Foresight as a tool for creating and managing a company’s ecosystem

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the company and its environment have been the subject of lively academic discussion by several major global schools: the study of national innovation systems, and of the emergence, development and diffusion of innovation; research that analyzes value chains; institutional theory; ecosystem approach; strategic management; forecasting; planning; and foresight to assess current corporate processes and future transformations. The research landscape is still highly fragmented and characterized by several extensive gaps related to an integrated approach to the study of the company, taking into account the global trends, incentives and patterns of behavior of the key stakeholders. The paper presents the results of the research uniting different theoretical approaches on the platform of foresight: a two-loop integral ecosystem model is proposed which takes into account the influence of global trends on internal and external stakeholders of a company, including the empirical survey of more than 260 Russian companies in 2021. A set of practical recommendations for using modern foresight instruments to form, manage and transform the company ecosystem is given. A forecast of possible directions of development is made.