Ever since the end of the Cold War, the clock began ticking on the current Western-driven world order. However, the shift to a new global order is difficult to see in real-time. The world may be entering a new era; however, we do not yet know what this will look like. As we move from multipolarity to regio-globalism, as the innovation paradigm shift to decarbonisation, biotech and bioengineering, existing frameworks are disrupted, and conventional sources of power may be shifting we are in period of liminality also in global relations (Mälksoo, 2012).
Corporate foresight enables companies to assess drivers of change and future scenarios for the business environment (Fergnani, 2022). As a corporate foresight think tank, Themis Foresight observes that many business leaders are unable to comprehend and manage the liminality of Global and European relations. In the course of 2022, we thus conducted a comprehensive research project and produced two outputs. The foresight report ‘The European Economy in a New World Order’ and a set of five scenarios titled ‘At the cusp of a new era: Scenarios for European Business in 2045’. The project consisted of a year of continuous environmental scanning, two surveys among board members of European businesses and a series of in-depth interviews with international experts. We conducted two Futures Labs and developed scenarios using abductive and perspective-based scenario methods (Ramirez and Wilkinson, 2016). Four scenarios were based on political perspective, and a fifth scenario was developed as a counterfactual.
We propose a shared keynote/paper presentation to share the methodology and results of this project.