In order to maintain and expand its leading position as an innovative company,
Siemens needs to identify particularly promising projects at an early stage of the
innovation process, to direct its activities towards attractive market segments and
to fit new developments into the business strategy. Siemens has implemented a
variety of tools to achieve these goals, and summarized them in the concept of the
“innovation business plan”. In order to take into account foreseeable trends as well
as possible discontinuities, Siemens also developed a process known as “Pictures
of the Future”. This visionary process combines two antinomic perspectives:
extrapolation from “today’s world” and retropolation from “tomorrow’s world.”
The look ahead, extrapolation, corresponds to what companies usually do:
mapping the development of the presently known technologies into the future and
estimating as precisely as possible at what point in time something will be
available. The retropolation as a scenario analysis completes the “Pictures of the
Future” process. For a chosen time horizon, a scenario is designed that takes into
account all of the influencing factors: the development of political and social
structures, environmental impacts, technological trends, and new customer needs.
This makes it possible to think one’s way back into the present and identify tasks
that must be accomplished in order to cope with this particular world of tomorrow.
If both of these perspectives are reconciled in the “Pictures of the Future” process,
consistent and internally coherent scenarios of the future are generated (Eberl,
2011).