Visual methods in mapping innovation journeys to the unexpected: Building a typology for future foresight

Complexity inherent to future environments challenges organizations to respond with clear future visions for directing the complexity arrangement of innovation journeys, with its ongoing interactions among actors, artefacts and organizational guidelines. The use of multimodal methods might enable designers and researchers to match this complexity of future environments and offer the opportunity to discover surprising and unexpected patterns through the fine-grained and robust analysis. However, most future foresight methods are rooted in classical data collection.
This paper unravels the use of visual based methods in organisation research on innovation journeys and design roadmaps. We work from the assumption that visual data shapes manager’s perceptions of ‘imaginable futures’ of new product and services in ways that have concrete implications for organizing and decision-making on innovation. Beyond the constraints of the established ways of analyses on the qualitative and quantitative data that currently limits the potential performative of the future foresight, we studied the use of images such as captured in photos and sketches in this strategic innovation activity. Although images are commonly used and its rich properties raise increased interest, images are currently underutilized, in particular in the research and practice of future foresight and trends in the context of design roadmapping.