Our Strategic Foresight research gives our clients the ability to anticipate and navigate the uncertainties of tomorrow on a global scale, enabling them to adapt to change – and proactively shape their future trajectory.
The majority of our work is with innovation and insight teams that want to ensure strategies and developments succeed on a global scale, which naturally means they need to be effective in every region they operate in.
Running multi-region Strategic Foresight projects comes with its own set of complexities and benefits. These projects involve gathering and synthesising insights from diverse markets, each with unique cultural, economic, and social contexts. The complexity lies in the coordination and integration of these varied insights into a coherent strategy.
For globally active businesses, however, it is vital to rise to the challenge of gathering input from all around the world, in order to avoid a disproportionately Western-centric viewpoint.
Multi-region projects provide a holistic view of global trends and their local implications, ensuring that strategies are both globally informed and locally relevant. This approach enables businesses to:
Strategic Foresight is an invaluable tool if you want to move your business away from reactive business practices toward more pro-active strategic planning. It merges insight-driven foresight, trends, and future scenarios with your organisation’s unique proposition and strategic objectives, to reveal exciting new directions that cater to your future customers. Think of it as a compass that helps you navigate our ever-evolving world.
The advantages of incorporating Strategic Foresight into your research strategy:
Let’s begin with the challenge of uncertainty, as this is what keeps us anxious and awake at night, and is also where your next opportunity is waiting.
Scenario Mapping is an integral part of our Strategic Foresight offering. This tool supports businesses in navigating uncertain futures by anticipating changes, identifying growth opportunities, and shaping strategies that resonate with future users. By drawing on global insights from multiple regions and sources that are most relevant for your business, Scenario Mapping identifies and validates patterns and trends in consumer behaviour.
Our Scenario Mapping methods allow us to create visual representations of different plausible futures based on relevant factors and uncertainties. The benefits this offers include:
Scenario Mapping is invaluable for strategic planning, risk management, and fostering a culture of innovation that empowers businesses to stay ahead of the curve.
Kingfisher has over 1,300 retail stores across nine countries, and its brands include B&Q, Castorama, Brico Depot, and Screwfix. The ambition of this project was to support an aligned vision of the future of homes across category teams, which often work in silos due to the breadth and complexity of product ranging. Kingfisher sought a ten-year view into the future of homes, exploring how home improvement needs and behaviours are likely to change in their key markets. Ultimately, the strategic goal for Kingfisher is to avoid the cycle of reactive product development and continually develop a proactive and pioneering position in the industry.
Our project with Kingfisher spanned 3 phases. Phase one involved foresight research into the future of homes, as well as curated conversations with 16 progressive users and nine industry experts across four regions. Phase two focused on synthesising our insights into future signals and presenting these to the stakeholder team. Phase three revolved around the creation and facilitation of a remote workshop to align 20 stakeholders around a future vision for product design at Kingfisher. Our ongoing work is concentrated on addressing knowledge gaps and validating progress.
Our work with Kingfisher developed rationales for long-term business growth activity with a roadmap focus of ten years, and our collaborative workshop developed a stronger sense of unity about future priorities amongst stakeholders. intO uncovered and distilled micro trends that will be relevant to the future of Kingfisher and the motivations of its audiences, and delivered both live and recorded bi-lingual presentations that can be revisited going forward.
Our Applied Trends service goes beyond traditional off-the-shelf trend reports by identifying the strategic and practical implications of current and emerging trends in relation to your brand, business objectives and business contexts. This service is designed to support the design and development of future-facing products that meet evolving consumer needs and expectations.
Key benefits of Applied Trends include:
Applied Trends helps businesses ideate products and services that resonate with future consumer preferences, market demands, and technological advancements, ensuring they remain at the forefront of their industries.
In the realm of seasonal home accessories, there are different needs for different weather conditions, a huge range of product categories, and diverse cultural celebrations – as well as differences in how they are expressed – from country-to-country. For IKEA, this creates a near boundless set of opportunities, and the challenge of deciding what the strategy should be for developing seasonal offers across its global business.
The foundational phase of this project included stakeholder interviews and knowledge share sessions, market analysis research, a sales data analysis and a hypothesis workshop held with the stakeholder team. Our mixed method research involved global trend research, digital diary studies and in-depth interviews with 30 consumers across the regions, desk research to explore seasonal market and product trends, and a quantitative survey with 1700 shoppers to contextualise our qualitative findings. Additional stakeholder sessions included a workshop that scrutinised commercial potential, a growth-planning workshop, and a delivery session that navigated our top-line findings and customer segmentations alongside the global report and each market-specific report.
This foundational research will influence the way seasonality manifests in the homes of IKEA customers. The project refreshed previous explorations into seasonality and uncovered new needs, desires, behaviours, and trends that showed how seasonality could be strategically embraced in the next three to five years.
For many of our clients, embracing Strategic Foresight is not just about preparing for the future—it’s about actively shaping it. With tools like Scenario Mapping and Applied Trends, intO empowers organisations to navigate uncertainty, drive innovation, and secure a competitive edge in an ever-evolving world.
If you’re ready to future-proof your business and lead your industry with confidence, drop me a line at [email protected]. Together, we’ll discuss your objectives and how, together, we can transform foresight into actionable strategies that will propel your organisation into a prosperous future.
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The AIBA 2024 Conference in Katowice, co-organised by Studio intO, gathered hundreds of global attendees for two days of insights on AI’s impact on business. With 40 speakers from 15 countries, the event offered diverse perspectives on AI’s real-world applications and challenges. We’re already looking ahead to AIBA 2025, building on the connections and ideas from this year. Read the full blog for highlights and stay tuned for next year’s event!
