Budapest Business University’s journal Prosperitas is inviting papers for its special issue entitled “Futures in Entrepreneurial Behaviour” to be published in 2024. The journal is inviting contributions by both junior and well-established researchers from all over the world.
Aim of the special issue:
Collecting and comparing case studies on how the notion of future appears in business decision-making, what skills are related to such decision-making, and how future skills are related to business performance. In the case studies to be submitted, the stories and analyses of entrepreneurs and companies should trace what futures these entrepreneurs and companies used, how they used them and what success stories or failures they have experienced.
Rationale:
The umbrella concept of the studies to be published in this special issue is soft skills, such as resilience, responsibility, persuasion, teamwork, analysis, empathy, and not at last anticipation. As Gascóna and Gallifab (2022) define, soft skills psychologically describe the learning, thinking and acting characteristics of people. Among many effects, these features help people anticipate professional futures and career orientation. These skills, however, are not easy to acquire, measure or develop, and the education system is short of offering opportunities of developing these skills.
Future consciousness and future orientation are immanent and specific features of the human species. Thomas Lombardo dedicated a voluminous book to discovering the nature and historical development of the human capacity to think about the future (Lombardo, 2008). Loveridge (2009) also gives examples of how foresight was used in the main cultural eras of humankind’s history and concludes that “foresight is not new, only newly rediscovered after one of its periodic sojourns in the intellectual and political wilderness” (ibid, p.8.).
However, recent decades have been facing the crisis and transition of the global world, which is depicted as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (Johansen-Euchner, 2013; Sombala, 2019). Technological, economic and social networks are transforming into highly complex systems that perform inconstant futures. In this world, one fixed point is the ability to navigate in the waves of change through possessing futures consciousness, a foresight framework and appropriate techniques.
Being aware of what future we use and how we use it in thinking and in decision-making is called futures literacy (Miller, 2019). Unconsciously we regularly use futures in planning or forming expectations, but the navigating power in these scenarios derives from the conscious distinction between aims, types and methods of futures, which ideally is coupled with knowing how the proper aims, types and methods fit together. Our age demolishes the past boundaries of time, opens the plausible scope of the future and enables people to shape their own lives through purposive activities and continuous reflections. Both the ability of permanent adaptation and shaping the future are evolutionary advantages in our global world.
Developing futures literacy and adapting foresight are fundamental challenges for the entrepreneurial field. Corporate foresight mainly denotes the field of futures activities in business. Rohrbeck and Kum (2018) find that corporate foresight is used with the expectation that it will help firms break away from path dependency, help decision-makers define superior courses of action, and ultimately enable superior firm performance.
When paying attention to success, Hines (2016) found four specific challenges or barriers to integrating foresight in organisations: (1) foresight competes for attention, (2) foresight is perceived as threatening, (3) foresight is viewed as intangible, and (4) foresight capacity is lacking. As Rohrbeck and Kum (2018) experienced, even if we are witnessing the rising adoption of corporate foresight within firms, its application – on average – seems to still lack comprehensiveness, continuity and institutionalization.
Future in business – both as corporate foresight and soft skills – boasts extensive literature. Many conceptual papers, methodological discussions and statistical conclusions of big sample analyses exist. The special issue we are now inviting papers for aims to contribute with some specific case studies to the exploration of successful and failed uses of futures skills.
Process
- Abstract submission due date: Abstract submission due date: 30 November 2023 by e-mail to gaspar.tamas@uni-bge.hu. Reflection and discussion on the concepts promptly follow submissions.
- Full paper submission due date: 1 February 2024. The submissions follow the Journal’s review process.
- Revised version due date: 1 May 2024
- International Conference (hybrid) organised by Budapest Business University to present the papers and make comparisons with the others’ experiences, as well as a focus group discussion on results: May 2024.
- Special issue published: 2nd half of 2024. Please, note that finalised and accepted papers will be published earlier in the form of early access articles.
Please, visit Prosperitas’ website for further information about manuscript submission at https://uni-bge.hu/en/prosperitas
Guest Editor: Dr. Tamás Gáspár, Associate Professor, Budapest Business University, Hungary
References
Gascóna, Á. E.- Gallifab. J. (2022). How to measure soft skills in the educational context: psychometric properties of the SKILLS-in-ONE questionnaire, Studies in Educational Evaluation, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2022.101155
Hines, A. (2016) Let’s Talk about Success: A Proposed Foresight Outcomes Framework for Organizational Futurists. Journal of Futures Studies, June 2016, 20(4): 1–20.
Johansen B, Euchner J (2013) Navigating the VUCA World, Research-Technology Management 56(1):10-15.
Lombardo, Th. (2008) The evolution of future consciousness. Author House.
Loveridge, D. (2009) Foresight. The art and science of anticipating the future. Routledge.
Miller, R. (ed.) (2019) Transforming the future. Anticipation in the 21st century. Routledge
Rohrbeck, R., Kum, E. (2018) Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 129: 105-116.
Sombala N (2019) The VUCA Learner: Future-proof Your Relevance. South Asian Journal of Management 26(3): 193-198.