Innovation activities and foresight are closely interlinked. Visionary capability, which can be defined as “actor’s ability to outline the potential development trajectories based on travelled paths, and utilising the opportunities emerging by the changing techno-economic paradigm”, plays an important role as the facilitator or enabler of innovativeness.
Some people seem not only to have this inborn and intuitive ability to sense or foresee the future possibilities, but also to have the faith in their own capability to realize these possibilities and the changes they demand. These people can be labelled as “class A innovators”.
Of fundamental importance in this research theme are questions such as what kind of data or information we can obtain of future issues and the quality attributes of that information, why some people and more widely some organizations are very receptive and responsive to the weak signals while others are not at all able to react to even the most evident signs of change. The concept of absorptive capacity, which relates to an organization’s ability to recognise, acquire, assimilate and exploit the knowledge produced outside the organization, may provide some useful insights when studying this phenomenon. Especially in an era of open innovation activities, this capability seems to be of the utmost importance.
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Tuomo Uotila