Strategic foresight for Universities

What will the university of the future look like? How will the expectations of students, teachers and stakeholders in politics and business change? How can universities successfully position themselves in tomorrow’s global education competition?

A new consulting concept from Z_punkt The Foresight Company and CHE Consult Berlin helps universities to use strategic foresight to exploit scope for action and to set the course for the future in a timely and coordinated manner.

The framework conditions for the successful development of universities are changing more and more rapidly. Trends and challenges such as digitalisation, demographic change, technological developments, global upheavals and ecological challenges are increasingly posing new questions to society. Questions to which universities must find answers in terms of content and organisation.

Universities today are under increasing pressure to adapt, which, due to the specific constitution of the university world, is matched only by the limited “innovative capacity” and creative power of university management. This makes it all the more important to identify the risks and opportunities of the future at an early stage and to take them into account proactively in planning processes. This is the only way to ensure that universities remain attractive to their stakeholders and relevant to society in the long term.

With our strategic foresight approach for universities, we support university and department heads in

• the professional and participative development of future visions as a basis for development planning and securing development goals.
• identifying new educational needs and content at an early stage through systematic analysis of subject-specific and interdisciplinary trends.
• transforming the university into a “forward-looking organisation”, which is oriented towards the future in terms of content and organisation
  actively developing an agile mindset that enables the university to act as a sustainable interface to the future.

Z_punkt and CHE Consult combine their methodological and professional strengths in the new consulting approach. Z_punkt has more than 20 years of experience with challenging foresight projects for private and public clients. CHE Consult specialises in strategic and organisational consulting in the education sector and has already accompanied a large number of universities on their way into the future.

Together, we see ourselves as future partners of the universities, jointly develop a project concept adapted to the specific situation of the university, analyse the relevant environmental developments in a structured manner, convey the methodological knowledge of strategic foresight in joint application and steer the entire process with experience, good stakeholder management and sensitivity – from the future analysis to the concrete implementation strategy.