Beyond the COVID-19 crisis: A research note on post-pandemic scenarios for South Tyrol 2030.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit societies all around the globe, with tremendous consequences. Beyond its impact on individual and public health, the ensuing crisis has also accentuated existing social and economic problems and, in many cases, exacerbated them. In this context, a central question arises: How can societies be better prepared for the future? This research note presents an example of strategic foresight as an instrument for better understanding systemic challenges, anticipating the emergent risks and opportunities and informing future-proof decision-making. More specifically, it reflects central insights of a regional foresight project that aimed at exploring development pathways of the Italian province South Tyrol for the next 10 years and beyond (2030+). Delineating four plausible, equivalent and consistent scenarios and their entailed challenges, risks and opportunities for South Tyrol, the project offers a future-oriented policy instrument for political, economic and civil actors and key stakeholders. Instead of a classic empirical outlet, the article is prepared as a research note that, beyond sketching the scenarios, shares the project experiences, lessons learned, challenges and success factors for other future regional foresight endeavors.

Preparing, conducting, and analyzing Delphi surveys: Cross-disciplinary practices, new directions, and advancements.

Delphi is a scientific method to organize and structure an expert discussion aiming to generate insights on controversial topics with limited information. The technique has seen a rise in publication frequency in various disciplines, especially over the past decades. In April 2021, the term Delphi method yielded 28,200 search hits in Google Scholar for the past five years alone. Given the increasing level of uncertainty caused by rapid technological and social change around the globe, collective expert opinions and assessments are likely to gain even more importance. Therefore, the paper at hand presents technical recommendations derived from a Delphi study that was conducted amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.•The paper comprehensively demonstrates how to prepare, conduct, and analyze a Delphi study. In this regard, it combines several methodological advancements of the recent past (e.g., dissent analyses, scenario analyses) with state-of-the-art impulses from other disciplines like strategic management (e.g., fuzzy clustering), psychology (e.g., sentiment analyses), or clinical trials (e.g., consensus measurement).•By offering insights on the variety of possibilities to exploit Delphi-based data, we aim to support researchers across all disciplines in conducting Delphi studies and potentially expand and improve the method's field of application.

Scenarios for the logistics services industry: A Delphi-based analysis for 2025.

The logistics services industry will be significantly affected by future developments throughout the world. Therefore, developing future scenarios is an important basis for long-term strategy development. Nevertheless, research exposes that there is a lack of awareness among logistics researchers and practitioners about future scenarios. In this paper, we apply scenario planning and present the findings of an extensive Delphi-based scenario study on the future of the logistics services industry in the year 2025. The major contribution of our research is the development of probable and unforeseen scenarios of the future which may provide a valuable basis for strategy development in the logistics services industry.