Falling in love with strategic foresight, not only with technology: European deep-tech startups’ roadmap to success

Abstract

This study exposes relevant tensions between deep-tech startups’ sound technological solutions, confronted with lack of marketing skills to communicate their unique value proposition for targeted customers. Incorporating technological foresight as an essential component of strategic foresight, this study explores how the interplay between firm internal technological, environmental, and market features influences enhanced foresight capabilities. The model is tested with Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and uses survey data from managers of European deep-tech companies. PLS-SEM findings reveal a significant correlation between market features, tech features and environmental features jointly influencing enhanced foresight capabilities. The strong correlation between tech features and enhanced foresight capabilities give promising insight for upgrading this managerial capability as it influences successful scaling from laboratory to pilot customers. In turn, the lack of correlation between firm internal features and enhanced foresight capabilities proves that rapid technological advances outpace market readiness or customer adoption, claiming to replace “learning from the past” with “learning from the future”. The findings enrich the current body of knowledge, while the practical implication highlights how enhanced foresight capabilities enable deep tech firms to leverage technology dominance with desirable business agility, in order to adopt a virtuous cycle of capturing-market maker opportunities towards a future shaping builder.