Learning from an Envisioned Future: An Empirical Account

• Published in: Electronic journal of knowledge management : EJKM 2016-03, Vol.14 (1), p.18
• Main Authors: Kaiser, Alexander, Kragulj, Florian, Grisold, Thomas, Walser, Roman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1479-4411

Innovation processes require organizations to transcend current boundaries. The authors are used to face the future with our existing knowledge and experiences from the past. They therefore suggest a new learning approach for organizations, which enables to literally envision a desired future scenario and thereby, allows for the creation of radical new knowledge. They argue that the created knowledge yields a higher degree of novelty and radicalness. Along with an enhanced theory of learning including learning from the future, they present the empirical findings from comparing the outputs of Learning from an Envisioned Future and learning from the past. For this purpose, they use data from two organizational learning projects; one, which was conducted with a high school in Austria and another one, which was conducted with members of the Austrian Economic Chamber. The findings from both case studies suggest that Learning from an Envisioned Future does produce significantly more paradigm challenging knowledge compared to the output gained from conventional learning from past experiences.