The Present Future : How anticipations of the future shaped through path creation affect present innovation

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates how visions created to enable change inside organizations or society affect the ability to fulfill these visions. Radical innovation often requires both change and investment and to enable this, knowledge is needed. Visions can create a sense of knowledge and help overcome knowledge gaps by creating unity. By extending existing research that has focused on enabling change through path creation with how the enablement affects the innovation process itself this thesis contributes with new insights into how the future affects the present. It consists of four different articles, set in four different empirical qualitative contexts, all focused on how visions of the radical innovation, self-driving vehicles. Results indicate that the visions of self-driving vehicles are needed to enable innovation, but visions shrink the solution space for the innovation process of unknown technology. The findings also indicate that radical innovation affects who steers strategy development in times of radical innovation and that what is done in strategy development is affected by the profession of the strategy developer. The results point to the importance of understanding the effects of visions in early vision building not only as a lever against history but also as a shaper of an unknown future.