Future Design and Industrial Innovation

Considering current decision-making from the perspective of future generations

How should societal systems be designed and implemented to address long-term challenges that span multiple generations, such as climate change, resource and energy issues, and public finance and infrastructure maintenance and management, in order to ensure a sustainable society? Discussions on this question began in 2012 among researchers from various specialized fields, including me, who joined the “Seven Generations Vision Project,” a research group within what was then the Center for Environmental Innovation Design for Sustainability (CEIDS) at Osaka University. The discussions developed and led to the Future Design proposal and relevant research initiatives. At present, relevant research and practices are progressing across Japan and in other countries.

Future Design refers to the design and practice of societal systems that will allow us to pass on a sustainable society to future generations. One of the most effective mechanisms within such systems is the so-called “imaginary future generation (IFG)” that is used to retrospectively examine and evaluate current decision-making from the perspective of future generations that have yet to be born. Economic experiments, field experiments, large-scale questionnaire surveys, and practices have demonstrated that the adoption of IFG is effective in controlling human short-sightedness and in making decisions and building consensus from a long-term perspective that takes into account the interests of future generations (e.g., Kamijo, et al., 2017; Hara et al., 2019; Saijo 2020). As I described in my previous column, Future Design was first put into practice in 2015 in Yahaba Town, Iwate Prefecture, during discussions by local residents who were considering measures for a regional revitalization plan. In this practice, local residents were divided into two current generation groups and two IFG groups to consider their respective plans for the revitalization of the town. In their final stage of the practice, the current generation and IFG groups paired up to propose their own measures for negotiations and consensus-building. The practice found that the IFG groups gave greater priority to regional resources and strengths than current generation groups in proposing revitalization measures, were more likely to prioritize complex and time-consuming issues, and had higher incentive to implement societal changes (Hara et al., 2019)

After the first practice in Yahaba Town, Future Design using the IFG mechanism has been widely applied in various domains of public policy and other issues (urban planning, environmental planning, resource and energy issues, carbon neutral policies, disaster prevention, education, etc.) (See Future Design Practices). These practices demonstrate that the IFG mechanism can be effective in creating proposals, making decisions, and building consensus from a long-term perspective that takes into account the interests of future generations (e.g., Hara et al., 2023a). Observing the present retrospectively from the perspective of future generations may allow us to specifically and clearly understand the potential impacts of one generation's decisions on the future, contributing to more sustainability-focused decision-making.

I believe that the introduction of IFG is important not only in public policy domains but also in considering desirable industrial innovation. In this article, I would like to examine the significance of Future Design in the context of industrial innovation. In particular, I consider what impacts the introduction of a future generation perspective could exert on the design of the direction of industrial innovation based on business plans and research and development (R&D) strategies.

Examples of IFG practice in industry and implications for innovation

In recent years, Future Design has been implemented when considering business plans, designs corporate directions, and R&D strategies in the industrial world. Future Design was first implemented to explore R&D strategies and technology seeds in FY2019 by Organo Corporation, a comprehensive water engineering company. Under a joint research project with a research team at Osaka University that was promoting Future Design research, Organo employees in charge of R&D and corporate planning practiced Future Design for three years from 2019. In the six sessions held in fiscal 2019, about 20 Organo employees divided into five groups imagined societal and business conditions in 2050. They discussed the exploration of R&D strategies and technology seeds to be tackled in the next 10 years from the perspective of the current generation and the IFG in 2050. In the end, there were significant differences between present and future generation groups in terms of assumed societal and business conditions, R&D strategy policies and ideas to be adopted in the future. When depicting business strategies for society in 2050, those with the perspective of future generations tended to imagine completely new application domains and implementation potential for the company’s technology seeds, instead of considering their application as an extension of the present. Regarding finally proposed R&D strategies and technology seeds to be nurtured in the future, the future generations groups developed more new ideas (Hara et al., 2023b). On the other hand, questionnaire surveys of employees participating in the practice before and after their discussions found that the importance of individual criteria for designing R&D strategies, like “client’s needs and wants,” “differentiation from industry competitors,” “business models” and others became less significant after the introduction of the IFG perspective. In other words, by considering the perspectives of future generations, not only did the originality in future business planning and the technological seed exploration increase, but there was a change in criteria and decision-making processes of employees when considering R&D strategies and technological innovation. Comprehensive evaluation of the survey findings and follow-up interviews with the employees generally indicated that the practice of Future Design had effects such as “the concretization of future technology application domains and R&D strategies,” “the redefinition and relativization of the value and strengths of the company’s technologies,” “the discovery of new (different) R&D requirements,” and “the finding of new application domains for the company’s technologies.”

In the subsequent Future Design practice by the company in 2021, new R&D themes were proposed more frequently from the IFG perspective than from the current generation perspective. A follow-up survey of employees who participated in the Future Design practice found that when evaluating the significance and value (potential, prospects, promise) of R&D themes, the importance of indicators in the categories “business and economy,” “differentiation with & relationships with other companies,” and “company policy and vision” decreased after the consideration from the IFG perspective, while such categories as “technology development,” “environmental problems,” and “social issues & needs” became more important (Hara et al., 2023c). This indicates that as a result of adopting the IFG, viewpoints related to short-term profits decreased in importance as decision-making criteria for corporate innovation and R&D strategies, while the importance of perspectives of societal improvement and long-term profit increased.

These findings demonstrate the following important point: The introduction of the perspective of future generations in a company, in addition to enhancing its employees’ creativity in considering business strategies and technology R&D themes, can lead to decision-making that emphasizes societal impacts, such as consideration for the environment. This means that Future Design could result in new directions for industrial innovation that should be pursued from a sustainability or long-term perspective. Previous studies have also discussed the relationship between future insight and corporate innovation. For example, Rohrbeck and Schwarz (2013) argue that strategic foresight can help companies develop new products by exploring new areas for innovation and identifying promising innovations. Here, foresight is similar to the future insight from the perspective of the current generation which is referred to in this paper. On the other hand, the above Future Design practice demonstrates that by incorporating an IFG perspective, the future social environment and business conditions and criteria for decision-making and judgments related to R&D can change, enabling the design of new directions for R&D and innovation.

Even after the joint research project with Osaka University, Organo is continuing its Future Design practice. The company has internalized Future Design not only for exploring R&D themes but also for developing human resources who can evaluate business plans and R&D from a long-term perspective.

I would like to introduce another case. Teikoku-ion Co., Ltd., which has a one-of-a-kind plating technology, has practiced Future Design for the purpose of considering the application and development of the company's technology and training employees involved in the inheritance of their technology. In FY2020, employees took the position of an IFG in 2050 to consider the application and development of the company's technology seeds and business strategies. Of particular note is the change in awareness and cognition of employees who took part in the Future Design practice. Ex post analysis demonstrates that while considering these matters from the IFG perspective, Teikoku-ion employees heightened their awareness of the company's technology, human resource development, and customer base. They also expanded the scope of their thinking to consider how customers use the company’s products, and enhanced their personal recognition of the importance of improving their work efficiency and undertaking responsibilities from a broader perspective than indicated by their given job descriptions (Fujita et al., 2023) (in Japanese).

Future Design practices, including those at the two companies presented in this paper, demonstrate that the introduction of a mechanism that creates empathy for future generations has the potential to allow company employees to gain new perspectives and redesign technology and business development policies and shift innovation directions. Here, I particularly pay attention to the changes in awareness and cognition of company employees who have experienced the practice of Future Design. Are the awareness changes obtained through Future Design practices persistent or are they temporary? According to interviews with management leaders and decision-makers at the two companies cited above, the changes in employee awareness remain even after the Future Design practices end, active cooperation and synergy among employees are seen, and employees maintain an awareness of not only their technologies but also their impacts on a future society in their work (Gaper and Hara, 2023). Another employee survey at Teikoku-ion after the Future Design practice in FY2021 found that their changes in awareness through the thinking and decision-making process from the perspective of the future generations remained effective to some extent post implementation (Fujita et al., 2024) (in Japanese).

Past Future Design studies have found that the introduction of IFG contributes to enhancing employee creativity and leads them to have a wider perspective covering both current and future generations and to consider matters from that perspective, while enhancing their awareness of sharing socially desirable goals, their sense of crisis about the future, and their motivation to transform society positively (e.g., Hara et al., 2021, Hara et al., 2023a). It can be said that these existing findings are consistent with the changes in company employees' awareness as seen in the industrial Future Design practice cases cited in this paper.

The potential for cross-organizational collaboration and Future Design

Does Future Design encourage discussions and consensus-building among stakeholders in different organizations and positions (Hiromitsu et al., 2021)? Does it increase the possibility of collaboration between organizations? Does the IFG perspective allow for joint design of innovation directions beyond organizational and positional barriers?

To answer these questions, 11 employees from five major companies in different sectors and 15 Osaka University students (undergraduate and graduate students) jointly practiced Future Design in 2022. The 26 participants were divided into five groups to implement five Future Design sessions on the campus of Osaka University to explore the challenges and needs of a society in 2050 and consider future R&D directions in relation to the two themes: “livelihood, lifestyles, and health” and “ensuring resilience against global crises.” Through a series of discussions, it was found that the Future Design practice participants discovered new challenges and needs that the current generation perspective groups did not (Hara et al., 2024). For example, a text-mining analysis of discussion data from a group considering the challenges and needs of society in 2050 in terms of “livelihood, lifestyles, and health” found that from the current generation group, high-scoring words included “diversity,” “CO2,” and “safety net," as opposed to “non-cognitive ability,” “healthy life expectancy,” “environmental problems,” and “sense of self-esteem” from the IFG perspective. This indicates that the IFG perspective provided a significantly different focus of discussions and proposed concepts. As a result, five measures related to “R&D directions” proposed by the members from the IFG perspective differed significantly from those proposed by the members from the current generation perspective. None of the measures proposed from the IFG perspective was the same as those proposed from the current generation perspective. When asked whether they felt that new perspectives, realizations or ideas emerged when discussing from the IGF perspective after similar discussions from the current generation perspective during a follow-up survey of the Future Design practice participants (company employees and students), 64% of the respondents answered, “I feel strongly so” or "I feel somewhat so.” It seems that a majority of the participants became aware of new viewpoints, which led to new proposals and decisions based on new ideas. The fact that the exercise involved cross-sector discussions between working adults and students to jointly consider future society challenges and needs and R&D directions was as important as the acquisition of new perspectives. It implies that sharing the IFG perspective may have the effect of promoting or strengthening collaboration across organizational or sectoral barriers. The effect of Future Design on the promotion of such inter-organizational collaboration and its mechanism are important research themes for the future.

The practice of trying to propose measures to solve social issues beyond barriers between organizations or between business sectors has already begun. A typical example is an initiative of the “Future Design Subcommittee for Carbon Neutrality” (in Japanese) within the Kinki Regional Committee on Energy Supply and Demand and Prevention of Global Warming. In June 2024, the subcommittee launched discussions to consider carbon neutrality policies from the perspective of future generations beyond barriers between industry, academia, and government. It is believed to be the first time a government body has established a subcommittee whose purpose was to implement the practice of Future Design. A total of 22 industrial, academic, and government organizations, including national government agencies, local (prefectural and municipal) governments, public institutions, research institutions, and industrial bodies in the Kinki region are participating in this subcommittee for the purpose of creating a catalog of various ideas for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 (for the names of the participating organizations and details of the discussions, see “Case: 15” of “Practices in Public Policy,” Future Design Practices) (in Japanese). Through three workshops, participants from these diverse organizations were divided into four groups and tasked with considering “social conditions in the Kinki region in 2050” and “specific ideas to be addressed” beginning in 2024 from the IFG perspective. It should be noted that various actors from industry, academia, and government worked together to design “new innovation directions” to achieve the common societal goal of carbon neutrality, while transcending organizational frameworks and barriers and making use of their respective expertise and positions. The collaboration of diverse stakeholders in decision-making and building consensus from a long-term perspective will lead to the discovery of new ways of addressing long-term challenges and of possibilities and opportunities for innovation. The IFG approach is an effective mechanism in supporting such efforts.

Toward new industrial innovations

Designing industrial innovations from a long-term perspective or based on sustainability is extremely important not only for individual companies but also for society as a whole. This paper introduced some Future Design practices to demonstrate that Future Design can promote decision-making and consensus-building from the sustainability perspective in terms of designing new directions for innovation. These practices indicate that typical examples of people thinking about the future (labeled as the “current generation perspective” in this literature) actually tend to represent thinking within quite a limited framework. From within these limited frameworks, it is difficult to incentivize change for the future and motivate cross-organizational collaboration. By introducing new mechanisms to create empathy for future generations, instead of pursuing discussions and decision-making based only on the premise of existing systems, we may be able to enrich the consideration of the desirable state of organizations and society and directions for innovation from a long-term perspective.

In the future, it will become increasingly important to consider new forms of industrial innovation to support the realization of a sustainable future society in a collaborative manner that transcends organizational and positional barriers. Future Design has the potential to become part of the foundation that underpins such decision-making and practices. Needless to say, it is important to accumulate further scientific knowledge related to Future Design itself and to put the mechanism into practice based on such knowledge. In this process, it is essential that Future Design researchers and practitioners cooperate and share roles to support the practice of Future Design, while verifying its effectiveness. The methodology and conditions underlying its implementation must be modified and improved continually. These careful steps will be necessary to promote the research and practical application of Future Design.