Innovation forecast: Un-avoidable and context dependent

In order to mobilize the necessary resources for innovation forecasts are unavoidable. However, a forecast is never a neutral or objective assessment. Given an interdependent business landscape, there are at least two major context-related aspects that affect an innovation forecast. First, the actor that makes the forecast is embedded into a specific context. Secondly, the potential innovation stems from a specific environment, and will during the innovation journey be related to other environments in a producing and a using setting, and thus to other investments in place. In this paper we examine the development of one innovation and the forecasts made by three different economic actors. There is an interesting variation in the forecasts that can be explained as a variation of contexts of the actors. The contexts influence the way that the forecasts are done and especially in terms of what the context of the innovation is assumed to be. The empirical findings suggest that the results of the innovation forecast are highly dependent on the actors' abstraction of the business landscape which in turn is affected by the contexts of the actors.