Keywords Complexity, Disruptive events, Emergence, Reframing, Variation, Policy making, Complexity theory, Uncertainty management, Strategic planning Paper type Conceptual paper 1. Foresight techniques To date,
The FFRC team stressed that due to the nature of long-reaching scenarios to hold a great variety of unknown uncertainties,
If the user of the resulting numerical information concerning the scenarios is not aware of the uncertainties behind scenarios,
These situations inherently have to deal with high uncertainties 2, which means that options for the future are unclear,
but intrinsic uncertainties inherently related to emerging technologies. Our basic claim is that in order to appreciate and to influence developments in new emerging technologies,
and discussion In this paper we proposed a route to deal with the intrinsic uncertainties of a new emerging field like nanotechnology.
opportunities and uncertainties, RS Policy document, 2004.15 H. W. Kroto, J. R. Heath, S. C. O'brien, R. F. Curl, R. E. Smalley, C60:
century and its full development during the twentieth century, one of the key concerns of urban planning has been to foresee the future and limit uncertainty.
its complexity and its uncertainty. Scenario design was chosen from among all the foresight tools because it provided an adequate management of the topic's complexity and uncertainty while at the same time unfolding alternative futures.
Scenario design is a foresight technique that has been used widely and documented (Godet, 1993; van der Heijden, 1996;
because it is profoundly creative and capable of handling uncertainty. The stated foresight exercise followed the conventional scenario design methodology made up of three sequential stages:
This axis encompassed all future uncertainties related to social behaviour, economic models and public policies towards SD. 2. Horizontal axis. Showed the availability of resources needed to achieve the sustainable development goals in the future.
This axis included all critical uncertainties regarding the abundance or scarcity of technological, economic, human, institutional, and natural resources.
Shaped by the values and parameters of legal security and certainty, the legal mind seems to have developed a phobia as regards uncertainty
The LOTF team then derived from these trends a number of key uncertainties. The latter consisted, specifically, of the two following legal contingencies:
These key uncertainties and contingencies allowed the LOTF team to systematically explore possible futures, providing the foundation for the following three alternative futures
and in the legal context, the production of scenarios is extremely useful for dealing with the inexorable uncertainty of the Future 18.
uncertainties can be explored through scenarios that envisage possible and alternative futures, preparing legal systems for the matrix of different possibilities that compose the Future scenarios,
in this respect, should be used‘‘as a tool to deal with uncertainty, rather than as a claim to know the future''(HIIL, 2011).
Given the systemic unpredictability of the future 20, how can FTA-based or oriented laws and legal research be evaluated effectively?
Through this analysis, the paper underlines the roles that FTA can play in managing uncertainty
For a detailed analysis of those trends, uncertainties, scenarios (including its likely triggers), as well as of the strategic implications for national legislators derived from the analysis of those scenarios,
Regarding the latter paper, Tuomi reconfirms the thesis of the unpredictability of the future, arguing that foresight has missed systematically important future developments due to its reliance on categorizations
and uncertainties e g. about the up-scaling of the current processes used for material production
In this situation, is it possible to find ways to consider knowledge about the potential impacts of a technology which admittedly is gained with high uncertainty and its assessment with regard to sustainability already in early phases of technology development?
In short, the methodical challenge for our program is to develop roadmaps that combine the disaggregation level of a product roadmap with the timeframe and the inherent uncertainties of strategic roadmaps for branches or industries.
and new governance structures are evolving, reflecting growing interdependence and complexity and the need for decision-making under uncertainty.
On the other hand, there is some experience with similar doubts about the potential of technology roadmapping. In the words of Robert Galvin:
this last edition was responding timely to the growing demand for forward-looking intelligence in times of crisis and uncertainty,
The papers presented in this special issue address the above issues by exploring from different angles the growing demand for forward-looking intelligence in times of crisis and uncertainty,
Four further contributions analyse concrete cases of advanced FTA practices in areas that are characterised by high degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
or whether it‘produces fictional certainty that leads to managerial overconfidence and blindness to true novelty and uncertainties,
by zooming in on the issue of unpredictability, in line with Linstone's argument on the limitations of forecasting in times of transition between two eras.
Tuomi looks at epistemic and ontological causes for this failure, by introducing the idea of‘ontological unpredictability
'and showing how innovation leads to unpredictability that cannot be removed by more accurate data or incremental improvements in existing predictive models.
Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:57 03 december 2014 732 Editorial Should a firm match its foresight approach with the types of uncertainty it faces?
Vecchiato kicks off a set of four contributions on concrete cases of how FTA is used in addressing compleexit and uncertainty.
and use foresight practices and techniques for handling environmental uncertainty. He expands the understanding of environmental uncertainty by defining the concept of‘boundary uncertainty,
'which regards the identity of the components of the business (micro) environment. Vecchiato distinguishes between‘continuous'and‘discontinuous'drivers of change
and unpredictability Such notions lead several authors to remind us on the role of FTA to challenge persisting premises on extrapolated futures based on past events.
Merenneidontie 24 D, 02320 Espoo, Finland Unpredictability has two main sources: epistemic uncertainty and ontological unpredictability.
When disruptive and downstream innovations become frequent, ontological unpredictability becomes increasingly important for innovation policy and strategy.
The analysis of the nature of ontological unpredictability explains why future-oriented technology analysis and foresight frequently fail to grasp socially and economically important technical developments and clariffie why policy strategy,
and future-oriented analysis need to move beyond evidence-based approaches. Keywords: unpredictability; ontological expansion; anticipatory systems;
innovation; creattiv evolution Introduction Predictions about future almost always fail. In this paper, the epistemic and ontological causes for this failure are described and their implications for foresight, innovation policy,
The paper introduces the idea of‘ontological unpredictability 'and shows how innovation leads to unpredictability that cannot be removed by more accurate data or incremental improvements in existing predictive models.
Based on the presented analysis, it highlights some methodological implications for future-oriented analysis and policy-making. The paper aims at a conceptual contribution that builds on several disciplines,
The next section introduces the two sources of unpredictabilitty epistemic uncertainty and ontological unpredictability. The following section then further elaborates the idea of ontological unpredictability in the context of innovation theory,
showing that downstream innovation leads to a practically important form of ontological unpredictability. It then introduces Bergson's model of creative evolution,
showing that it leads to ontological expansion, and illustrates this using the expansion of mobile phone industry as an example.
Two sources of unpredictability In much of contemporary thinking, failures in prediction indicate a need to engage in further study and research.
and action creates a delicate balance between predictability and unpredictability in social systems and interactions. As soon as we have an explicit theory of human or social behaviour,
In economics, Knight (1921) differentiated between two kinds of uncertainties. One he labelled as risk and the other as‘true'uncertainty.
Risk, according to Knight, was associated with events where outcomes could be known using probability distributions, either a priori or from statistics of past experiences.
the associated uncertainty is measurable and can always be managed as a fixed cost of doing business.
True uncertainty, in contrast, emerges when the situation cannot be classified as an example of a generic group of similar situations.
Entrepreneurs live under true uncertainty irredeemable ignorance, and failing foresight, which in competitive markets remains the only source of profits. 1 Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 737 Epistemic uncertainty Integrating the numerous extant typologies
of uncertainties proposed in the literature, Walker et al. 2003) distinguished two sources of uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty, according to these authors, is uncertainty due to the imperfection of our knowledge,
which can be reduced by more research. Variability uncertainty, in turn, is due to inherent variability of empirical quantities,
generated by the inherent randomness and unpredictability of natural, behavioural, and social processes. Following van Asselt and Rotmans (2002), they characterised variability uncertainty as‘ontological uncertainty'.
'2 The ontological uncertainty of van Asselt and Rotmans and Walker et al. is about uncertainty of attributes associated with given objects.
Although the attributes of the objects can be uncertain, random, and perhaps unknowable, the ontology itself is presumed taken for granted
and to be known. This concept of‘ontological uncertainty'thus somewhat paradoxically requires that there is no uncertainty about the underlying ontology.
Therefore, we use the term epistemic uncertainty below to cover both variability uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, the focus is on a specific form of unpredictability that looks terminologically similar to ontological uncertainty
but which is fundamentally different from it. As uncertainty tends to be an inherently epistemic concept,
we distinguish between (epistemic uncertainty and (ontological) unpredictability. A central claim made in this paper is that ontological unpredictability is becoming the dominnan form of unpredictability as communication
and information networks make distributed downstream innovation increasingly visible. Ontological unpredictability thus becomes importaan for technology analysis, foresight,
and strategy, as well as for characterising the limitations of evidence-based policy-making in innovation-intensive societies and economies.
In the next section, we further clarify this concept. Ontological unpredictability The nature of ontological unpredictability can most conveniently be understood in the context of innovation theory.
The prototypical narrative of the traditionalwestern model of innovation can be found from the first chapter of Genesis. The 1769 version of King James Bible tells us how cattle
and beasts are created: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle,
and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
The challenge of ontological unpredictability can thus be formulated in a simple way: How can we predict the number of cattle or the impact of a new technology,
'Anticipation under ontological uncertainty Ontological expansion makes anticipation a challenging task. To understand this task,
The fundamental reason for ontological unpredictability is, therefore, the fact that predictability only emerges as a cognitive phenomenon.
we may now reformulate the distinction between epistemic uncertainty and ontological unpredictability. Epistemic uncertainty is located on the right-hand side of the figure.
Ontological Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 745 Figure 2. Modelling in the context of the phenomenological veil. unpredictability,
Ontological expansion and foresight research The above discussed concepts of unpredictability and ontological expansion shed some new light on recent discussions on foresight research.
In strategic decision-making, it is possible that the traditionalansoffian analysis of weak signals mainly produces fictional certainty that leads to managerial overconfidence and blindness to true novelty and uncertainties.
full certainty can lead to unpredictability. Creative evolution and ontological expansion, however, mean that the dimensions of such‘control space'also emerge in an evolutionary process.
Implications for strategy and policy-making When true uncertainty and ontological expansion are important, formal models rarely provide useful predictions.
Notes 1. Uncertainty, of course, has been a central theme in much of economic theory since Knight. For a critical historical review of key contributions, see Mirowski (2009.
2. Ontological uncertainty has been defined in several different ways by different authors. For example, Lane and Max-field (2004) distinguished between truth uncertainty, semantic uncertainty,
and ontological uncertainty. Ontological uncertainty, for them, is about what kinds of entities inhabit the world,
what kinds of interactions these entities can have, and how the entities and their interaction modes change as a result of these interactions.
The ontological uncertainty of van Asselt and Rotmans could in this classification be defined as truth uncertainty. 3. The need for text communication, paging,
and access to the telex network has already been discussed in the first GSM plenary meeting in Stockholm in 1982 (CEPT-CCH-GSM 1982).
Risk, uncertainty, and profit. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Knorr Cetina, K. 1999. Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge.
Ontological uncertainty and innovation. Journal of Evolutionary economics 15, no. 1: 3 50. Latour, B. 1996.
Uncertainty in integrated assessment modelling. Climatic Change 54, no. 1: 75 105. Varela, F. J.,E. Thompson,
Defining uncertainty: A conceptual basis for uncertainty management in model-based decision support. Integrated Assessment 4, no. 1: 5 17.
Wallén, M. 2008. Mannen som uppfann sms: et. Dagens Industri, May 11. http://di. se/Artiklar/2008/5/11/41905/Mannensoomuppfann-sms-et/Whitehead, A n. 1978.
http://www. tandfonline. com/loi/ctas20 Ignorance and uncertainty: influences on future-oriented technology analysis Denis Loveridge a & Ozcan Saritas a a Manchester Institute of Innovation research, Manchester Business school, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Published online:
Denis Loveridge & Ozcan Saritas (2012) Ignorance and uncertainty: influences on future-oriented technology analysis, Technology analysis & Strategic management, 24:8, 753-767, DOI:
8 september 2012,753 767 Ignorance and uncertainty: influences on future-oriented technology analysis Denis Loveridge*and Ozcan Saritas Manchester Institute of Innovation research, Manchester Business school, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) deals in phenomenological ignorance
uncertainty; qualitative; quantitattive methods Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Arthur C. Clarke) 1. Introduction Is there something phoney about foresight,
Roberts 2012) and uncertainty in underpinning quantitative and qualitative thought in FTA. There is an evident paradox in characterising,
an extreme case of the combination of an Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 755 unusually severe earthquake and tsunami,
qualitative opinion and the quantitative information including all its uncertainties? How would the risk of disaster
FTA's future orientation means that it deals with matters characterised by uncertainty and ignorance:
uncertainty and ignorance that are subsumed generally under the title of subjective opinion in many dimensions. It is not the intention to debate the merits of the methods
Hopefully, it will include statements of known unknowns in recognition of the uncertainty of the outcome.
and qualitative information that goes beyond the Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 757 conventional‘synthesis report'.
and uncertainties involved revealed in the next section. 4. FTA and subjective behaviour: methodological issues and metaphors FTA assumes that its processes have an innate capability to deal with dynamic situations made up of many interconnected themes, each
Many of the perceived‘uncertainties'of quantitative information arise from these sources and from the nature of expert opinion:
but the next section necessarily sets out briefly their relation to the purpose of the paper, namely the influence of ignorance and uncertainty on FTA. 5. Quantitative and qualitative methods in FTA In a sense,
and uncertainty 759 Direct observation of objective reality People's perceptions of objective Reality Artificial reconstruction of objective Reality Axiomatic Reason/logic/theorems Normative modelling
these judgements place less Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 761 emphasis on philosophical matters and more on practical ones of concern in FTA,
and sectors of society probabilistically to express their relevant uncertainties How to deepen dialogue with society How to improve governance Because of the dominant role of subjective opinion,
it also illustrates the uncertainties and the kinds of ignorance involved. The need for capabilities and knowledge in breadth and depth is established clearly.
and uncertainty 763 of expertise and how it could be assessed in advance. Recognising an‘expert'and coming to some understanding of how expert the individual was,
and acceptance, bringing Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 765 a new social role for computation and computers.
uncertainty and ignorance (5) Pursued on the basis of knowledge applied through due diligence investigations'FTAASSUMES that its processes have an innate capability to deal with dynamic situations made up of many interconnected themes, each
so that its‘certainties'are fraught with the uncertainties of expertise (7) There is the temptation to believe that hugely increased computational power will take FTA into a Kurzwellian era in
large and small, relating to Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 767 long-term directions of change in the business environment.
In Judgment under uncertainty, heuristics and biases, ed. D. Kahneman, P. Slovic and A. Taversky, 294 306.
Experts in uncertainty: Opinion and subjective probability in science. Oxford: Oxford university Press. Funtowicz, S. O,
Uncertainty and quality in science for policy, theory and decision library, Series A: Philosophy and methodology of the social sciences.
and there is too much uncertainty but the promising direction is available through the informal expectations circulating amongst technology developers.
Expectations thus reduce uncertainty in much the same way as heuristics do in research and development (Nelson andwinter 1982.
Mackenzie (1990) describes in his study on guided nuclear missiles how the degree of uncertainty about the promised capabilities of the missile depends on the distance from the development itself.
He calls this a‘trough of uncertainty'.'For the involved engineers, the uncertainty is relatively high:
they know all the details, conditions and assumptions. The uncertainty is also high for those at a distance,
who are involved not: it is not clear to them what the expectation entails, and they are indifferent to its veracity.
For direct stakeholders between these two positions, such as clients or prospective users, the uncertainty is relatively small:
Brown and Michael (2003) describe the phenomenon of the trough of uncertainty in the study of clinical applications of biotechnology:
According to the‘trough of uncertainty'(Section 3 the performative rebound will be stronger when it concerns stakeholders at distance from the knowledge production.
Revealing uncertainty in gene silencing technology discourse. Technology analysis & Strategic management 18, nos. 3 4: 345 59.
matching environmental uncertainty Riccardo Vecchiato a a Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Published online:
matching environmental uncertainty, Technology analysis & Strategic management, 24:8, 783-796, DOI: 10.1080/09537325.2012.715487 To link to this article:
matching environmental uncertainty Riccardo Vecchiato*Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy This paper explores how strategic decision-makers select
and use foresight practices and techniqque for handling environmental uncertainty. Our research is based on a multiple-case study of corporate organisations that recently faced major changes in their external environment and increasing turbulence.
We expand our understanding of environmental uncertainty by defining the concept of‘boundary uncertainty, 'which regards the identity of the components of the businees (micro) environment.
environmental uncertainty; strategic foresight; planning; learning; strategic management Introduction The strategic management literature (Hofer and Schendel 1978; Miles and Snow 1978;
Thompson 1967) have emphasised long the role of the environment as a major source of uncertainty for strategic decision-makers in charge of coping with emerging opportunities and threats.
A broad range of heuristic approaches to coping with uncertainty have been developed in corporrat organisations: today, the term‘strategic foresight'is used widely to designate the activities
in order to match uncertainty in its business environment and thus prepare at its best for the future.
how do managers design their strategic foresight approach in different environments and thus under different conditions of uncertainty?
In order to explore the relationships between environmental uncertainty, foresight, and strategic decision-making, we performed a multiple-case study of corporate organisations.
on the one hand, the selected firms operated in distinct industries that underwent considerably different (kinds of) drivers of change and conditions of uncertainty.
and refined their approaches to handling environmental uncertainty. We start examining the historical evolution and the main drivers of change in each industry of our sample firms since the early 1990s.
We thus expand our understanding of environmental uncertainty by defining the concept of‘boundary uncertainty'
Environmental uncertainty and strategic foresight Conceptualisation of environmental uncertainty Early conceptualisations of uncertainty go back to pioneering management scholars such as Knight (1921) and March and Simon (1958),
and this instability creates uncertainty for rationally bounded managers who are not able to fully collect, process,
‘environmental uncertainty'arises when managers lack accurate information Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 05:03 03 december 2014 Strategic foresight 785 about organisations, activities,
Milliken (1987) distinguishes between three types of uncertainty that act together to determine the overall uncertainty faced by strategic decision-makers.
The first is‘state'uncertainty and refers to the inability to understand how the components of the environment might change (e g. in the case of the automotive industry, the driver of change of ecological concern by public policy-makers in Europe:
The second is‘effect'uncertainty and refers to managers'inability to predict what the consequences of drivers of change will be on their organisations (e g. will customers switch from a traditional product fuel-based car to an innovative one hybrid car?).
Finally,‘response'uncertainty is associated with attempts to understand what response options are available to the organisation and
Concerning the classification of the different components of the external environment that bring about uncertainty, Dill (1958) makes the distinction between‘general'and‘task'environments.
practices and techniques The challenge of coping with increasing uncertainty encouraged new analytical approaches to decision-making and long-range planning:
and implementation of appropriate techniques for anticipating the likely evolution of drivers of change (state uncertainty), their consequences on the organisation (effect uncertainty),
and the most suitable responses (response uncertainty). Roadmaps, 3 scenarios, 4 and strategic options (Dixit and Pindyck 1994) are by far the most popular foresight techniques (Becker 2002;
what conditions of environmental uncertainty a given practice or technique is more appropriate and effective than others.
Extant research streams of environmental uncertainty and strategic foresight are aligned not seamlessly. The following issue in particular remains largely unexplored:
how do managers design their strategic foresight approach in different environments and thus under different conditions of uncertainty?
We aim at expanding our understanding of environmental uncertainty by exploring the different kinds of drivers of change
(and the different kinds of uncertainty conditions) a firm might face in its business environment. We thus aim at investigating the suitability
and appropriateness of different foresight techniques and practices for coping with such conditions of uncertainty. In this way, we try to enhance the use of foresight by practitioners
matching the right anticipatory approach with the specific conditions of uncertainty a firm is facing in its business environment is an essential condition
and Siemens operated in different industries that underwent considerably different (kinds of) drivers of change and conditions of uncertainty.
and refined their approaches to handling environmental uncertainty. Table 1. Overview of case studies. Firm Business Foresight activities started Philips Consumer electronics Early 1990s BASF Chemicals Mid-1990s Daimler Automotive Late 1970s Siemens Consumer Products,
we analysed the foresight activities of each firm in relation to uncertainty and drivers of change in its business environment and the use of strategic foresight in decision-making.
Cross-case analysis and theory triangulation with different bodies of literatuur on environmental uncertainty, foresight,
Matching strategic foresight with environmental uncertainty: empirical evidence In this section, we illustrate the main findings of our research.
Foresight in mature industries Environmental uncertainty and foresight approach The chemical and automotive industries throughout the last decade were typically mature and global industries where trajectories of technologies
and response uncertainty) was framed around scenarios. These were built via a top-down process that started at corporate level,
Foresight in fast-paced industries Environmental uncertainty and foresight approach The consumer electronics and ICT industries
A model for uncertainty and strategic foresight In the prior sections, we sketched the strategic foresight approaches that emerged from our data through
our findings offer the broad outline of a conceptual framework regarding how decision-makers match strategic foresight with environmental uncertainty.
We define this issue‘boundary uncertainty':'it is the difficulty to figure out who the main players
and the consumer electronics and ICT businesses, on the other hand, are suited well to illustrate what types of uncertainty a firm may face in its external environment
state uncertainty), how they could affect the industry structure and the competitive position of the firm (e g. the decrease of global demand:
effect uncertainty), and what responses it could adopt (e g. postponement of the launch of new models:
response uncertainty. Operating in the chemical and automotive businesses could be compared with a person playing a game of cards,
and response uncertainty evolution of the key components of the industry, effect on the organisation,
drivers of change in the consumer electronics business of Philips (or the broader ICT business in the case of Siemens) affected the identity of the main components of the micro environment itself and thus brought about‘boundary'uncertainty.
Building on the concept of boundary uncertainty, we distinguish between two main types of drivers of change.
which surrounds the industry. 7 The second category is‘discontinuous'drivers of change that bring about boundary uncertainty, by leading to completely new kinds of products, players,
and the tools and practices to be used for handling uncertainty. Let us consider the case of continuous drivers of change and the chemical and automotive industries first.
and response uncertainty. First, these techniques allowed managers to think about the alternative evolutions of drivers of change (state uncertainty) in an organic and systematic way.
Second, they allowed managers to exploit effectively what they already knew (and needed to know) about the boundaries of their business.
they were able to directly address uncertainty regarding the evolution of the main components of the business and the impact on the organisation (effect uncertainty) and the best options for coping with these drivers (response uncertainty).
In the face of boundary uncertainty, it is simply not sensible to use techniques such as scenarios or roadmaps.
Only after that boundary uncertainty has been solved and decision-makers have gained a sound grasp of the main components of their industry,
in order to deepen the investigation of state uncertainty (e g. evolution of demand for new Internet-based services on TV),
effect uncertainty (e g. role of new Internet service providers), and response uncertainty (e g. partnership with Internet service providers) of‘discontinuous'drivers of change.
Discussion Our work relates to several fields of research in strategy and organisation. First, we define the concepts of‘boundary'uncertainty
and‘continuous'and‘discontinuous'drivers of change and we thus improve our understanding of the different kinds of uncertainty a firm may face in its business environment.
Second, we provide empirical evidence on the ways major companies designed their strategic foresight approaches to handling uncertainty and supporting long-range planning (Cassingena Harper et al. 2008;
Da Costa et al. 2008. We argue that boundary uncertainty is something different from state, effect,
and response uncertainty, which so far have been the main focus of strategic scholars (Milliken 1987).
Boundary uncertainty entails strong implications for foresight efforts: our findings suggest that decision-makers facing discontinuous drivers of change
and boundary uncertainty are more likely to focus their predictive efforts on environmental scanning and explorative actions (e g. venture initiatives
and start-ups) in order to identify the new components of the industry (see, for instance, Mendonça and Sapio 2009).
Decision-makers facing continuous drivers of change or discontinuous drivers of which they have solved already boundary uncertainty might eventually exploit scenarios
and response uncertainty. Discontinuous drivers of change typically stem from technology-driven industries which are at the initial stage of their life cycle.
and thereby the emphasis on such challenges (and boundary uncertainty) is quite inferior. Conclusions In this paper
we believe that matching the right foresight approach with the specific kind of uncertainty faced by a firm is an essential condition in order to foster and nurture the learning process about the future
‘Boundary'uncertainty in particular offers interesting avenues for further investigation. Our arguments suggest that a crucial issue is the ability to distinguish continuous drivers of change from discontinuous ones.
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