Corporate foresight for the benefit of corporates' innovation climate

Abstract

Corporate foresight (CF) can be considered a future-oriented capability that incorporates perceiving and prospecting. Extant CF-related studies tackle the CF−innovation relationship but do not provide details on how CF relates to innovation climate. As we assume that the innovation climate of companies is a relevant antecedent to innovation, we conduct a quantitative empirical study with 147 upper-tier managers to investigate how CF and the respective training of managers relate to a corporate's innovation climate. Results show that strong perceiving and prospecting positively influence the innovation climate, whereby prospecting is of particular importance. Further, we find that training managers in future-oriented capabilities is only under certain circumstances (i.e., low prospecting) beneficial to the innovation climate in companies.