Pythia, Nostradamus and their colleagues had an easy time of it. All they had to do was formulate their prophecies vaguely enough, and all kinds of interpretations became possible. But today's corporate leaders have little use for the obscure omens of the Delphic Oracle or the cryptic predictions of a Nostradamus. They need reliable forecasts to achieve tomorrow's business success.
In an increasingly complex business environment marked by ever-shorter product cycles, the major challenge facing companies is how to organize R&D activities in as focused and success-oriented a manner as possible - while simultaneously making optimum use of available funds. All of this requires a clear vision regarding new technologies, customer requirements and the markets that will emerge in the years and decades to come.
But a leading global player like Siemens cannot be satisfied with merely forecasting trends: "Predicting the future works best when you create and shape it yourself," Siemens' CEO, Dr. Heinrich v. Pierer, once said. And that's why the motto "Inventing the Future" best describes Siemens' phil-osophy. Simply chasing after trends isn't enough for a global corporation. Instead, it must identify promising ideas and new approaches at an early stage, lay down a course of action and emerge as an innovation trendsetter.
In recent years, Siemens Corporate Technology Department has therefore worked closely with the operating Groups in order to develop a package of powerful measures designed to optimize the company's R&D activities in a systematic and sustainable manner. The results can be seen in "Pictures of the Future" - visions that employ two opposing, yet complementary approaches: extrapolation from "the world of today" and retropolation from "the world of tomorrow". Extrapolation, the first perspective, may also be seen as "road-mapping" - in other words, projecting the technologies and products of today into the future. The aim here is to anticipate, as precisely as possible, the point in time at which certain things will become available or when a need for them will arise.
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The advantage of this approach - an objective starting position - is also its biggest weakness, since the method fails to predict discontinuities and great leaps forward in the development process. Figuratively speaking, while "road-mapping" will take you on a journey along a well-built road, you won't see much of what's going on beyond the roadside. And you can never be sure that the road isn't about to end suddenly, in which case it would have been better to turn off many miles before. However, with the use of a complementary approach, known as the "scenario technique," such matters can be judged with more certainty.
What Siemens calls retropolation involves imaginatively placing yourself some 10, 20 or even 30 years or more into the future. The time-scale depends on the area of activity under investigation. For example, it is certainly much easier to make reliable predictions about the nature of power generation and distribution in 25 years time than it is to make equally reasonable statements concerning information and communications technology in 2030.
Once an appropriate time frame has been selected, a comprehensive scenario can be devised. This scenario should incorporate all relevant factors, including the future development of social and political structures, environmental considerations, globalization, technological trends and new customer needs. The trick now is to backtrack to the present from the "known" facts of the future scenario. In this way, it is possible to identify the kinds of challenges that need to be overcome to get there.
By combining extrapolation and retropolation - and bringing these two approaches into harmony with each another - Siemens experts can draw up "Pictures of the Future" revealing which changes will impact the company's different areas of activity. However, the purpose of these pictures is not merely to depict visions of the future; as part of a systematic, on-going process at the company, they also greatly help quantify future markets, detect discontinuities, anticipate forthcoming customer requirements, and identify new technologies with large growth potential and mass appeal.
This, in turn, generates new business opportunities for the products, systems and services of the company's business segments as well as a unified vision of the technological future for Siemens as a whole. As a result, the "Pictures of the Future" have become a key factor in the success of Siemens' top+ Innovation program - and one of the most useful instruments for optimizing the company's R&D strategy. Such insights into tomorrow's world not only present a coherent picture of the future, but also show the way to get there. Ultimately, that's the crucial difference between inventing the future and merely trying to predict it.
