Services
We are Tech Foresight, Imperial College London’s dedicated foresight practice.What can we offer you?
We create spaces for business leaders to immerse themselves at the fringes of disruption, and explore breakthrough technology and research through visionary academic perspectives.
We use a variety of tools and methods, developed in-house, to make the future come alive through bespoke foresight programmes.
Foresight research: scan the horizons
Understand how the future might unfold. Explore signals of change or potential disruptors to your business.
Approach
Work with us to understand how the future might unfold in the next 5, 10, 15 and 20 years in an area that matters to your business.
We scan the external environment for weak signals of change – emerging indicators of larger trends or potential disruptors – within your chosen technology area or specific challenge space. We have experience from a wide range of subject areas.
This process attempts to distinguish between what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes, giving you a strategic perspective to understand the future for your business. At Imperial Tech Foresight, we explore areas that stretch beyond the common trends and known facts to create a future perspective. Each project uses the rigorous foresight methodologies with expert academic input.
Outcomes
Our clients use their work in strategic planning and discussions around new technologies or thematic challenges. We have explored topics for companies, such as Future Disruptors for Shell and Future of Mining for WEIR.
We are always happy to discuss bespoke project design and challenges, just contact us and we can begin to discuss your future.
Bespoke workshops
Unlock future opportunities, identify uncertainties, and define your strategic priorities through a collaborative workshop. Define your view of the future at an experiential event.
In a bespoke futures workshop, you have the chance to redefine your perspective of the future. We bring together cutting-edge technology research, foresight speculations, and creative ideation methodologies to help you explore the future for your business over the next 5, 10 and 15 years.
Approach
At Imperial Tech Foresight, we consider the best futures to be created together. Our collaborative workshops are great opportunities to get internal and external stakeholders to work together to co-create future opportunities, identify potential risks and define future research gaps. They help explore multiple perspectives and ideas around the future of a sector (water, automotive, or others) or technology (high-performance computing, or others). All sessions are pre-planned by the Tech Foresight team including stimulus development and methodology development.
Outcomes
Our clients have used the workshops to ignite new thinking internally and to creatively consider a future challenge. Previously, we have explored topic areas, such as Future of Food, Future of 4D Printing, and Future of Urbanisation with a range of clients. Organisations, such as Schmidt Science Fellows and Tata Consultancy have commissioned us for bespoke workshops. As each engagement is bespoke, our outputs from them are as well, ranging from reports to timelines.
Thought-leadership
Explore a landscape of an area to inspire your customers, clients and staff to think differently about the future.
Going beyond traditional futures, we can explore the fringes of discussions, which are less well known. This work can culminate in a thought-leadership visual piece or narratives that help tell the story about the future.
Approach
When developing future timelines or narrative, we focus the research on exploring weak signals (‘imprecise early indications about impending impactful events’) in the area of interest that have the potential to disrupt the market. We also bring to life a broad perspective of the industry exploring instances across the STEEPV (Social, Technology, Environment, Economic, Political, Values) that could impact the market as a whole.
Outcomes
Our clients have used timelines to excite their clients about their thinking in a subject area. Organisations, such as Tata Consultancy have commissioned us to develop a bespoke timeline for the future of water in the UK. We can create timelines or scenarios that can help bring alternative futures to life.