Corporate foresight and its effect on innovation, strategic decision making and organizational performance (case study: Iranian banking industry)

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the capability of corporate foresight in the organizations and its impacts on innovation, quality of managers’ strategic decision-making and organizational performance in the banking industry of Iran.

Design/methodology/approach

In the first part, upon introducing corporate foresight from the two process and content perspectives, influential elements in this construct are discussed. Then, corporate foresight’s relationship with innovation and strategic decision-making is examined and its effect on organizational performance is analyzed within a structural model. Using interview and questionnaire, the data research were collected from the banking industry of Iran including 30 banks (state-commercial banks, specialist-state banks, interest-free loan funds and private banks). Through descriptive, inferential statistical analyses and structural equation modeling using SPSS and Smart PLS software, reliability of the measurement model with 576 samples was confirmed.

Findings

The results show that the corporate foresight playing three roles of initiator, strategist, and opponent affects the innovation. Moreover, the research results suggest that using the data from the foresight and identifying the weak signals, we can reduce the uncertainty and issue prior warnings in order to enhance the quality of manager’s strategic decision making and promote the organizational performance.

Originality/value

This paper is one of the articles from the sources of the doctoral thesis of Futures Studies as “The relationship between knowledge absorption capacity, corporate foresight and its effect on the performance of the banking industry in Iran”.

Citation

Joneidi Jafari, M. and NiliPourTabataba’i, S.A. (2017), "Corporate foresight and its effect on innovation, strategic decision making and organizational performance (case study: Iranian banking industry)", Foresight, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 559-576. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-07-2017-0035