Adopting Diverse Perspectives in the Fostering of Innovation Activities

Although foresight has often supported shared vision-building and generic priority-setting, it can also foster diversity in perspectives, collaborative relations and ideas on innovations. While such diversity can be supported by soliciting weak signals from different stakeholders, the mere mapping of weak signals may result in an extensive set of fragmental issues that are difficult to compare and interpret in terms of suggested actions. In contrast, novel ideas about prospective innovations can be viewed as more focused and action-oriented reflections of weak signals which can be more readily interpreted in the context of innovation processes. In this paper, we describe a novel foresight method for the Internet-based generation and multi-criteria evaluation of innovation ideas; we also report experiences from a pilot project where this method was employed in the Finnish Foresight Forum established by the Finnish Ministry of Trade and Industry. Specifically, the method provides a systemic anonymous process which fosters col-laborative work among multiple stakeholder groups (eg, researchers, industrialists, administrators, users, students). It consists of (i) the generation of innovation ideas, (ii) mutual commenting and elaboration, (iii) evaluation of ideas with regard to the several criteria (eg novelty, feasibility and societal relevance), and (iv) multi-criteria portfolio analysis towards the identification of most inter-esting ideas. The encouraging results from the pilot project suggest that this kind of an Internet-based process can foster diversity within innovation activities.