Experiencing tomorrow, today

It is unpredictable what the future will look like. However, for a leading, global specialty chemicals group like Evonik, spotting future trends is a vital competitive factor in order to initiate timely and target-oriented innovation. The Corporate Foresight Team of Creavis has addressed the task of conducting this future research. This has resulted in the largest study worldwide on possible future scenarios for the specialty chemicals industry, based on more than 100 interviews with internal and external experts.

What are the major forces that could affect the specialty chemicals industry in the long term? The developed scenarios are expected to provide an answer to this question. The scenarios carry titles like Deceptive Calm, Chinese Dream, Sustainability Paradigm, Turbulent Times and Digital Champions. What exactly lies behind these names?

The latest Creavis Lounge offered a wider public the opportunity to get acquainted with the scenarios and to study their significance for their own field of work. Stefan Buchholz, managing director of Creavis, and Björn Theis, head of the Foresight team at Creavis, presented the scenarios and explained the development process. Björn Theis: “Based on interviews with internal and external experts we determined influencing factors from which we developed the scenarios with the support of algorithms. However, no computer can predict the impacts of these scenarios for each and every one of us!” For this reason, the guests of the Creavis Lounge were given the opportunity to study the scenarios in detail and discuss their impact in small work groups.

In a final discussion round, the key findings of these work groups were summarized. In the scenario Chinese Dream for instance, the participants focused on the five-year plans of the People’s Republic of China and arrived at the conclusion that these plans should be more strongly heeded by western governments and industrial enterprises than it is currently being done. The moderator, Matthias Bongard, closed the event by urging all the guests of the Creavis Lounge to continue to reflect on the scenarios, and invited them to think further about these tools that Creavis had developed.

After the official program had ended, the guests had the opportunity to immerse themselves further in the worlds of the future, thanks to virtual reality glasses. A collaborative robot (cobot) was also presented, with which the guests of the Creavis Lounge could interact — which brought them at least a little closer to the future.