Year: 2025
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: 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.
Source: Knowledge and space
Author: Ian Miles
Institution: University of Manchester
Language: English
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410115879