Today, companies are under constant pressure to innovate for remaining competitive on the market. The complex environment makes a pure reliance on trend analysis no longer enough to understand future development in their
industry. Particularly, the high-tech sector is vulnerable to combinations of long-term technological, societal and cultural change, comprising several dimensions of uncertainty related to technological change, especially the difficulty of
identifying use cases for new technology and dependence on complementary inventions.
Yet, HE offerings focus predominantly on educating (future) strategists in developing short and middle term (2-7 years) strategies. Far-future
strategic decisions, however, need to be built on a sound long-term technology future scenario (LTFS) development methodology that is different in so far as it needs to consider not just trend forecasts, but also tacit visionary knowledge.
Developing multiple LTFSs for a future more than 10-20 years ahead supports companies in anticipating and making sense of possible shifts in their industry due to emergent technologies, wildcards like the recent COVID19 pandemic, and
sociocultural change, and in validating business innovation ideas. High-tech sector companies would greatly benefit from an HE curriculum which provides a valid framework and a reliable methodology to develop LTFS enabling conscious
choices in long-term strategy making.
FIT4FUTURE is structured to make meaningful contributions to stimulating innovation and bridging Europe's knowledge, skills and competences gap. In a systematic way, it is important to understand those skills and competences gap, and students' learning pathways to design student-centred curricula that better meet the needs of the labour market. It is thus necessary to equip higher education institutions (HEI) personnel with the ability to teach LTFS development
methodologies, methods and approaches, which will provide companies with future technologists/engineers, who are aware of the importance of LTFSs for sustainable competitive advantage and educated in developing these types of
scenarios.
FIT4FUTURE will train HE teachers online in a novel and innovative area, i.e. LTFS, and enable them to design their own curriculum including LTFS in a transdisciplinary approach. FIT4FUTURE will implement this with a modular course design in an online platform, that can either be delivered online or hybrid, which is designed with an instructional technologies approach so that the digital skills and competences of HE teachers will be enhanced for the digital transformation in line with the Digital Education Action Plan.