Pictures of the FutureA Process to Help Shape Tomorrow's World
Pictures of the Future Introduction
Recognizing which innovations have high growth potential, identifying key technological breakthroughs, anticipating future customer requirements, spotting new business opportunitiesSiemens is systematically doing all of these things in its quest to "invent the future."
The pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle often led people astray ...
The ancient oracles and soothsayers had an easy time of it down through the ages. All they had to do was formulate their prophecies vaguely and all kinds of interpretations became possible. But the obscure omens of a Delphic Oracle or cryptic predictions à la Nostradamus aren't much use to today's corporate leaders, who require reliable forecasts regarding future business trends. In an increasingly complex business environment marked by ever-shorter product cycles, the major challenge facing companies is how to organize R&D activities in as focused a manner as possiblewhile making optimum use of available funds. All of this requires a clear vision regarding new technologies, customer requirements and the markets that will emerge in the years and decades to come.
But a leading global player like Siemens cannot be satisfied with merely attempting to forecast new trends. As Siemens CEO Dr. Heinrich v. Pierer once said, "Predicting the future works best when you create and shape it yourself." And that's why the motto "Inventing the Future" best describes Siemens' philosophy. Simply following trends will not help a company with such ambitions. Instead, it must identify new ideas and approaches, take appropriate action, and thereby become a trendsetter for innovation.
In recent years, Siemens Corporate Technology Department has therefore worked closely with the operating Groups in order to develop a package of powerful measures designed to optimize the company's R&D activities in a systematic and sustained manner. The results can be seen in Siemens' "Pictures of the Future"visions of where the world of technology is headed in the years to come. These are in fact the product of two opposing approaches or perspectives, each of which reinforces the other. On the one hand, the pictures are extrapolations into the future based on the world of today; on the other hand, they are generated through retropolation back to the present, starting from the world of tomorrow. Extrapolation, the first perspective, may also be seen as "road-mapping"in other words, projecting the technologies and products of today into the future. The aim here is to anticipate, as precisely as possible, the point in time at which certain things will become available or when a need for them will arise. The advantage of this approachan objective starting positionis also its biggest weakness, since the method fails to predict discontinuities and great leaps forward in the development process. Figuratively speaking, while "road-mapping" will take you on a journey along a well-built road, you won't see much of what's going on beyond the roadside. And you can never be sure that the road isn't about to end suddenly, in which case it would have been better to turn off many miles before.
However, with the use of a complementary approach, known as the "scenario technique," such matters can be judged with more certainty. What Siemens calls retropolation involves imaginatively placing yourself some ten, twenty or even thirty years or more into the future. The time-scale depends on the area of activity under investigation. For example, it is certainly much easier to make reliable predictions about the nature of power generation and distribution in 30 years than it is to make equally reasonable statements concerning information and communications technology.
Once an appropriate time frame has been selected, a comprehensive scenario can be devised, incorporating all relevant factors, including the future development of social and political structures, environmental considerations, globalization, technological trends and new customer requirements. The trick now is to backtrack to the present from the "known" facts of the future scenario. In this way, it is possible to identify the kinds of challenges and problems that need to be overcome to get there.
in contrast, the Siemens "Pictures of the Future" method shows a clearly structured path toward the future
By combining extrapolation and retropolationand bringing these two approaches into harmony with one anotherSiemens engineers can draw up Pictures of the Future revealing which changes will impact the company's different areas of activity. However, the purpose of these pictures is not merely to depict visions of the future; as part of a systematic, ongoing process at the company, they also help quantify future markets, detect discontinuities, anticipate forthcoming customer requirements, and identify new technologies with large growth potential and mass appeal. This, in turn, generates new business opportunities for the products, systems and services of the company's business segments as well as a unified vision of the technological future for Siemens as a whole.
In addition to being a crucial factor influencing the success of the Siemens innovation initiative, Pictures of the Future have also become a key instrument for optimizing the company's R&D strategy. Such insights into tomorrow's world not only sketch a coherent picture of the future but also show how to get there. Ultimately, that's the crucial difference between inventing the future and merely trying to predict it.
Ulrich Eberl