Meet René Rohrbeck, a Professor of strategy who uses foresight as a lever for impact

The start of the career of this native Berliner came as something of a revelation: in 2006, fresh from an MSc. Business Administration from the Technische Universität (Berlin), René Rohrbeck joined Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-Lab). In this unit dedicated to developing the telecoms giant's R&D strategy, René quickly realised that the major groups were woefully unprepared for what he describes as the tides. ‘This technology and strategy watch work opened my eyes to the inability of companies to prepare for major changes such as climate change, decarbonisation, digitalisation and, today, artificial intelligence’, says René. ‘I began to think about how to enable and support these strategic reflections, and then how to manage the resulting transformations at company level.

René Rohrbeck then began a doctorate, taking advantage of the high-level contacts around him to carry out an initial benchmark of companies' forward-looking capabilities. His thesis, presented in 2009 at the Technische Universität and entitled ‘Corporate Foresight - Towards a Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm’ (1) analysed 19 multinationals, analysing their degree of preparedness for change and deriving an original model for strategic thinking.

This first dive into the subject was to be decisive in shaping his career choices: a few months later, he helped launch a European consortium of excellence bringing together universities, research structures and private sector players. The EIT Digital (European Institute of Innovation & Technology) (2), for which he is then Director of Innovation, is an entity operating under the aegis of the European Union, with a budget of one billion euros to work on accelerating the digital transformation of European businesses.

In 2011, he decided to join the University of Aarhus (Denmark) to resume the research activities he began with his doctorate. He relaunched his benchmarking programme with a 7-year longitudinal study on the impact of preparation and foresight on business performance. Published in 2018 in the Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change the study is a landmark and is still regularly cited today (3).

Aarhus marks the official start of his academic career as a professor, a path that he is carefully building while keeping one foot in the business world. In 2017, René became the University's Associate Dean for Corporate Relations, and the Rohrbeck Heger consultancy, which he co-founded in 2014 with Tobias Heger, enables him to bridge the gap between research and impact.

‘I've turned my initial shock into long-term intellectual stimulation and a real desire to act’, he explains. ‘It's very important for me not only to keep in touch with the world of business, but also to help change it. This contribution takes the form of a benchmark model designed to assess companies' future FITness, or their degree of preparedness for the transformations to come. More than 700 organisations have already benefited, and a self-assessment tool is currently being developed with the World Economic Forum.

René Rohrbeck joins EDHEC in 2019 as Professor of Strategy: ‘It was the alignment of our visions that convinced me,’ he says. ‘I wanted to get closer to the business world and work to change industries by helping to train their future leaders; the idea of impact resonated with my ambitions and my approach to research.’

In addition to his work with students, whose critical thinking skills he is committed to developing through his Strategy, Strategic Foresight & Strategic Design courses at EDHEC, René launched and is still directing two chairs: the FIT Chair (Foresight, Innovation & Transformation), which focuses on companies through benchmarks, continuing education courses and Future of sector analysis projects, and the UNESCO Chair in Organizational Anticipation, Resilient Leadership and Educational Innovation, which focuses on North-South collaboration and training the leaders of tomorrow.

Behind these two initiatives is the same desire: ‘To move forward, we have to do it together’, explains René. ‘Collaborative anticipation is the only approach that will enable us to create a world we want to live in, to rediscover our ability to think about our societies in the long term, to take back control of our future and imagine a better one’.

It is within these initiatives that René advances his research on the subjects that fascinate him, in particular with the Future of projects in which he, his colleagues and their students dissect industries and their players by involving companies in workshops, hackathons and innovation days to understand the weak signals and work on their evolution. And always with a concern for transmission and impact, René features, for example, in the top 2% of most cited scientists in the Stanford/Elsevier world ranking, alongside 3 other EDHEC professors (4).

This work has already led to publications on the future of medicine (‘Medicine of the future: How and who is going to treat us?’ (5) and ‘Technology entrepreneurship in healthcare: Challenges and opportunities for value creation’ (6)) and soon on the future of agri-food and construction.

‘What interests me today is creating the capacity to take better action for the future in companies’, he explains. ‘This means co-creating solutions, through research, but also by educating our students and developing their critical thinking skills. Foresight is a method of thinking that can be learned, a systemic way of thinking that enables us to put industries at the service of sustainable development, and to mobilise all our energies in a desirable direction.’

Key dates

Since 2019: Professor of Strategy, Director of the FIT Chair (2019) and the UNESCO Chair (2023), EDHEC Business School

2017-2019: Associate Dean for Corporate Relations, University of Aarhus (Denmark)

Since 2014: Co-founder, Rohrbeck Heger (Berlin, Germany)

2011-2019: Professor and researcher, University of Aarhus (Denmark)

2009-2010: Director of Innovation, member of the Executive Management Board, EIT Digital (Brussels, Belgium)

2006-2009: PhD, Technische Universität (Berlin, Germany). Thesis Corporate Foresight - Towards a Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm

2006-2008: Technology Foresight and Innovation Management, T-Labs, Deutsche Telekom (Berlin, Germany)

1999-2005: BSc. then MSc. Business Administration, Technische Universität (Berlin, Germany)

To find out more about René Rohrbeck :

• Go to his EDHEC Business School webpage
• See his Research Gate profile
• Access his Linkedin profile

References

(1) Corporate Foresight: Towards a Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a Firm, January 2010. Publisher: Physica-Verlag, Springer. ISBN: 978-3-7908-2625-8 - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/202288900_Corporate_Foresight_Towards_a_Maturity_Model_for_the_Future_Orientation_of_a_Firm

(2) The EIT aims to mobilize "a pan-European multi-stakeholder open-innovation ecosystem of top European corporations, SMEs, startups, universities and research institutes" - https://www.eitdigital.eu/

(3) René Rohrbeck, Menes Etingue Kum. "Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis" (2018) Technological Forecasting and Social Change,
Volume 129 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.12.013

(4) Four EDHEC professors in the 2023 Stanford/Elsevier world ranking of the top 2% of scientists (Nov. 2023), edhec.edu

(5) Julia Kulkova, Ignat Kulkov, Rene Rohrbeck, Shasha Lu, Ahmed Khwaja, Heikki Karjaluoto, Joel Mero. Medicine of the future: How and who is going to treat us? (2023) Futures, Volume 146 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103097

EDHEC Vox / The Conversation, "The future of medicine: what does 50-year forecast look like?" (Nov. 2023) - https://www.edhec.edu/en/research-and-faculty/edhec-vox/future-medicine-what-does-50-year-forecast-look-like

(6) Ignat Kulkov, Maria Ivanova-Gongne, Alberto Bertello, Hannu Makkonen, Julia Kulkova, Rene Rohrbeck, Alberto Ferraris. Technology entrepreneurship in healthcare: Challenges and opportunities for value creation (2023). Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, Volume 8, Issue 2 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2023.100365