The Concept of Tipping Points and the Importance of Corporate Foresight

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us again how small events trigger a transformation that influence all parts of our everyday life. The diffusion of the virus, which is driven by the established structures of overall global connectivity, hasn‘t run linear. The outbreak of Sars-Cov-2 can be interpreted as a so-called tipping point that has the power of changing the way we work and live in a sustaining way. According to the definition of Milkoreit et al. (2018, 11) based on an interdisciplinary literature review a tipping point can be described as ―a threshold at which small quantitative changes in the system trigger a non-linear change process that is driven by system-internal feedback mechanisms and inevitably leads to a qualitatively different state of the system, which is often irreversible‖. Based on that definition the conceptual paper introduces and discusses different tipping point concepts. In a second step, the paper reviews the findings in the research field of Corporate Foresight for early detection of weak signals and micro-trends, as it is postulated that tipping points can often identified only afterwards. Corporate Foresight research could help demystifying. ... mehrLastly, the paper closes with an evaluation of similarities and differences of the dynamics of tipping points, weak-signals and micro trends and the derived implications for the strategies and practices of Corporate Foresight.