Ian Miles

Innovation and the processes that shape it are no longer peripheral concerns

Businesses and policymakers have become heavily reliant on inputs from Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS), who provide strategic advice, and support with confronting complex and changing environments and the challenges that these create for “business as usual”. Often KIBS explicitly provide appraisals of forces shaping the future—drivers, trends, wild cards, etc.—and many large consultancies and design and engineering firms will publish some of their key conclusions as to future prospects, risks, and scenarios for wide audiences. Some KIBS specialize in such futures work, and some of these work together with clients in analyzing alternative futures. Furthermore, most KIBS will be working less explicitly with assumptions about future markets, regulations, and technologies, when assisting with the design, implementation, and integration of organizational and technical solutions to their clients’ problems. KIBS’ roles in bringing expertise to bear on futures thinking has been little examined. This chapter raises questions about the quality of these future-oriented services, and the extent to which they may embed particular narratives into business and policy thinking.

Live commerce is creating a new paradigm for e-commerce platform economy. This study aims to provide effective strategies that can be used for live commerce platform operation and management by analysing factors that influence consumer intentions to purchase. As a combination of e-commerce and live streaming, live commerce allows businesses to demonstrate products, answer customer questions, and provide personalized recommendations in a way that replicates the in-store experience. Thus, this study aims to provide effective strategies that can be used for the new e-commerce platform economy and market competition that live commerce platforms build by analysing factors that influence consumer intentions to purchase. This study was conducted using structural equation modeling (SEM) based on a survey of 237 live commerce users. The results of this study lend platform-providers a more comprehensive understanding of the functional and social factors that influence consumers’ decisions to make purchases on such platforms. The outcomes can further serve as a basis for improving platforms, providing consumers with a better consumption experience, and offering theoretical support for consumers to use related services rationally and efficiently.

Digital Business Services (DBS), industries that have grown rapidly in recent years, played important roles in facilitating the adoption of digital technologies, as well as having applications in innovative products, transforming business processes across the economy. If DBS firms are committed to reducing negative environmental impacts, they should be able to make more positive contributions to their clients’ performance; for instance, promoting the digitalization of businesses process in ways that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and inefficient energy usage. But what are DBS business practices, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and related topics? This study examines the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosures of leading companies providing consultancy, advertising/marketing, and information technology services. The plans, targets, and actions of DBS companies with above-average ESG scores, as indexed by the Refinitiv dataset, are examined. The results indicate that all of these firms express goals, and almost all of them have set clear targets, in terms of moving to net zero. A wide range of relevant activities is being implemented, including services that promote energy efficiency. The diversity of these actions suggests that these firms can learn from each other, and that companies with lower ESG ratings have models to emulate.

Foresight scenarios are not only useful presentational devices to show that many aspects of the future are open. Scenarios are means for generating advice that helps policymakers initiate actions in the present or near future that will be of long-term significance. Despite the influence that such advice may have on policy decisions, the Foresight literature has paid very little attention to the creation of policy recommendations. Though reports of scenario exercises frequently conclude with lists of recommendations that follow from the study, there is very little explication of the process whereby advice is elicited from the examination of these future scenarios. This paper addresses this gap, examining how the generation of recommendations is related to the development of scenarios within multiple future repositioning workshop settings. It focuses on the fluency and originality of these recommendations, and how this is influenced by repositioning participants in highly transformational scenarios. Repositioning is the process whereby participants are invited to imagine themselves playing roles in hypothetical future contexts, and on that basis to make decisions or devise strategies as if they actually were immersed in these circumstances. The method proposed and the findings of the case study have implications for why and how this future repositioning approach can be incorporated as a ‘key feature’ in the design of Foresight activities. The aim is also to raise awareness of the need for more exploration of Foresight recommendation methodology.

Research and development service firms (RDSFs) are a particular type of technology‐based knowledge‐intensive business services (KIBS). RDSFs provide clients with R&D services on a contract basis, and operate as knowledge intermediaries linking research and market. They are innovative in their own right, as well as supporting innovation efforts by their clients; they rely on their own innovation efforts to be competitive and to develop new value propositions for their clients. The present paper explores the innovation process in RDSFs, drawing on semi‐structured interviews with founders and senior managers of 32 companies in the United Kingdom. Our findings suggest that RDSFs vary considerably in terms of their primary innovation drivers (i.e. whether they are mainly driven by market demands or by technological opportunities) and the outcomes they pursue (i.e. whether their outputs are mainly services to clients or a mixture of services and products and/or intellectual property). Four major orientations of RDSFs were identified: (i) technology‐based innovation exploiters; (ii) science‐focused innovation explorers; (iii) client‐driven innovation integrators; and (iv) open innovation translators. This variety among firms normally belonging to the same, small subsector of KIBS, suggests the need for caution in generalising about behaviour in terms of such statistical groupings.