Scenario thinking: a practice-based approach for the identification of opportunities for innovation

Dr. David SarpongBristol Business School

University of the West of England, Bristol, UKDavid2.Sarpong@uwe.ac.uk

Prof. Mairi MacleanUniversity of Exeter Business School

University of Exeter, Exeter, UKK.M.Maclean@exeter.ac.uk

Published as: Sarpong, D. & Maclean, M. (2011). Scenario thinking: A practice-based approach for the identification of opportunities for innovation, Futures, 40(10): 1154-1163.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the social theory of practice, this paper ‘unpacks’ scenario thinking in the form of strategizing in product innovation teams to explore when and how the practice may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation. Adopting a case-based approach, three software companies engaged in four new product development projects served as our empirical research sites. We found creative emergence and open-endedness of the practice in innovation teams serving as quintessentially embedded modalities and contingencies that supports the identification of opportunities for innovation as a potential outcome of scenario thinking. We also suggest a framework that specifies how specific team practices supporting scenario thinking (strategic conversation and human-material interactions, and reflexivity-in-practice) may operate in combination or serially, and which may lead in turn to the identification of opportunities for innovation.

Keywords:Innovation; New product development; Practice approach; Scenario thinking

1. Introduction

While it is widely acknowledged that the link between cause and effect is often

elusive, the last few years have seen a remarkable upsurge in the number of scholarly

papers reporting a direct link between scenario planning/scenario thinking and

innovation. This causal link has served not only as a point of convergence for many

conceptual as well as empirical studies on scenario planning, but has also been the

starting point for much theorising on the part of scenario planners [1-3]. While these

studies have made an invaluable contribution to enriching our understanding of the

relationship between scenario thinking and an organisation’s ability to innovate, they

often fall short in their ability to demonstrate how and when the practice may lead to

the innovations they often report.

This paper attempts to bridge this epistemic gap by providing new insight into

the management and foresight literature in the following ways: first, we conceptualise

scenario thinking as an everyday social practice played out in the day-to-day activities

of a group of competent actors as an actualisation of a continuous process of

becoming [4]. Second, we move beyond the cause and effect linkage between scenario

thinking and innovation to provide a logical account of when the practice may

contribute to the identification of opportunities for innovation. Following Nonaka [5,

p. 14], we refer to innovation as “a process in which the organization creates and

defines problems and then actively develops new knowledge to solve them”. We

develop our contribution in the context of the software industry, and focus more

specifically on product innovation teams who may be relied upon as a strategic group

within the organisation to exploit its distributed expertise and limited resources to

craft and deliver a mechanism for building the organisational market-technology

knowledge base.

The structure of the paper is as follows: in the next section, the salient

literature on the causal link between scenario thinking and innovation is reviewed. We

then draw on the practice turn in contemporary social theory to explore scenario

thinking as a social practice. Next, we introduce a framework for classifying, before

presenting an overview of the empirical research context and the methods employed

in the study under the general rubric of research methodology. Following this, we

present our research findings and conclude the paper with a discussion of the

implications of our research for theory and practice.

2. Scenario thinking as a precursor for innovation

Scenario thinking is the use of scenarios to stimulate innovative solutions for a

possible future context. The practice in organisations is often traced back to the Royal

Dutch/Shell Planning group [6,7], where it was used as a tool for long-range corporate

planning in the early 1970s. The literature is replete with multifarious but similar

methods and methodologies on how to conduct scenario thinking. A typical

‘manifesto’ on how it unfolds is provided by the Centre for Innovative Leadership, as

cited in [8], which identified the following six generic steps in scenario thinking:

INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Beyond being historically employed as a mere planning tool, a growing

number of organisations support and conduct scenario planning exercises, issuing

calls on managers to integrate these into their organisational processes [9,10];

scenario planning having been heralded as leading to other desirable organisational

outcomes such as adaptive learning [11], improved decision making [12],

organisational ambidexterity [13], creativity [14] and innovation [15,16].

However, with innovation identified as a fundamental capability required to

sustain competitive advantage [17,18], much of the burgeoning literature has striven

therefore to establish a positive relationship between scenario thinking and innovation

[19]. Even work which does not report a causal link often presents innovation as a by-

product of scenario thinking, by identifying various outcomes whose derived

theoretical and managerial implications could promote innovation [20]. This emerging

paradigm has come to represent something of a conundrum. On one hand, much of the

existing literature explicitly or tacitly agrees with the validity of this ‘factual’ claim.

Nevertheless, studies that have attempted to explore this causal link have done very

little empirically or theoretically to show when and how innovation may arise in

practice. From this perspective, rather than just treating innovation as a by-product of

scenario thinking, we explore scenario thinking as a nexus of real-time, taken-for-

granted situated activities which may serve as a precursor to innovation. In this

regard, we draw on the practice turn to conceptualise scenario thinking as a social

practice in a flux of transformation, played out in the everyday work of a group of

competent actors, as an actualisation of a continuous process of becoming [4].

3. A practice approach to scenario thinking

The theory of practice is concerned with the taken-for-granted sense of space and

routines of actors as inscribed in the ways they enact their practice(s). It encompasses

what Benner (cited in [21], p. 426) describes as a “rich socially embedded clinical

know-how that encompasses perceptual skills, transitional understandings across time,

and understanding of the particular in relation to the general”. In simple terms, it

refers to what people do in their situated activities. Practices can be seen as

permeating almost every part of social life. For Schatzki ([22], p. 471), they are

“organized human activities” made up of “an organized, open-ended spatial-manifold

of actions”. Elsewhere, placing emphasis on actors’ actual activities in practice, what

those activities are and how these activities are enacted, Schatzki [23, p. 90] argues

that:

“Practices consist of both doings and sayings, suggesting that analysis must be concerned with both practical activity and its representations. Moreover we are given a helpful depiction of the components which form a ‘nexus’, the means through which doings and sayings hang together and can be said to be coordinated”.

This ‘hanging together’ or “held-togetherness” (Zusammenhang) in Schatzki’s

[23, p. 14] terms, suggests a temporal interrelatedness, while activities also serve as a

context within which other activities occur. In making sense of these ‘social activities’

underpinning the practice of scenario thinking, the everyday activities that innovation

teams engage in to fulfil their roles come together to form the nexus of the practice.

These activities are not to be understood as mere ‘building blocks’ of the practice,

enacted just for the sake of the practice; rather, their enactment is goal oriented and

based on the experience and intelligibility of actors. The role of intelligibility

however, brings to the fore the role of mental organisation in practices. Schatzki [24,

p. 49], in accounting for this, refers to mental phenomena such as desires, hopes, fear

and anxiety as fundamental “states of affairs” that enable actors to cope with their

involvement with the world. As such, expressed in behaviour, they inform activities

by extending understanding and determining what makes sense to people. Here, it can

be argued that scenario thinking, by virtue of being a disciplined knowledge-driven

process of imagining possible futures, is conditioned by uncertainties, embodies

capacities such as know-how and dispositions, and is centrally organised around

shared skills and practical understandings. So, in conceptualising scenario thinking as

a social practice, we give ontological priority to organisational members and those

regular discernable patterns of activities that take place within the ambit of their

praxis. Epistemological primacy is placed on the actors’ quest to understanding the

future of their complex business environment, which is characterised by uncertainty,

serving to condition the actors’ behaviour and conduct in their everyday situated

practice (praxiology).

INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

Driven by these assumptions, we define scenario thinking as the bundles of

human actions and practices in context directed towards understanding the past and

the future in the present in order to cope with future uncertainties within the

contingencies of the moment (see Figure 1). From this perspective, scenario thinking

emerges as an ongoing social practice whose routines and activities are enacted on an

everyday basis, sometimes with very little reflection, from an unintended action to an

unintended outcome in the moment. It continues unabated in as much as relations may

remain unexplained even when anomalies are brought within the range of vision.

Viewed in this light, organisational actors apply their collective knowledge and the

resources at their disposal, including those capabilities gained from their conscious

individual experiences and collective psychic life, in a dynamic, generative way to

probe the unknown future. As a collective shared practice that permeates everyday

‘doings’, its enactment and engagement in practice requires emphasis on coordinated

action and shared understandings of possible futures. Thus, the specific relational take

on scenario thinking, as argued here, is one that takes a critical look at the

dispositional in-betweens rather than the isolated subjects or wider structuring forces.

The practice therefore is conceptualised as flexible and durable, as opposed to being

stable or institutionalised.

4. Framework for classifying potential outcomes of scenario thinking in teams

We present a conceptual framework here to extend our understanding as to when

scenario thinking may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation. The

framework is built around two specific lines of attention. The first is strategic

conversation and human material interaction. Here, we refer to those verbal

interactions between and among organisational members in their everyday situated

activities that go beyond mere information exchange to focus on improving the

organisation’s core activities, and the creation and capturing of value relevant for

competitiveness. This is supplemented by the ongoing, coordinated, regular and

continuous interaction between themselves and their material objects. In context,

human-material interaction provides possibilities for elaboration by enabling actors to

construct meanings and make sense of their material and structural environment,

which serves as a mechanism for the continuous reconstruction of their social

structures.

It should be noted that ongoing strategic conversations and human material

interactions are not mutually exclusive. Both phenomena are intrinsic to the shared

practice of scenario thinking. Without interaction among actors, the notion of a team,

as a community of practitioners, does not exist. Likewise, without interaction with

epistemic objects or material artefacts, the shared practice that bounds the community

becomes non-existent. By virtue of this it is assumed that “the shadow of the Other is

always implicated in the articulation of the One” ([25], p. 5). Moreover, putting the

communities’ structurally formed capacities developed through practice and

experiences into re-usable knowledge, which in turn drives and sustains their practice,

requires reflexivity in practice [26]. Reflexivity-in-practice here is about intelligibly

challenging those constraints imposed by social structures and peoples’ taken-for-

granted assumptions about reality. Reflexivity-in-practice refers to the ongoing

collective, deliberate and conscious locally reflexive orders of actions engaged in by

organisational members’ that undergird the perception, reproduction and

transformation of their social structures. In this regard, engaging in reflexivity is not

an aim in itself, but rather a consequence of taking a ‘step back’ from technical

rationality to question and challenge intelligibly everyday ‘doings’, routine actions

and collective assumptions about the world [27]. These are transmitted among

members in practice in the form of bodily doings, interactions and precepts which

over time become part and parcel of the communities’ taken-for-granted culture of

enacting, evaluating and reconstructing temporal structures.

The emergence and identification of opportunities for innovation, we argue, is

enabled through the ongoing strategic conversations and material interactions and

reflexivity shared by organisational members through a variety of mechanisms that

may operate in combination, or serially, to lead to the identification of opportunities

for innovation. Therefore, rather than assuming that any of the practices identified

here independently lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation, four

dynamics are distinguished to offer new insights into how the extent of interaction

among actors and their material artefacts and reflexivity may lead to opportunities for

innovation, as shown in Figure 2.

INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE

4.1 Morphostatic Mode

Organisations in a ‘morphostatic mode’ sustain high strategic conversation and human

material interactions, but lack reflexivity in practice. Promoting conversation and

interactions without reflexivity is akin to harnessing what can be described as

‘relevance’ at the expense of ‘rigour’. In this situation, the organisation can be

assumed to be not only experiencing an epistemic drift, but also gearing towards a

perfect adaptation state in a fast-moving environment characterised by discontinuity

and ambiguities. Also, the failure of the organisation to reflect on its practice while

channelling efforts in conversations and interactions implies that the team might

become entrapped in their taken-for-granted assumptions and underlying beliefs,

making it difficult to spot opportunities for innovation, cope with challenges or

creatively renew themselves and their practice when new contingencies arise.

4.2 Dynamic Mode

Organisations in a ‘dynamic mode’ combine high quality-intense strategic

conversation, material interaction and a great deal of reflexivity in practice in their

everyday work. They are sustained by their inherent ambidexterity, which enables

them to interact with their epistemic objects and concurrently reflect on their everyday

practice. Organisations that are able to develop this kind of repertoire, by virtue of

their orientation, can also be characterised as ‘vagile’, since they have the ability to

‘think’ beyond the theoretical boundaries of their products, embrace discontinuity and

open-endedness in their innovation processes; hence the ability to succeed in their

struggle to explore opportunities. This in turn empowers them to develop efficiency in

their practice, which helps them not only to explore intelligibly, but also to exploit

emerging possibilities that come into view. Some of these identified possibilities are

bound to lead to strategic insights, and those that take root potentially grow into the

oaks of innovation.

4.3 Speculation Mode

Those organisations identified as being in a ‘speculation mode’ are those that

primarily display a precondition for reflexivity in practice, but do very little to engage

in highly intense-quality strategic conversations and continuous interaction with their

material objects. They are preoccupied with pure imaginations imbued with rhetoric,

utopian thoughts and fantasies to the extent that creativity becomes dysfunctional in

the strategic process of envisaging the future. Projected possibilities in this kind of

organisation would seldom be grounded in reality. Pragmatic reflexivity-in-practice

cannot independently take place nor be sustained when separated from the context in

which interaction occurs. This is because in the face of ambiguity, reflection in itself

can only be enhanced by interaction with others who may contribute to refine it [28].

Thus, in the absence of interactions, reflexivity in practice can result in some enduring

insights and revelations, but in the end cannot lead to any pragmatic value capture.

4.4 Dysfunctional Mode

Organisations in a ‘dysfunctional mode’ do very little to engage in material

interaction, and the intensity and quality of their strategic conversation is very low.

Similarly, they seldom engage in any form of reflexivity-in-practice. The organisation

is more likely to be shambolic or dormant. Actors in such organisations make very

little effort to get their hands ‘dirty’, to share their insights or to take a step back to

reflect on their experiences, making them bereft of ideas and insights regarding the

future. In this regard, they are destined to miss out on the opportunity of mastering

their practice or even of developing any meaningful understanding of their

technologies and markets. An organisation in this mode can best be described as one

on the verge of extinction. In such a situation, the team basically becomes

dysfunctional; their innovative products under development will automatically end up

on the laboratory shelf. Their survival does not only hang in the balance, but may

ultimately end abruptly within the shortest possible time.

5. Research methodology

We adopted a case-based approach using three software organisations serving as our

empirical research sites. The chosen level of analysis was their product innovation

teams and their four new product development projects. All the organisations selected

for the study were running more than one project at the time of data collection. In

order to improve the scope and generalisations of insights generated by the research,

the following normative criteria were developed to guide the selection of projects

included in the empirical inquiry:

(i) Project(s) should require the commitment of significant resources (in terms of

staffing, time and money) to be pioneered.

(ii) Project(s) should entail the development or generation of innovative product(s),

incorporating new or unfamiliar technology of the organisation and or marketed to

unfamiliar users.

(iii) Project(s) must employ Microsoft’s technologies, including their user and data

interfaces in creating the platform architectures on which the products were built.

INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

5.1 The projects

The first project (with Interlab) consisted of an upgrade of internal applications of a

bespoke planning application system for a UK government agency responsible for

developing a world-class community sport system. The second and third projects were

both with Kemitech. The second entailed the development of a product which

was conceived in direct response to the ever-growing concerns with respect to the

management of traffic on British road networks, expected to provide real-time

information on the state of the trunk road network by raising alarms whenever traffic

conditions breached a user-defined threshold. The third project concerned the

development of a train graph application. This had begun as a bespoke project for a

railway company which suddenly abandoned the project. The company decided to

continue with the development of the application in the hope that it might serve as a

potential springboard to showcase the firm’s capabilities to future customers in the

railway industry. The final project (with Mercury) concerned software developed for

security agencies. This involved embedding modern software technologies within an

existing suite of criminal investigation software.

Data for the study were collected over a twelve month period using qualitative

methods of interviews, ethnographical observations and the analysis of the various

projects’ archival documents. In each case-study company, we interviewed all team

members for the specific projects under study, as well as their respective project

managers. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. In addition,

ethnographical observations, including observations of informal conversations

between team members, helped us to gather insight into the everyday situated

practices of the group in question, capturing and deepening our understanding of

unverbalised rules and group norms [29].

Greenwood and Hinings [30, p. 1074] stress the necessity of granting suitable

“attention to the biography of the organisation under scrutiny”. Biographical sketches

of the case organisations, and details of the innovation projects and data collated, are

presented in Tables 2 and 3 respectively. We use pseudonyms to preserve the

anonymity of case-study companies.

INSERT TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE

In analysing our data, our purpose was to ‘unpack’ scenario thinking in the

form of strategizing, in order to ascertain how it manifests in the actions of the

innovation teams. To this end, when scrutinising interview transcripts and observation

notes, we placed emphasis on those strategic episodes and practices geared towards

the identification of novel ideas, processes or procedures qualitatively identified as

capable of improving the new product under development. As scenarios are narratives

or stories about plausible futures, we identified banal narratives that exhibited spatial

and temporal orders, like stories, to capture the actors’ lived experience from the

interview data. Following this, we used Labov’s [31] sociolinguistic structural model

to evaluate and analyze the narrations in their entirety. We gave primacy to those

scenarios that often “raised questions of possibility, impossibility, necessity and

contingency” (Booth et al., ([32], p. 90). We used Hendry and Seidl’s [33]

recommended framework for analyzing strategic episodes to analyze the archival and

observation data. The gathered data were then triangulated and pulled together as a

whole, analyzed and interpreted continuously and iteratively until common themes

emerged and we reached a point of saturation. In analyzing the triangulated data in

practice, we followed Richie and Spencer’s [34] qualitative data analysis framework,

making minor modifications to the process in response to some of the salient

theoretical and methodological commitments.

6. Identification of opportunities for innovation

Based on the analysis of our case data, we identified two quintessentially embedded

modalities and contingencies of scenario thinking as a social practice which

constitutively may lead to the identification of opportunities for innovation during

scenario thinking.

6.1 Creative emergence and open-endedness

The conceptualisation of scenario thinking as a dynamic, social, iterative and never-

to-be-completed practice emphasises the creative emergence of possibilities. At the

same time, the complexity of technologies and an uncertain market lead to identified

strategic possibilities being open-ended in character. Innovation teams therefore need

to develop the capacity to embrace this tension which may impact on their ability to

create or capture tangible value from scenario thinking. Embracing creative

emergence here is therefore the “willingness to engage in a process that is not

predetermined or planned ahead in detail and where outcomes are unknown or

uncertain” (Michlewski, [35], p. 380). This also implies that even though a pragmatic

future might not lead to infinite possibilities, avoiding deliberate planning or bringing

the process to a hasty closure is antithetical to uncovering potential sources of

discontinuity which underpins sustainable value creation and capture. Embracing

creative emergence and open-endedness is not only to ‘ditch’ or abandon habitual

procedures to probe emerging possibilities and projections; it also entails some

conscious attempt to reconcile both emergent and deliberate forms of realities and

repertoires in the pursuit of linking technologies to markets. This was the case when a

Mercury team member claimed:

“We’ve got Windows 7 coming out, and we have already started preparing for that. We have to look at it, and see how the product runs on it. With Vista there were so many issues with security and with XP the speed was fantastic, but you know, security was at first a pain. Now Windows 7 is out and we may still have to make room for another technology.” [Mercury team member A]

Bearing in mind the uncertainty surrounding markets and technological

trajectories, the team, in making room for the next technology, explicitly refused to

firmly ‘nail their colours to the mask’ thereby avoiding the danger of technology ‘lock

in’ which can prevent them from probing potential avenues of exploration in the

future. Another Mercury team member put it this way:

“Everything eventually comes down to market forces. There is no point releasing the application in three years because the quality of web applications available would have moved on by three years. So it is important that we keep moving forward and keep making changes and potentially major changes in order to keep our product competitive.” [Mercury team member B]

What makes these extracts relevant to the embracing of emergence and open-

endedness is the actors’ emphasis on the relational and contextual grounding of

desirable future projections, in which the process, material and market components

coming to presence never equilibrate. Based on the case evidence, two dimensions

were found constitutively to promote contextualisation of the analytical leverage of

creative emergence and open-endedness in contributing to the identification of

opportunities for innovation across the various teams. These include the practice of

re-use of existing software components, or what has come to be known in software

parlance as ‘code-brokerage’ [36], representing both exploitation and the exploration

of possible design ‘spaces’ through ongoing experimentation [37-39]. These two

generative aspects of creative emergence and open-endedness are not analytically

separable in context, as they tend to underpin recursively the effectiveness of how

emergence and open-endedness may contribute to the identification of opportunities

for innovation.

First, the engineering practice of creating new software products from

previous software components, rather than developing the new software ‘from

scratch’, encourages the creation and maintenance of software components and a

knowledge repository. Akin to the concept of the re-use of knowledge, where

knowledge generated is shared, re-used and accumulated [40-42], an accumulated

critical mass of flexible expertise or modular knowledge within the built repository

may enable the team routinely to evaluate, apply and integrate related knowledge in

different contexts. While the practice has come to represent a standard software

development procedure [43,44], the emphasis here is on its creative potential. As

observed by a Kemitech team member:

“A lot our products end up on the shelf, but that is the nature of software development. You pull out components you can re-use again. So, somewhere down the line a completely different project to a model railway may come in and we can go, aha, but we did something similar on the model railway so let’s get that bit, so it’s never completely wasted work.” [Kemitech team member A]

The Kemitech project manager also argued that:

“If we don’t find a buyer, then that will probably be the end of the product in its current configuration. But we tend to re-use ideas quite a lot. We have already shown this particular product to our customers in the rail industry, and they liked the idea, although they feel the actual product is not useful to them. They have asked us to do another demo for their staff. So, although you don’t actually get the chance to sell that product, you do get some use out of it by demonstrating how the technology could be used in other bespoke developments.” [Kemitech project manager]

These two statements highlight how typically the re-use of components across

multiple projects could improve productivity and the quality of new software products

[44]. It also re-affirms the notion that knowledge-driven “processes of inquiry rarely

come to a natural ending of the sort where everything worth knowing about an object

is considered to be known” (Knorr-Cetina [45], p. 186). In a related development, the

Interlab project manager who expressed some surprise as to why Interlab’s main

customers (local governments) were not keen on the company’s new product under

development, was confident that at least the process knowledge accumulated from

developing the product could be re-deployed in the development of other projects

targeted at other industries. She observed that:

“Surprisingly, the local government sector is not very keen on this product. But in other sectors, mobile working is becoming quite important as a more modern way of working, so people are not tied to their desks any more. People expect to be able to take a laptop out and connect via a mobile internet link, or

at least be able to synchronise their work when they come back to the office. The idea is that all future developments will be based on this new sort of bottom layer which will enable us to exploit modern technologies and make use of a single innovation approach. We don’t have to re-develop stuff from scratch.” [Interlab project manager]

Finally, the Mercury project manager also gave an overview of the extent to

which his team intended to modify and extend their existing application to other

markets:

“At the moment, we’ve written the product, and everything is basically in English. But we need to globalise it, and to globalise it means we want to target the product to other police forces in different countries. So, for example, if we want to sell to the French police force, then they would obviously want the French version. That means we need to globalise it in a sense that we can provide separate versions of the same applications, the same in code but just showing everything in French for example, and there are few ways of doing it. We may need to experiment our options to decide a strategy.” [Mercury project manager]

Clearly, the re-use of legacy processes and components involves building new

products whose components in turn may be re-usable in future innovative products.

These  'angular splitoffs' (Knorr-Cetina, [45], p.186) and recurrent use of existing

knowledge may lead to the innovation process unfolding indeterminately, while

simultaneously expanding the set of possible opportunities that could be exploited in

the future. In this regard, potentially plausible but ambiguous scenario narratives that

were previously discarded may be reinvented, adjusted and integrated into other

products that may be developed in the future.

Secondly, the existence of an infinite “design space” [46] and the ongoing

experimentation with new possibilities also serve as additional processes that anchor

emergence and open-endedness as a sustainable resource for the identification of

opportunities for innovation. “Design space” refers to the possible variations of the

dimensions, structure, appearance, colour or any given variation of the design of a

product or process [46]. From a practice perspective, this space is very similar to the

“activity-place space” employed by Schatzki ([24], p. 43) to describe the non-physical

matrix of places and paths where human activities take place spatially. The

exploration to find space through experimentation(s) with scenario narratives enables

actors to probe emerging technologies and new market developments and ‘map’ all

possible alternative designs. For example, the Kemitech project manager observed

with regard to the railway project that:

“Although the product is not sellable in its current format, we have no fears on this project because it’s one of the best positions to be in, because it’s like you are there in a playground of technology and it’s like a sandpit. You make mistakes, its fine; it’s not going to have any repercussions. It will get better as you will learn from those mistakes.” [Kemitech project manager]

Concurrently, the teams’ ongoing experimentations and other exploratory

activities they undertake keep expanding the available ‘space’ at their disposal. The

sustenance of the generative relationship between these two dimensions accounts for

practical projections and the creative evaluation of alternative pathways that

contribute to the identification of opportunities for innovation. They also act as a

mechanism that helps the innovation teams selectively to recognise opportunities in

other contexts or markets where they can apply their existing technologies. As the

Mercury project manager explained:

“The power behind our software is in its searching capability. The original software didn’t start off as software for police forces. It was aimed at antiquarian book sellers. Because it has powerful text searches, it was really quick at pulling up data, so we quickly rolled it to the police forces and they thought it was fantastic for them. Now the antiquarian book people, if you like, have not so much slipped away, they have been pushed away. Our focus has changed, if you like, to the law enforcement agencies. But sure, with a lot of tailoring, there are many more markets available that can support the product.” [Mercury project manager]

The flexibility of the design space was stressed by another member of the

Mercury team:

“The product is being designed to be flexible by any means possible, and generally, whenever there is a choice between making it rigid or spending a bit more time making it flexible, our group always take the time to make it more flexible. Well, again there is incremental soft technologies that Microsoft sort of release constantly over time, and we generally get a lot of warning about those, and we have been able to sort of infuse them beforehand, so that when they are available and they are stable, we have been able to say: ‘I think we should start using this, because it will do that, that and that, and it improves these things’.” [Mercury team member C]

Here, the institutional context within which the design space may contract or

expand becomes the ‘design-space structure’. The multiple markets conceptualised as

a design space-structure therefore define the space available for exploration and may

seem to be expandable if not infinite. However, while structural spaces may not fit

tightly with the relevant technologies at the disposal of the team, functional spaces or

alternative innovative design paths are always indeterminate. In this case, there is still

a window of opportunity for the team to innovate to improve their processes or their

products’ performance features within their existing markets through their ongoing

experimentations with future markets. Active experimentations can be expensive, but

provide a ‘test bed’ for evaluating all conceived possibilities within and beyond

existing markets. Experimentation with new possibilities, it can be argued, is

imperative to understand technologies better and identify opportunities for innovation

in the present and future. Thus, the teams’ understanding of their spaces and

possibilities may play an important role in defining the extent to which emergence

and open-endedness may help them identify opportunities for innovation. From this

perspective, we observed that through these kinds of experimentations, members’

perceptions and actions become focused on the information in their environments,

which they then use to solve their problems. In this sense, they collectively embark on

creative efforts when there is scope for improvement on their epistemic objects.

However, some of these creative efforts might lead to temporary errors and failures.

Notwithstanding, these errors and failures can be seen as not only necessary but an

intrinsic part of exploring novel ideas and possibilities. This is evident in the

following quotations:

“If you make mistakes or take the wrong approach, then luckily that’s exactly what prototyping is for. It’s for you to learn from those mistakes, so you don’t do them again on the real thing.” [Kemitech team member B]

“If you work on one project and do something in a particular way, then at the end you might think, if I had done it slightly different or instead of doing all this, I could have just done this bit instead, and that would have got us the same result, then I feel like that is just part of the job, how it works. You don’t always know the best way of doing something until you’ve done it, so that will come with experience.” [Mercury team member D]

The caution here is about the possibility of an ‘epistemic’ drift that might

occur whenever there is an attempt to place practice prior to theory and see theory as

implied. However, the active experimentation here can be seen as not only purposeful,

but also an instrumental way of independently assessing viable scenario narratives

and their complementary discursive modalities. A Kemitech team member put this

succinctly:

“There is no better way for a Software Engineer to have fun in terms of you seeing something happening. Whether it’s a flick switch or a light coming on or a train moving, it’s good stuff.” [Kemitech team member C]

‘Seeing’ a flick or light, as reported, provides no form of telepathic ‘power’

capable of bringing the yet-to-be-realised future of the product into focus. Again, no

claim of an asymmetric relationship between this kind of ‘seeing’ and innovation as a

result of the interactions is made here. Rather it is argued that this kind of ‘seeing’ has

the potential to illuminate hopes and imaginations. It could provide fertile ground to

challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and stretch imaginations as actors attempt to

make linkages between temporal actions and unfolding events. Thus, projections of

possibilities, as induced by creative emergence and open-endedness, interrelate, shape

and reinforce their propagation during scenario thinking, to help in the identification

of relevant opportunities for innovation.

7. Conclusions

This research seeks to contribute to our understanding of the causal link between

scenario thinking and innovation. More importantly, it aims to improve our

understanding as to when a practice may lead to the generation of this important

organisational outcome. Drawing on the foresight and innovation literature, and the

theory of practice, we studied the real-time, taken-for-granted situated activities that

form the nexus of scenario thinking in product innovation teams engaged in the

linking of organisational technologies with market opportunities to identify when the

predictable relations between scenario thinking and innovation may emerge. In doing

this, the enacted interwoven nexus of canonical activities actors engage in in their

situated practice (including those not discernable to the actors themselves) were the

fundamental realities explained. Moving beyond these truncated expositions, the

relations between these activities and their influence on the teams’ behaviour as

inferred from the case evidence, served as the main factors employed to conceptually

ground the role of scenario thinking in the discovery of opportunities for innovation.

By conceptualising scenario thinking as a social practice, our purpose was to

move beyond the episodic paradigm to present a logical account of how the practice

temporarily unfolds in innovation teams. The new paradigm, as advanced in this

paper, makes no attempt to replace or invalidate the old one; rather, it complements

the first by seeking cumulatively to enrich our understanding of how the activities

forming the nexus of the practice are constituted, reproduced, adapted and defined

through ongoing processes [47]. The claim advanced by this paper is as follows:

scenario thinking as practiced in product innovation teams does not necessarily lead to

innovation. Instead, ongoing creative emergence and open-endedness of the practice,

which constitutively serve as quintessentially embedded, modalities and

contingencies, make it possible for the identification, exploration and exploitation of

opportunities for innovation.

Our findings offer benign insights about the causal link between scenario

thinking and innovation. First, we have shown that scenario thinking in product

innovation teams’ fares differently under different interaction and reflexivity regimes.

Drawing from these regimes, we have proposed a theoretical framework that could

serve as a guide for future research not only to describe other innovation teams and

how they operate, but also to serve as a proxy to gauge the ‘foresightfulness’ of

innovation teams across space and time. Moreover, while the identification of

opportunities for innovation as enabled by these practices has no predetermined target

that teams manoeuvre or garner unique resources in order to attain, nevertheless the

framework may prove a useful diagnostic tool for determining the future state of

innovation teams and highlight potential ways in which strategic self-organised

groups could be reinvigorated. Second, the everyday interactions, the micro-learning

processes and the ongoing activities of innovation teams in their situated practice are

not only relevant, but fundamental to extending our understanding of the link between

scenario thinking and innovation. This is consistent with the recent emerging view

that the everyday microscopic activities and practices of organisational actors to a

large extent shape the ‘foresightfulness’ of organisations [48]. This study emphasises

the importance of scenario thinking in helping to identify relevant opportunities for

innovation in order to help extend both practitioners’ and scholars’ understanding of

the causal link that is often made between scenario thinking and innovation.

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