Lines into the future. Exploring how Dutch infrastructure providers organize and manage their foresight processes

摘要

An infrastructure that meets future technological and societal demands is vital to Dutch society, which is why Dutch infrastructure providers look at long-term developments. We explored how they organize and manage their foresight processes by conducting 30 interviews among five different infrastructure providers, showing that to a large extent they carry out these processes themselves in different locations within the organization and only call on external support for specific subjects. They are not too worried about the importance of the short term but instead want to know how they can connect long-term developments to the short term, and try to deal with different time horizons within their organization. They use the foresight studies of other organizations and their search for information is not overly structured. Infrastructure providers have a well-developed sense of their environment, and they realize that their strategic room offers limited freedom and, in terms of foresight, should work together more than they are doing at the moment. Comparing our findings with two theories, we see that their approach to foresight is often adapted to their approach to innovation, that their foresight is organized in a facilitating, stimulating and framing manner, and that it is centralized as well as decentralized.