A Foresight And Innovation Enabled Future: Rupert Hofmann From Audi Business Innovation With Dinis Guarda
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Dinis Guarda interviews Rupert Hofmann, Chief Foresight Strategist at Audi Business Innovation and founder of the Foresight Academy. Both discuss the role of foresight and innovation in ensuring a humane-technology-enabled society. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com.
Rupert Hofmann is a leading foresight practitioner renowned for his trend receiver methodology. As an observational draftsman, he captures modern life in linear drawings, blending art with a deep understanding of human motivations. At Audi Business Innovation GmbH, Rupert created and is managing the Foresight Academy.
The Foresight Academy is a collaborative platform where leading companies engage in foresight to explore future urban trends and challenges.
“Foresight Academy is a collaboration of major companies innovating together responding to the question ‘how do we want to live in 10 years?’”, says Rupert.
“We are researching and exchanging around that question and try to respond to that because the partner companies use that to influence their strategy, their product development, and so on.
We have a joint budget, we have research questions which all the partners bring up because that's interesting to see where the overlaps are between the most interesting research questions of Ferrari, of Allianz, of Porsche, and McDonald's. So, you have a very broad view and then we build hypotheses together. We work on that; we have exchange meetings. So, it's really a kind of an exchange and research journey which we're doing together, so that we have the strategy.
The innovation, the business development, and the product development people from the different industries working together is how we do that and then we visualise it. We have a legacy that does a major part of the research and visualisation and we use all the material to spark innovation and good foresight knowledge in and its application in our diverse companies.
So, it's three things: the exchange, research and of course, transfer how to bring the knowledge about potentials, about what makes sense, what people want to make out of these shifts, how to use that to spark the development of of the products and services and to position the brand in the right way. So, the basic question is who we want to be as a brand in a few years.”
Audi Business Innovation: Integrating technology with humanity
At Audi Business Innovation, Rupert focuses on integrating new technological applications, particularly in digital and AI domains, to enhance urban mobility and infrastructure.
“Audi business innovation brings new technological implications, especially in the digital and AI world to the company so we really helped the company to bring it on the road Audi business innovation was also the environment with Foresight Academy was brought up together with our first partners, but Audi is initiating the company. I started it there Audi created the business innovation and the framework to make that possible with the first Partners which were Hornbach, Ikea, Adidas, and many more”, he explains it to Dinis.
This integration is crucial for developing smart solutions, he says, that addresses the complex challenges of modern landscape.
Rupert shares significant findings from the Foresight Academy’s research, emphasising the global attractiveness of the European model of smart regulation and its implications for urban planning:
“We have 30 reports and many movies. We see that collaboration makes much sense in foresight because we get a broader view, and we get more credibility from the learnings.
What we learned from one of this research is the importance of Europe being at the forefront of smart regulation to bring AI in the race in terms of climate change. People will now have tech and the tremendous opportunities of AI embedded in a huge way. So, to say it simply in a way that fits our senses and our physical limitations as well which enhances that but not by becoming cyborgs but more subtle humanely.”
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