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Abstract: For corporate and technology foresight to reach its full potential in detecting weak signals and multi-perspective trends, sophisticated integration with organizational structures and ongoing management processes is necessary. One innovation management discipline that could particularly benefit from adopting a dedicated foresight process is product lifecycle management (PLM). The review of foresight and PLM literature shows that there are indeed various intersections between both topics and that a product lifecycle-encompassing foresight process is not only desirable but feasible. As a research-in-progress contribution this paper presents the current development status of a novel foresight process for PLM that aims to accompany products with valid trend insights while they evolve through their lifecycles. This includes a literature review of established foresight and PLM processes, on the basis of which further process development via method engineering will be conducted, plus the preliminary analysis of qualitative data regarding organisational and processual phenomena in foresight activities.
Keywords: corporate foresight; technology foresight; innovation management; product lifecycle management; process development; method engineering; expert interviews; trend analyses.
1Introduction
Foresight research is a scientific field that often evolves detached from other areas of general management and innovation management research (Rohrbeck et al. 2015). While the strong emphasis is put on researching how to conduct foresight - here, the focus lies on data sources and methods - only a little attention is given to integrating foresight activities into ongoing management tasks and innovation efforts of industrial firms (Rohrbeck and Gemünden 2011). Unmistakably, the outcry for a dedicated research stream that focuses on merging general management theories with findings from foresight research exists (Rohrbeck et al. 2015). Based on the increasing need for optimization in the process of product lifecycle management (PLM) and the desperate call for data-supported decisionmaking in that discipline (Zhang et al. 2017), we identified PLM to be an area of innovation management that could particularly benefit from the structured integration of foresight activities. Previous research shows that corporate foresight can support different stages of the innovation process (Gracht et al. 2010; Rohrbeck and Gemünden 2011), which leads us to the assumption that also the different phases of a product lifecycle can be supported with phase-specific foresight activities and serves as a key driver four our research-inprogress. The ability to detect weak...