Back to the Future: Scoping Dynamics in Industrial Innovation

Many companies and regions in Europe consider innovation to be their key competitive advantage. To enable these actors to successfully incorporate innovation into their strategic planning, this article seeks to scope dynamics of industrial innovation by analyzing historical developments and forecasting future trends. The insight into historical developments provides the basis for learnings and a deeper understanding of the dynamics of industrial innovation. The forecast of industrial innovation in 2030 creates a framework to discuss future orientation and positioning. Historical developments are regrouped according to five key action fields of R&D and innovation management in accordance to the action fields of industrial companies. The foresight process was carried out based on a reduced and adapted version of the scenario technique, starting bottom-up with the descriptors of innovation systems and resulting in five theses on how innovation will look like in 2030. Both perspectives are combined to reach conclusions on anticipated transformative aspects in industrial innovation systems and discuss potential consistencies, repetitions, and interruptions between historical and future dynamics.