Rohrbeck Heger GmbH

Foresight Maturity Assessment for a medium-sized company

Situation

We recently benchmarked a family-owned semiconductor supplier in the field of Photonics with around 1.500 employees, who operates in an industry with fairly mature structures but fast innovation cycles.

So far, the supplier was organized in several Business Units (BUs) that serve different markets and allow quick response to market needs. Central functions coordinate longer-term activities beyond BU borders.

Rohrbeck Heger partnered with the supplier to assess its future preparedness in terms of its organizational capabilities, the ability to detect and understand change, and to take advantage of mid-to long-term technological and market developments.

Approach

Rohrbeck Heger has developed a maturity model based on its academia to systematically assess the future preparedness of organizations. This work builds on 40+ in-depth case studies and surveys with more than 500 multinational organizations.

Through interviews and surveys with employees from different areas and on different hierarchical levels in the organization – ranging from board members to technical experts –, we analyzed the 5 practices information usage, methodological maturity, organization of future-oriented processes, culture, and involvement of people and networks.

Further, the need for Corporate Foresight in the industry was assessed as environmental dynamism, environmental complexity, environmental hostility, and strategic orientation differ from one industry to another. The comparison of the supplier's data with industry peers allowed Rohrbeck Heger to identify the future preparedness level and an adequate level of Corporate Foresight activities in the competitive environment.

Results

Based on the Foresight maturity assessment, Rohrbeck Heger identified the need for Foresight activities in the organization to enable the supplier to identify opportunities outside of its core markets, which requires the organization to scan for opportunities across and outside BUs.

The supplier decided to build-up an integrated radar as a central Foresight instrument. In parallel, a Market & Technology Team was created to sustainably embed the Radar into the organization. 

In a next step, the supplier and Rohrbeck Heger continued the collaboration to build-up an integrated radar with the purpose to initiate continuous Foresight practices to take advantage of emerging technologies, new market needs, and new product concepts.