Foresight – Brazil

Cosmob, in collaboration with international partners such as SEBRAE and Conect Consultoria, is involved in Foresight, a project born in 2015 with the aim of supporting the competitiveness of the Paranà (Brazil) SMEs, identifying the best opportunities for the development and the introduction of technological innovations and acquisition of specific  skills.

Foresight is a methodology aimed at forecasting scenarios, ie the identification of the favorable and necessary context for recognizing and disseminating new opportunities within a given territory or production sector. All this looking at the future, while remaining anchored to reality and to the current skills held by companies belonging to each sector of reference.

The methodology, initially applied to the construction sector of Curitiba, was subsequently applied in other areas; in fact, the beneficiaries are SMEs and can be applied to different sectors: agro-industry, manufacturing, construction, wood furniture, fashion and boating.

The main outputs of the project are:

1. Definition of the strategic elements for sectorial development
2. Identifying competitive factors
3. Projection of SMEs in future innovation scenarios
4. Connection with European technology platforms
5. Identification of new lines of action

The Foresight methodology has already been successfully applied to the civil construction sector of the Brazilian state of Parana. Thanks to the involvement of many stakeholders (experts in the sector, representatives of the scientific, associative, institutional, companies) it was possible to identify the most strategic issues for the construction sector; in particular, the positioning of the whole of the future scenarios of the 80 companies involved was defined and their technological needs were identified. In parallel, over 20 institutions (universities, laboratories, technology centers, etc.) have collaborated to determine the offer of technology services available to companies. All this represented the basis for the creation of a demand-supply matrix and to make a comparison with the European platforms: the final result was the definition of lines of intervention both of public policy and directly addressed to the enterprises with a view to their competitive growth.

Currently Foresight has been applied to the agro-industry sector of the State of Paranà, Brazil. The objective is to apply the Foresight methodology to the agri-food chain in order to define new technological scenarios that will influence the main factors of development of the supply chain: better quality, reduction of production costs and improvement of logistics.