. It is in view of this current state of organizational foresight scholarship in management that this symposium will feature papers from authors at the forefront of the various theoretical conceptualizations of organizational foresight to enable dialogue, encourage synthesis, and incentivize new theories on this important yet underinvestigated topic in management and strategy research. Decoding the black box of the art and science of organizational foresight Author: Alex Fergnani; Rabat Business School Playing with temporal, social, and contextual boundaries Author: Britt Smulders; Eindhoven U. of Technology The evolution of corporate foresight and its value for decision-making in view of COVID-19 Author: Jan Oliver Schwarz; Bavarian Foresight-Institute Organizational foresight: The changing role of the board Author: Adam Vigdor Gordon; AU Antecedents to longer-term industry foresight Author: Daniel Wilde; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Customizing roadmaps: Lessons from the cutting room floor Author: Matthew Spaniol; Roskilde U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]