Scenario Planning Method Research Articles

Forecast of Economic Growth by Time Series and Scenario Planning Method—A Case Study of Shenzhen

“Time series analysis” is one of the main tools to predict the value of economic variable with the appropriate model to describe the time variation of historical data. “Scenario planning” is a kind of special research method which is used to analyze the macro environment of a subject. In the prediction of the growth trend of economic entities, the two methods can be used to a certain extent to avoid the prediction errors caused by environmental changes. The results showed that the economic growth of Shenzhen during “the 13th Five-Year Plan” would appear a slowing trend.

Ethnographic Foresight: Understanding Your Customers' Futures

Trends are a commodity. You are one Google search from discovering hundreds of forecasts, trend lists, and predictions for your industry. Unfortunately, so are all of your competitors. Innovating against these known trends is table stakes. You need to do it just to stay in the game, but doing so will likely yield only market-rate growth unless your company already has a particular advantage. To grow at above-market rates and achieve truly transformational innovation, companies need to create a proprietary understanding about the future. This enables them to focus innovation, acquisitions, and other activities to build unique capability in tomorrow's growth areas. One way to achieve proprietary understanding of the future is through ethnographic foresight. This research method combines customer ethnography techniques with foresight tools to anticipate future customer demand and build new capabilities ahead of competitors. Ethnographic foresight has a rich history: futurist Arnold Mitchell created the VALS (Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles) instrument as a foresight tool to understand how society might develop in the future for a 1978 study at SRI International; it became one of the first foresight-related tools used by business (Yankelovich and Meer 2006), and it's still in use today. VALS identified specific groups of consumers who shared unique values that were expressed through behavior and consumption. Companies were then able to develop products and services aimed at those values and begin to anticipate how those groups might behave in different potential futures. Today the use of ethnography for business that VALS helped engender is very sophisticated; it underpins the marketing activities of many companies. Ironically, though, ethnography is not commonly used as VALS was originally intended, to understand the broader future of society. Rather, business ethnography often focuses on understanding customers as they are now. Ethnographic foresight combines business ethnography with foresight tools such as scenario planning, systems thinking, and forecasting to unearth unique insights into the future. There are three main ways to do ethnographic foresight: * Incasting--placing your current customers into new futures and evaluating how they might respond, * Forecasting--identifying new consumer behaviors and looking for how they might be creating unique futures, and * Co-evolution--recognizing that people both shape and are shaped by the future and developing ways to monitor this co-evolution over time. An example ripe for ethnographic foresight is playing out right now with the rise of the Millennial generation. Connected technologies, a parental focus on safety and security, and a slow economy are shaping the values and behavior of Millennials. Applying the tools of future ethnography can yield a rich harvest of insight to drive product, service, and business model innovation: * Using incasting, we can ask how the expression of Millennial values might change in different futures or contexts. For instance, as the financial hangover from the Great Recession finally dissipates, the United States, with its large, highly trained workforce, could be poised for a sustained period of above average financial growth. How might Millennials react to this economic boom scenario, which would be unfamiliar to them? How would their desire for access, as opposed to ownership, be expressed? How would their need for virtual experiences and companionship change or be enhanced by increased disposable income? * Using forecasting, we can look for affluent Millennials, use ethnographic techniques to discover behaviors or desires that differentiate them from the rest of their generational Christian Crews has over 15 years of experience applying foresight to innovation and strategy for large corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. He designed and Implemented the IRI2038 project for IRI in 2012-2013 and is a leading practitioner and innovator in scenario planning methods. …

Russiaas Water Resources 2030: Plausible Scenarios

The research presented in this paper focuses on the sustainable use of water resources in Russia based on a Foresight study with a 20-year time horizon. The study uses a scenario-planning method to develop four trajectories: economic depression, economic stagnation, visionary future, and national priority. These four trajectories offer significantly different yet plausible alternative futures. The current paper draws upon the earlier horizon scanning activity, which identified a set of trends, weak signals and wild cards, along with their implications for water resources in Russia. Based on this work, it identifies key factors and indicators, which may characterize future developments in the following domains: (i) the sustainability of water systems; (ii) water use by households and industry; and (iii) new water products and services. The evolution of variables and indicators will then be considered under the scenarios termed ‘Nearly perfect future’ (economic growth), ‘Problem conservation’ (economic stagnation), ‘Losses and accidents’ (economic depression), and ‘National priority’ trajectories. The paper concludes with a brief description of further research directions, including a discussion on the probability of the scenarios being implemented. Russian policy makers and water companies may use the scenarios to adapt (i.e. plan for timely responses), avert certain undesirable future developments, or approximate the visionary future of the sector.

Adaptation in hindsight: Dynamics and drivers shaping urban wastewater systems

Well-planned urban infrastructure should meet critical loads during its design lifetime. In order to proceed with design, engineers are forced to make numerous assumptions with very little supporting information about the development of various drivers. For the wastewater sector, these drivers include the future amount and composition of the generated wastewater, effluent requirements, technologies, prices of inputs such as energy or chemicals, and the value of outputs produced such as nutrients for fertilizer use. When planning wastewater systems, there is a lack of methods to address discrepancies between the timescales at which fundamental changes in these drivers can occur, and the long physical life expectancy of infrastructure (on the order of 25–80 years). To explore these discrepancies, we take a hindsight perspective of the long-term development of wastewater infrastructure and assess the stability of assumptions made during previous designs. Repeatedly we find that the drivers influencing wastewater loads, environmental requirements or technological innovation can change at smaller timescales than the infrastructure design lifetime, often in less than a decade. Our analysis shows that i) built infrastructure is continuously confronted with challenges it was not conceived for, ii) significant adaptation occurs during a structure's lifetime, and iii) “muddling-through” is the pre-dominant strategy for adaptive management. As a consequence, we argue, there is a need to explore robust design strategies which require the systematic use of scenario planning methods and instruments to increase operational, structural, managerial, institutional and financial flexibility. Hindsight studies, such as this one, may inform the development of robust design strategies and assist in the transition to more explicit forms of adaptive management for urban infrastructures.

Can scenario-planning support community-based natural resource management? Experiences from three countries in Latin America

Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is a concept critical to managing socio-ecological systems, but whose implementation needs strengthening. Scenario-planning is one approach that may offer benefits relevant to CBNRM, but whose potential is not yet well understood. We therefore designed, trialled and evaluated a scenario-planning method intended to support CBNRM at three cases, located in Colombia, Mexico and Argentina. Implementing scenario-planning was judged as worthwhile in all three cases, although aspects of it could be challenging to facilitate. The benefits generated were relevant to strengthening CBNRM: encouraging the participation of local people and using their knowledge; enhanced consideration and adaption of future change; and supporting the development of systems thinking. Tracing exactly when and how these benefits arise is challenging, but two elements of the method seemed particularly useful. Firstly, using a systematic approach to discuss how drivers of change may affect local socio-ecological systems helped to foster systems thinking and identify connections between issues. Secondly, explicitly focusing on how to use and respond to scenarios helped identify specific practical activities ('response options') that would support CBNRM despite the pressures of future change. Discussions about response options also highlighted the need for support by other actors (e.g. policy groups): this raises the question of when and how other actors and other sources of knowledge should be involved in scenario-planning, so as to encourage their buy-in to actions identified by the process. We suggest other CBNRM initiatives may benefit from adapting and applying scenario-planning. However, these initiatives should be carefully monitored since further research is required to understand how and when scenario-planning methods may produce benefits, and their strengths and weaknesses versus other methods.

SCENARIO PLANNING ROLE: CASE BALTIC NON-LIFE INSURANCE MARKET

The purpose of the research is to investigate the role of the scenario planning methods in the future development of the Baltic non-life insurance market.In order to achieve the stated objective and with the purpose to study the elements and functions of the scenario planning and critical stress testing, the authors use theoretical and methodological analysis of the scientific literature, analytical methods, expert and priority chart’s methods, comparative, statistical and modelling methods.One of the major problems of the research was to find the correlation between the possible impact of the scenario planning methods and the process of managing the development of the insurance market. The stated problem was solved by using a special tool for scenario planning method that can be used by non-life insurance companies.The authors have analysed the theoretical basis of scenario planning methods and prepared the financial analysis and scenario planning tool to evaluate the Baltic non-life insurance market’s development and to investigate its possible future outcomes with the main aim to demonstrate practical issues of scenario planning. In order to test scenarios discovered in the process of financial analysis using scenario planning tool, the authors have also applied critical scenario testing, which simulates possible future outcomes of an insurance company development.The rate of the Baltic non-life insurance market’s development is considered to be rather high, hence it requires analysing, managing and evaluating its financial stability and solvency. The Baltic insurance market faces many challenges due to the requirements of the Solvency II framework, which will establish new rules of risk evaluation for improving the solvency of insurance companies and protecting the interests of policyholders. Since the implementation of the Solvency II regime requires a stable insurance market establishment, it is important to plan and analyse the possible scenarios of insurance market development. The assessment of the Baltic non-life insurance market can be performed through strategic organizational planning – scenario planning methods. Scenario planning methods help evaluating possible short – term future outcomes of stability and solvency of non-life insurance market’s participants’ using the means of simulations.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.19.1.6303

Scenarios of the future - modelling of innovative tourist products

The aim of this article is to indicate the directions of the development of tourist sector innovativeness in the south region of Silesian Province. In the article was self-characterized the essence of modelling innovative products during the cycle of product life. There were presented chosen results of research in region and scenario planning method, used for indication of main changes in tourist sector - with special pressure on the innovativeness. Key words: Tourist products, Innovation, Future

Foreseeing Iron Ore Prices Using System Thinking and Scenario Planning

In competitive and complex markets such as the commodities one, having the ability of planning scenarios and envisioning the behavior of prices in each of them, constitutes a competitive advantage for organizations. Within this context, this research aims at developing a method for the understanding of the key factors that impact the pricing of commodities through a systemic approach, allowing the estimation/evaluation of future prices in different scenarios. Action research was used as research methodology, which is characterized by the principles of collaborative and continuous learning. In order to implement the objectives of this research, an adaptation of the Systems Thinking and Scenario Planning method was developed and implemented in an industry of the iron ore market. The first phase led to the understanding of the main variables associated to the price; in the second phase, this learning was materialized in a system dynamic computational model, which was used in the third and final stage for the estimation/evaluation of future prices in some alternative scenarios. Interviews were conducted in parallel with the quantitative evaluation, in order to obtain subsidies for acceptance and refinement of the proposed method. The results obtained, the learning reported and the possible applications identified for the use of the model indicate that the proposed method allows for the understanding of the pricing of commodities through the systems thinking and the planning by scenarios.

Enfoque metodológico para la valoración de escenarios de movilidad urbana frente al cambio climático

Frente al reto y a la oportunidad de abordar el cambio climático en el contexto urbano, la
 planificación necesita profundizar en enfoques metodológicos que traten el problema desde una perspectiva espacial, integrada y estratégica. Para ello, los métodos basados en escenarios no sólo constituyen una elección idónea para incorporar tales enfoques, sino también para promover una dimensión más proactiva en el proceso de toma de decisiones. Por tanto, el objetivo central de este artículo consiste en presentar un enfoque metodológico para el
 desarrollo de métodos y técnicas que permitan afrontar el problema del cambio climático desde la planificación, utilizando para ello la valoración de escenarios de movilidad urbana.
 El planteamiento metodológico consiste en analizar diferentes laboratorios urbanos, sobre los que se valora la capacidad instrumental de la planificación para alcanzar determinados objetivos de mitigación y adaptación al cambio climático, atendiendo a las limitaciones, necesidades y oportunidades específicas que ofrece cada uno de los escenarios en relación a
 dos aspectos básicos: la dependencia del automóvil y la capacidad de respuesta del medio urbano. Front al repte i a l’oportunitat d’abordar el canvi climàtic en el context urbà, la planificació necessita profunditzar en enfocs metodològics que tractin el problema des d’una perspectiva espacial, integrada i estratègica. Per això, els mètodes basats en escenaris no només constitueixen una elecció més proactiva en el procés de presa de decisions. Per tant, l’objectiu central consisteix en presentar un enfoc metodològic pel desenvolupament de mètodes i tècniques que permetin afrontar el problema del canvi climàtic des de la planificació, utilitzant per a això la valoració d’escenaris de mobilitat urbana.
 
 El plantejament metodològic consisteix en analitzar diferents laboratoris urbans, sobre els que es valora la capacitat instrumental de la planificació per aconseguir determinats objectius de mitigació i adaptació al canvi climàtic, atenent a les limitacions, necessitats i oportunitats específiques que ofereix cadascun dels escenaris en relació a dos aspectes bàsics: la dependència de l’automòbil i la capacitat de resposta del medi urbà. Climate Change poses new challenges and creates opportunities to the urban systems for which planning needs to gain insight into methodological approaches from a spatial, integrated and strategic perspective. To achieve this, scenario planning methods become not only suitable to embrace those visions, but also to promote a more proactive dimension of the decision-making process. Therefore, this paper aims to present a methodological approach in developing planning methods and techniques to face climate change, through the definition and assessment of urban mobility scenarios.
 The proposed methodology consists of analyzing different urban areas (“urban laboratories”), over which the planning instrumental capacity to achieve adaptation and mitigation objectives is assessed regarding particular constraints, needs and opportunities offered by each scenario in relation to two core features: automobile dependence and the response capacity of the urban environment.

Building technology foresight: using scenarios to embrace innovation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the application of scenario planning methods to: identifying disruptive innovations at an early stage, mapping out potential development paths for such innovations, and building appropriate organizational capabilities.Design/methodology/approachA combination of scenario planning with technology road‐mapping, expert analysis and creative group processes. The techniques described can be integrated with traditional tools of strategic technology planning. The paper presents a short illustrative case study and examples from practice.FindingsScenario techniques can be successfully applied to analysing disruptive innovation.Practical implicationsScenario techniques help guide managers to more effective decision making by preparing for a wide range of uncertainty and by counteracting typical biases of over‐optimism and decision “framing”. The techniques presented can be used in executive development and in strategic planning for innovative and high‐tech industries.Originality/valueThis paper presents a novel way to combine scenario methods with technology road‐mapping and creative group analysis. It also provides an overview of the literature and research related to scenario planning for disruptive innovation.

Analysis of Energy Crises in East Asia Using a Scenario Planning Method and It's Implications for Japan's Science and Technology Policy

東アジアのエネルギー危機問題を事例として，シナリオ・プランニングに基づく科学技術戦略の構築支援研究を実施した．本手法は多分野の専門家の協働に基づき，対象とする問題領域の俯瞰・構造化，未来の不確実性に対処するロバストな科学技術戦略の構築，科学技術の多面的価値の明示化に有効と考えられる．本研究では，東アジアのエネルギー安定供給および日本の安全・繁栄の実現に対するリスク要素の総合的検討，中国の将来像をシナリオ軸とする未来シナリオ－「資源争奪シナリオ」と「極東の島国シナリオ」－の作成, 各シナリオに基づく科学技術戦略の視点の抽出と研究開発課題例の意義の検討を行った．

Correspondence to what? Coherence to what? What is good scenario-based decision making?

This paper provides a framework for the evaluation of scenario planning and other strategic decision making methods or techniques. If scenario planning is useful, we should be teaching it in schools and we as individuals should be using it to cope with the uncertainty inherent in modern life. A prerequisite to this is the need to identify why, where and how (in what way) scenario planning and other methods or techniques are useful. Here, I review evaluations of scenario planning. Taking a Brunswikian perspective, I highlight the issues that have failed to be addressed in this evaluation. I demonstrate that there are many ways in which scenario planning could be useful other than those that have appeared in previous discussions. These multiple routes are dependent upon the interaction between the individual organisation, the environment in which they are operating and the method being followed.

Networks as an aid in transportation and contingency planning

As a mainstay of transportation analysis, network modeling is an alluring methodology around which to build decision aids for contingency planning. And yet, because contingencies in transportation are so diverse, any single methodological approach is best suited only for certain of these decisions. By summarizing varied uses of network optimization and current capabilities of network-planning computer systems, this paper identifies the strengths and weaknesses of network analysis in supporting various planning and control issues that arise in contingency planning. It also proposes a framework for designing decision aids that combine sensitivity analysis, scenario planning, and simulation methods with the enormous computational capabilities of network optimization. Illustrations of network analysis are given in the context of vehicle fleet planning, equilibrium analysis of urban traffic flow, and energy distribution systems.