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Research studies on futures studies have recently gained significant attention to create a desirable future based on the environmental change. Futures studies follow discovery, invention, presentation, test and evolution of possible, feasible and desirable futures. The purpose of this study is to examine some important aspects of the relationship between futures studies and planning and to present a model where futures scenarios have been developed as an integral part of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the lens of dynamic capabilities theory and creative system theory.

Based on interpretive structural modeling and Delphi technique, the most important trends, proponents and uncertainties of the future of 10 Iranian petrochemical SMEs is identified and related innovative scenarios are presented.

The findings show four scenarios on the petrochemical industry including attracting investment, the presence of the private sector, attracting people's capital and sustainable development of the petrochemical industry.

The paper undertakes a first of its kind cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis to design Innovative Scenario Planning for SMEs. Despite the importance of scenario planning in SMEs, theories for understanding the nexus of entrepreneurial future studies remain underdeveloped. Therefore, there is still a theoretical gap and lack of research; hence, the current study tries to shed light on the topic and fill the gap in the entrepreneurship literature.

The author, a veteran futurist, aims to trace the history of the scenario process, starting with those developed by the Shell team that anticipated an OPEC manipulation of oil supplies and prices that occurred in 1973. Largely on the basis of the Shell scenario's brilliant insight, the methodology initially seemed to offer organizations a chance to bet on the future before it happened.

The paper describes how the best practices in the scenario process identified in this historical review can be adopted by current leaders.

The paper reveals that, in cases where the scenarios have effectively influenced corporate decision making, it was because the scenario team stayed together to execute the foresights they reached in the scenario process.”

Scenarios encourage strategic thinking about long‐term futures and potential discontinuities in a world that obsesses about the short‐term.

The paper concludes that scenarios, to be most effective, demand a rigor that consumes time and resources. They require leaders to open conduits to information, promote group interactions, encourage disciplined imagination and demand persistent follow‐through.

This paper seeks to outline four scenarios developed for the future of the South West Midlands region of England. Like many depressed regions in the UK, the foundation industries that initially developed the region have gone. Manufacturing is continuing to decline and the low‐skilled economic underpinnings of the region have all but disappeared. The population, however, has not changed with the times, but remains low‐skilled and largely unemployable to many of the industries the region is trying to attract to regenerate itself. Despite this economically depressed picture, the region is renowned for its sense of community and regional identity, and hence crime is uncharacteristically low given the economic and demographic circumstances of the region.

A range of methodologies were employed to inform scenario building for the future of the region, including a literature review, interviews with employers and community leaders, a word association exercise and questionnaire with children approaching school leaving age, and data analysis of demographic and economic trends.

Four scenarios were developed as possible futures for the region to help inform policy making, in particular educational policy to encourage more young people to remain in education for longer and gain higher qualifications.

The paper offers practical ideas for (re)engaging young people in education in a depressed region where the value of education has never really been appreciated.

This paper offers readers alternative perspectives on an area of education that might otherwise be ignored and finds positive ways forwards to further promote education in the region.

The aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between (dual) organizational identity and individual heuristics – simple rules and biases – in the process of strategy change. This paper offers a theory on identity reflexivity as a cognitive mechanism of strategy change in the context of organizational hybridity.

The authors draw on a 2-year ethnographic study at a Dutch social housing association dealing with the process of strategy change. The empirical data comprises of in-depth semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations as well as secondary sources.

Conflicting identities at the organizational level influence heuristics at the individual level, since members tend to identify with their department's identity. Despite conflicting interpretations, paths of cognitive shortcuts – that the authors define as internal and external identity reflexivity – are shared by the conflicting identities.

The findings of this research are subject to limitations typical of a qualitative case-study, such as possibly being context dependent. The authors argue that this research contributes to the understanding of how individual heuristics relate to organizational heuristics, and suggest that the process of identity reflexivity can contribute to the alignment of conflicting identities enabling strategy formation in the context of a dual-identity organization.

Understanding how managers with conflicting identities achieve agreements is important to help organizational leaders to pursue sustainability-oriented strategy change.

Given the pressure experienced by mission-driven organizations to integrate multiple sustainability demands in their mission, understanding managers' decision-making mechanism when adapting to new, often conflicting, sustainability demands is important to accelerate societal sustainability transitions.

This paper addresses the process of new strategy design in the context of a socially driven business. This context fundamentally differs from the one addressed by the existing heuristics literature with respect to organizational environment and role, and specific competing demands.

The purpose of this study is to assess the appropriateness of applying the ISO 9001 quality standard to the residential aged‐care sector.

The study undertakes a prospective qualitative survey using the Delphi methodology. A panel of 14 experts in the field constitutes the panel.

ISO 9001 has certain shortcomings in the context of the residential aged‐care sector. There is a need to fit generic quality‐management models to the specific characteristics of the sector, and to integrate those generic quality management models with specialised models.

Managers of residential aged‐care services should ensure: that they have sufficient resources to implement quality‐management models; that all personnel are involved in the implementation; and that generic models are appropriately adapted to the specific needs of the aged‐care sector.

The paper provides an original conceptual overview of the application of a generic quality‐management system to a specific services sector.

In his review of notable planning disasters, Hall proposes two ways for avoiding future disasters. In a turbulent age, the improvement of forecasting methods is quite problematic. Ranking near and distant futures requires images of alternative future developments. This paper investigates the use of scenarios constructed through interactive knowledge in order to evaluate near‐future policies and programmes. However, since scenarios normally have long‐time horizons, there is a tenuous link between the ideas and aspirations outlined in alternative scenarios and near‐future policies and programmes. This implies that such scenarios can in the first place be used to assess preferences in the near future in relation to distant ideas and aspirations expressed in them. They may also help structure the context and its underlying plural values, and enlarge the range of possible criteria for evaluation. In this sense, they require that evaluation remains open to the discovery of societal preferences, interests and desires. For this purpose uses the concept “exploratory evaluation”. The latter hopefully provides a useful instrument in evaluation. While the emphasis in this paper is on the methodological implications of using long‐term scenarios to evaluate current choices, it nevertheless indicates how scenarios might be used in evaluating policies for sustainable development in southern Mediterranean cities: Tunis, Izmir and Rabat‐Casablanca.

Drawing on a EU-funded research project on urbanisation in China and Europe (URBACHINA), the purpose of this inquiry is to explore the potential of foresight – through visionary scenarios and related participatory processes – in promoting learning and sustainable futures in China’s centrally planned context. Our research explores the use of backcasting, of Donella Meadows’ “levers” and Paul Raskin’s “proximate-ultimate drivers” and of archetypal worldviews to further our understanding of how we think about the future, and of the tension between transition scenarios and transformative, paradigmatic or deep change.

A review of recent foresight studies and literature provides an overview of the latest approaches: in particular the methods, scope, process, level of participation, themes discussed and wild cards considered. Building on this, the inquiry designs and implements a participatory, normative and qualitative scenario building to explore sustainable urban futures for China, adapting the elements of Joseph Voros’ basic foresight process to include a total of nine steps, with five workshops, two international surveys, an adapted backcasting step and internal consistency mechanisms.

The combination of a participatory iterative process with normative approaches to envisioning, helped question assumptions and deeply ingrained development models, as well as the narrow space for “alternatives” resulting from China’s centralised, top-down planning and decision-making. The experience confirms the power of scenario/storyline building in helping reflect and question strategic policy choices and enrich urban policy debates. The process successfully proposed a number of steps that ensured triangulation of the envisioning outcomes and additional learning also through backcasting. Finally, the research shows a clear link between the development of scenarios space, the debate on transition and transformative futures and archetypal worldviews, which were shown to be stable even after decades.

The URBACHINA approach to the specific challenge of sustainable urbanisation in China applies a strong normative component combined to more locally accepted exploratory methods and introduces a participatory approach to all key stages of scenario building. This represents an innovative contribution to the country’s foresight practice and the results help Chinese decision makers to reflect on the wider sustainability implications of their urban strategy. The inquiry deepens our understanding of the use of proximate and ultimate drivers of change and of the tension between transition and transformation pathways to our future.

In Finland, new forest-based sector (FBS) businesses are seen as important for the transition to the circular bioeconomy. The purpose of this study is to explore the transition of Finnish FBS companies to new business models. The aim is to understand how FBS companies define their ideal future states and related business models for the year 2030.

This study uses thematic interviews with managers from various FBS firms and companies from interfacing sectors. In the interviews, the key idea of backcasting was pursued when respondents discussed the desirable future states of their business.

The effort to achieve growth of the business and the appearance of new products characterize the company-specific desirable future states. In these desirable futures, expanded businesses will be based on strong knowledge. Resource efficiency and collaboration create a strong basis for the desirable future state of the whole FBS to create a sustainable and innovative “Wood Valley.”

The key limitations are that the backcasting process has been conducted only through interviews and a participative approach with stakeholder dialogue is lacking in the process. This means that the desirable futures are created by the FBS companies only.

As a practical contribution, the study shows the future-oriented thinking and goals of FBS firms. As a theoretical contribution, it extends research on sustainable business models and discussions on the novel field of corporate foresight.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how well Chinese teacher education positions itself in preparing qualified teachers for its vast K‐12 education system, especially in the transition from examination‐oriented to future‐oriented examination.

The paper looks at literatures discussing background, strengths and weaknesses of current Chinese teacher‐training programs. It also employs a Delphi‐based scenario research method to explore plausible futures of curriculum design for teacher education.

In order to ensure its astonishing economic development and present itself as a constructive force for world betterment, it is crucial for China to carry on its ongoing educational reform, especially in the area of curriculum for its teacher‐training programs.

The disciplinary curriculum currently employed in Chinese teacher education should be shifted to a trans‐disciplinary curriculum to produce future‐oriented, internationally‐prepared, and ICT‐savvy graduates with the high moral standards the country demands in its effort to play an important role on the international stage.

The research, while meriting the structured instruction displayed by the Chinese education system, argues that the system should strive to provide students with such skills as creativity, flexibility, initiative, leadership, all necessary in the globally connected future world. The second part of the paper will focus on four scenarios as a result of recent research among Chinese educators and administrators.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss how stakeholder assessment of scenarios can be used to trigger a structured and, therefore, more efficient debate amongst stakeholders about future options for achieving a more eco-efficient transport system in Europe. Particularly, it wants to explore the extent to which a distinction between the desirability and the feasibility of a potential future development can render such debates more rational and transparent.

The paper is based on a project on eco-efficient transport for the Science and Technology Option Assessment panel of the European Parliament (STOA). Key elements of the methods used in the STOA project were easily understandable scenarios and a survey of the main assumptions underlying the scenarios. Both the scenarios and the survey were used in a stakeholder workshop to assess the desirability and the feasibility of approaches towards establishing a more eco-efficient transport system.

The methodological approach proved helpful for collecting a large amount of valuable information in a relative short time. In particular, the distinction between desirability and feasibility was useful in mapping out the patterns of opinion amongst stakeholders and for understanding where there is common ground, where there are differences and what the reasons behind these differences are. It helped in identifying promising pathways towards more eco-efficient transport futures and in getting a better understanding of barriers and of the ways to overcome them.

The approach served as the basis for having a well-structured, rational and, thus, efficient debate. In practice, this factor is relevant because stakeholder involvement is crucial when it comes to transitions of socio-technical systems, such as the transport system. Keeping stakeholders motivated to take part in such participatory processes is only possible, however, if they perceive that these processes are well-structured and, therefore, efficient.

In contrast to many other scenario-based approaches, the scenarios in this project were understood as an input to the discussion and not as the result of a process. Furthermore, not only the results but also the underlying assumptions of the scenarios were explicitly made a topic for assessment. The differentiation between desirability and feasibility was used as a guiding dimension for the assessment.