Innovation and Entrepreneurship: the Role of Scenario Planning

摘要

Entrepreneurs have to make decisions in conflicting issues e.g. long-term versus short-term, production versus marketing, and flexibility versus continuity in human resources. The long-term issues, in particular the innovation issue, need to be managed in a short-term context, recognizing that companies that thrive in chaos by constant innovation are the only ones to survive. In managing this innovation it is necessary to achieve an efficient and creative innovation process in which the risks have been analyzed and planned in order to avoid surprises. Scenario planning can assist such innovation processes by designing several scripts of the future. The entrepreneur formulates strategies for each scenario, based on the business idea of the company, i.e. the set of market-based concepts the enterprise offers. Thus, innovation is not only about products/services, processes and organizations, but it concerns the business idea of the company. We will show that the concept of the living company is appropriate for the implementation of scenario planning, in which we emphasize learning and autonomy. Such an approach enables an entrepreneur to manage innovation, the core of which is the continuing adaptation to market developments of the entrepreneur's business idea.