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This poster describes the crowdsourced foresight process at Finpro, the Finnish Trade promotion organisation.  It is a unique organisational model for building anticipatory competencies to manage change. 

Finpro as an organizationFinpro is a global organisation with 375 employees, of which 250 people are working outside Finland in over 40 countries. Finpro is an association, owned by Finnish companies, where a main part of its funding comes from the  Finnish government.  The aim of Finpro is to help Finnish companies to be successful in global markets. One of the cornerstones in Finpro’s strategy is foresight activities, which is considered essential for Finnish companies to build both a strategic and a competitive edge for the future global environment.

Foresight process at Finpro In Finpro every employee is involved in the foresight process. Being a distributed organisation, there are special challenges in crowdsourcing the future information. Because of this challenge, TrendWiki (product owned by Data Rangers Ltd), a proprietary tool, was developed as the foundation for Finpro’s foresight activities. This tool is especially designed for distributed organisations for collecting and visualising weak signals. Every Finpro employee has access to this user-friendly tool. All employees are trained and encouraged to enter weak and strong signals as they have observed in their respective countries or when travelling. There is no guideline for what kind of signals are collected: every signal is considered to be valuable. During last year, over 9000 signals of change were spotted by Finproners. 

A task for the Finpro’s dedicated foresight team is to analyse these signals. Bi-annually, potential emerging phenomena are identified by clustering the signals. The phenomena are used for Finland’s key industrial clusters and  for building a new and unique competitive edge for Finpro’s client companies. In order to emphasize foresight’s importance for business, an overview of the phenomena is also made publicly available.  Finpro is not only interested in the broader view, but also in more focused technological changes. Signals are spotted from the viewpoints of technology, business as well as people and the society. We have proved that a holistic view provides a better indication of the forthcoming changes.

Finpro works with Finnish companies to help them to better understand the future transformation. Especially, technology companies can benefit from the holistic approach of Finpro’s foresight activities.

Case FiraFira is a Finnish company working in the building sector. One of its products is parking garages. With the future of parking garages in mind, Fira asked Finpro to assist them in seeing new perspectives for the future.

In the project, dedicated Finpro signal spotters for example from Japan, Holland and Brazil were looking for signals in the areas of business, technology and people and society for five months. These signals were analyzed by the team, and they were used in workshops with the client. The outcome of the project was new business concepts for Fira. The project helped the company to grasp a new and innovative business thinking in otherwise a very traditional business area.

Contact

Elina HiltunenFinproTel. +358 40 343 3363 E-mail: elina.hiltunen@finpro.fi

2011 INTERNATIONALCONFERENCE

Crowdsourcing Weak Signals of Change in Institutional Environments – Case Finpro

Niko HerlinFinproTel. +358403433342E-mail: niko.herlin@finpro.fi

Figure: Annual foresight process of Finpron