Legacy
How it all startedThe three initial ForeSight founders, Sven Atterhed, Lennart Boksjö and Gustaf Delin had line management backgrounds in large companies. They first worked together as consultants at Innotech, a leading US consulting firm, in the development of business concepts. It soon became clear to the Swedish trio that creative business concepts/ideas were only one ingredient in the success of new ventures. From venture capitalists in the USA the group learned early that the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial team account for some 75% of the success of a new venture.
A new concept "Intrapreneurship" was bornLooking at the way venture capitalists engage on the open market to support entrepreneurs prompted The ForeSight Group in 1979 to develop programs to support internal entrepreneurs, within large organizations. A new concept was born to help speed up the process of innovation and change in large companies, drawing on the energy and drive of internal entrepreneurs - intrapreneurs, a term coined by Gifford Pinchot.
The idea was to create a win-win situation for the companies and for the intrapreneurs. The companies would keep their internal entrepreneurial talent for creating new businesses and the intrapreneurs would be able to build on the established brand names and networks of the large company and share in the success at limited risk. The ForeSight methodology helps companies to speed up the process of bringing new ventures, products and services to market and of implementing internal projects.
Supporting top management teamsThe ForeSight Group later built on this experience to develop programs to help top managements in identifying strategic issues and in applying entrepreneurial principles to implement strategy. This process, which was later described by Professor Henry Mintzberg as emergent strategy is now well recognized as a theory, but few seem to know how to apply it in practice.
In 1983 ForeSight set up a company in Washington D.C. to test its methods in the world's most demanding market. For this purpose, only large US owned companies were approached. From the USA ForeSight returned to Europe via the Economist Conference Unit in London and Management Center Europe in Brussels, where ForeSight held seminars based on the ForeSight methodology of intrapreneurship. This led to a number of assignments with major European companies.
During the 1990s ForeSight worked with top-management teams on emergent strategy, in parallel with front-line innovation driven by intrapreneurs. This involvement became a powerful means of influencing corporate cultures towards becoming more entrepreneurial.
Leveraging the implementation of significant initiativesIn 2004 The ForeSight founders agreed to let one of their partners, Björn Larsson start a new chapter.
Apart from catalyzing change within large companies The ForeSight Group started helping to leverage the implementation of significant initiatives. Björn together with Dr Anders Aspling used The ForeSight Approach among other client assignments to set the framework for and develop what today has become The Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative, a European Foundation for Management Development and UN Global Compact long-term initiative to renew business schools world wide, engaging some 60 institutions, including INSEAD, London Business School, Instituto de Impressa, Aviva, IBM and Petrobras.
Björn has actively supported The World's Children's Prize since its start as a board member and international ambassador. It has become the world´s largest initiative on human rights, democracy and respect for the environment for the coming generation and engages close to 20 million children via almost 100 countries, annually. Its was recognized as ìthe most important communications initiative on the planet at the 2008 AGM of the 16,000 member-strong International Association of Business Communicators.
