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Financial reporting standards require that many future‐oriented expenditures for intangibles, such as development costs and personnel training, be expensed in the current period. These standards cause such expenditures to be indistinguishable from expenditures for current revenues, and penalize the earnings of firms making future‐oriented expenditures for intangibles. The current focus on earnings encourages firms to sacrifice long‐term economic objectives for higher reported earnings. This paper analyzes the need for improved reporting for future oriented expenditures. Improved accounting for future‐oriented expenditures would enhance the market’s ability to value stocks, improve company performance, and benefit investors and creditors.

Strategic Funds Programming is designed to help managers bridge the gap between strategy and action. The process has been implemented successfully in companies in the United States and Europe, and has the potential to help corporations deal with the frustrations of getting a formulated strategy moving.

The aim of this paper is to discuss key factors of long-term (sustainable) development and prosperity. There are three basic guidelines that seek explanation: dependence theory, the influence of geographical and environmental factors and cultural determinism. But there are perhaps three other important factors for successful development: education, caring for public space and future oriented thinking.

Why are some nations poor and some are rich? The answer might lie somewhere else other than in the known theories of development. Or rather, maybe every development theory has some truth in itself, but what we need is to create some inventive synthesis. To formulate such synthesis, calculation of future oriented thinking index can help us to understand better why some communities and nations are poor and some are rich. Perhaps future oriented thinking is the main key to prosperity and success.

If future oriented thinking is an important factor to prosperity and success, then an instrument is needed to measure it – the Future Oriented Thinking Index (FOTI). Future Oriented Thinking Index is by methodological approach close to the State of the Future Index (SOFI) developed by Theodore J. Gordon and the Millennium Project. But FOTI should focus more on identifying how people are able to take into account future challenges and behave according to them, less on “state of the future“ (measuring whether a situation will improve or deteriorate). Tentatively 23 indicators are proposed to calculate FOTI.

Many economists, environmentalists and other experts have long been cooperating in designing an alternative indicator to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) capable of better capturing the long-term development of society and not just economic performance in a narrow sense. Future Oriented Thinking Index calculated for individual countries as an arithmetical average of 23 selected variables (individual indicators, all available from publicly accessible sources) is a new approach to complement such indexes as the Gross Domestic Product, the Human Development Index, the Environmental Sustainability Index, or the State of the Future Index.

Kuwait has taken significant steps to reform its corporate governance (CG) by introducing the New Company Law (NCL) in 2013. This study investigates how this reform of CG mechanisms affects the disclosure of future-oriented information. Likewise, it explores how CG mechanisms affect the informativeness of this disclosure.

The sample comprises the nonfinancial firms listed on the Boursa Kuwait from 2014 to 2018. The study uses an automated textual analysis to measure the level of future-oriented disclosure in the annual reports of these firms. The informativeness of disclosure is proxied by firm value at three months of the date of the annual report.

The study finds that Kuwaiti firms with larger board sizes and substantial ownership by institutional investors are less likely to disseminate future-oriented information. Conversely, firms with more independent directors and larger audit committees are more inclined to provide future-oriented disclosure. Furthermore, the disclosure of future-oriented information carries contents that enhance investors' valuations of Kuwaiti firms, especially in firms with fewer institutional ownership and more prominent audit committees.

It focuses on management decisions to disclose information in the annual reports. Examining other channels of disseminating information, such as social media disclosure, provides avenues for future research.

Policy setters in Kuwait should consider the importance of some CG mechanisms to improve the transparency of Kuwaiti firms, as suggested by the NCL. Likewise, investors should rely on such specific CG mechanisms to build their prospects about the firm's value.

Apart from developed countries, the current study is the first evidence on how CG mechanisms could affect the informativeness of future-oriented disclosure in a developing economy. It is also the first to investigate the new CG mechanism introduced by Kuwait NCL in 2013.

Provides background for the use of cases and scenarios for anticipatory learning that require participants to acknowledge and reshape their mental models of the future. Reviews the issues central to anticipatory learning programmes.

This article aims to focus on how to ensure that Future‐Oriented Technology Assessment (FTA) activities have an impact on decision‐making. On the basis of the extensive experience of the authors, this article seeks to offer suggestions regarding the factors that may help policy makers, academics, consultants, and others involved in FTA projects, to produce useful and meaningful contributions to decision‐making processes.

The methodology deployed for this article is empirical. It is based on the lessons extracted and evidence produced by the authors' hundreds of diverse global consulting engagements as well as their analytical work on the subject. Added together the authors of this paper have engaged in over 80 years of professional practice. The article summarizes the results of presentations given by the authors and the ensuing discussion that occurred at the conference: Futures Oriented Technology Analysis 2011, held at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in Seville on 13 May.

Impactful FTA starts with the selection of the appropriate methodologies and skills for the specific anticipatory task. Arguing on the basis of experience, the authors point out that the effective impact of FTA projects on decision‐making depends on a strong grasp of the principles of foresight and project design, an educated client with clear expectations and a strong commitment, well‐developed communication efforts throughout, and considerable managerial capacity both on the demand and supply sides of the process.

By bringing the evidence of experience to bear, this article adds value to existing academic and practitioner discussions of the effectiveness of FTA for decision‐making. The article provides an original vantage point on key questions being posed by both users and suppliers of forward‐looking activities.

The purpose of this paper is to interconnect the firm level competitive performance (competitiveness) to the financial performance of the firms. The goal is to give evidence on how successful small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use their financial performance to support their competitive performance.

Competitiveness is interpreted and measured through the resource-based view theory on a wide range of competitiveness measurements with a sample size of 639 SMEs. Financial data originate from official, publicly accessible governmental archives. All data are from a mid-size Central European country (Hungary). To interconnect competitiveness and financial performance, this paper recognizes two types of cash flow, namely, cash flow to the “past” (dividend and debt service) and cash flow to the “future” (CAPEX and innovation). This paper used ordinary least squares regression and binomial logistic regression to analyze connections.

Cash flows to the “future” have much stronger effects on competitiveness than cash flows to the “past.” Debt services do not affect competitiveness, whereas dividends, CAPEX and innovation efforts have a significant positive connection to competitiveness, showing that higher cash flow indicates higher competitive performance. If this paper knows how much the firm spends on innovation and dividends, in about the four-fifths of the cases, this paper can predict the level of the competitiveness of the firm without any additional information. The level of these variables gives enough information, the variability of them is not relevant.

The explanatory power of future-oriented cash flow elements is much higher than that of the past-oriented ones, while innovation dominates all models. Firms with higher competitiveness build their returns in their cost structure, and only when the financial position of the firm is stable enough, withdraw the financial resource based on a long-term plan. The results are limited by the fact that using the current sample, detailed and representative (e.g. cross-industrial, spatial, etc.) decomposition is not possible.

Literature is focusing on how SMEs reach success, how SMEs “earn money.” There is no evidence on how SMEs “spend money,” earned during their success.

Although founders are often replaced with external CEOs prior to firms making IPOs, firms that do retain founder CEOs generally perform better at IPO. However, this relationship may be contingent upon context. This study aims to investigate how national context influences the relationship between a founder CEO and IPO long-run performance. The authors hypothesize that founder-CEOs will perform better in IPO firms in countries where managerial discretion, future orientation, and the level of conformity to professionalize management are high, and uncertainty avoidance is low.

Using insights from the upper echelon and institutional theory, the authors used hierarchical linear modeling to analyze over 1,000 firms across eight countries.

Founder CEOs perform best in IPO firms in a national context where managerial discretion is low, uncertainty avoidance is high and the level of conformity is high.

This study contributes to a growing area of cross-national IPO research in management by investigating the relationship between culture, management and IPO performance.