Department of Management

René Rohrbeck is Professor of Strategy at the EDHEC Business School, where we is also director of the EDHEC Chair for Foresight, Innovation and Transformation. At Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, he is visiting Professor of Strategy and also member of the Strategic Foresight Research Network. 

René is best known for his pioneering work on future preparedness of organizations. Having worked in two disrupted industries, automobile and telecommunication, René wanted to understand how leading organizations use foresight to anticipate future markets and develop agile strategies. He has developed the Future FITness model, which measures the ability of organizations to use foresight to drive innovation and transformation.

He regularly teaches on EMBA and Executive Education programs and at EDHEC offers a 35h Strategic Foresight Executive Certificate course.

Before joining academia he spent 6 years in industry where he worked on innovation management at Volkswagen and on corporate foresight at Deutsche Telekom.

As a consultant he has served clients on a number of topics including, designing innovation management systems, developing and implementing corporate foresight practices, as well as strategic and financial planning of new business fields. He is also partner in a Berlin-based consultancy.

Research. He has authored the book “Corporate foresight – Towards a Maturity Model for the Future Orientation of a firm”, in which he develops a benchmarking framework for assessing future orientation and describes best practices in corporate foresight. For the corporate foresight maturity model he also received the ODC best paper awards at the Academy of Management annual meeting in 2010. His research has also been published in leading international journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, and R&D Management.

His editorial contributions include being the managing editor of the special issue on Corporate Foresight for the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change and he is currently editing a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, which focuses on the impact of strategic foresight on innovation and strategic management.

Education

Employment

Teaching

Technische Universität Berlin (TUB); Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University (Aarhus BSS); Universität zu Kiel (Kiel); Sino-Danish Center (SDC), Beijing; EBS University (EBS), Germany; Hanken (Hanken, Danish Technical University (DTU), Finland.

Editorial Positions

Review assignments (last 5 years): Technological Forecasting and Social Change (8), Futures (5), Creativity and Innovation Management (3), Engineering Management Journal (3), R&D Managment (2), International Journal of Technology Management (1), Journal of Business Research (1), Long Range Planning (1), Strategic Organization (1)

Languages: Danish, English, French, German, Spanish