ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Historically organisations have had the "luxury" of being able to anticipate future developments and respond to them in good time due to, firstly, the comparatively slow pace of change and, secondly, the past being a relatively good predictor of the future. The second half of the 20th Century bears witness to some of the most dramatic changes and developments experienced by mankind. Most notable of these were globalisation,de-regulation, the emergence of the information/knowledge economy and, perhaps most significant of all, the changes brought about by the Internet. The underlying assertion of this report is that, given the current, complex, dynamic and sometimes volatile nature of changes in the external environment, in order to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage, organisations will be forced to consider carefully the dynamics of the environment in which they operate and to build their plans around these dynamics. This report briefly traces the evolution of strategic planning to its current status prior to providing a detailed analysis of the nature of environmental scanning and its applicability to strategic planning. The report provides a theoretical overview Qf environmental scanning and a discussion of some of the tools and techniques of environmental scanning. Within this context the report provides a brief indication of the extent of the practice of environmental scanning within the financial services sector of South Africa. The conclusion assesses the findings of the current state of the practice of environmental scanning against the theory, with the view to providing an insight into the extent to which environmental scanning is applied in South Africa Possible future directions of research and development of the practice are also identified. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Histories gesproke, het instansies oor die "luukse" beskik om toekomstige ontwikkelinge vooruit te kon waarneem en betyds op hulle te reageer, eerstens weens die betreklike stadige pas van verandering en tweedens, omdat die verlede 'n betreklike goeie voorspeller van die toekoms was. Die tweede helfte van die 20ste eeu getuig van sommige van die mees dramatiese veranderinge en ontwikkelinge wat deur die mens ondervind is. Die mees uitstaande was globalisering, deregulering, die verskyning van die inligting/kennis-ekonomie en, dalk die mees uitstaande van almal, die veranderinge wat deur die Internet teweeggebring is. Die onderliggende stelling van hierdie verslag is dat, gegewe die huidige, komplekse,dinamiese en soms onbestendige aard van veranderinge in die eksterne omgewing, om 'n mededingende voordeel te verseker, sal instansies geforseer word om die dinamika van die omgewing waarin hulle werk, versigtig te oorweeg en om hulle planne om hierdie dinamika te bou. Hierdie verslag speur kortliks die ewolusie na van strategiese beplanning tot sy huidige status gevolg deur 'n omvattende analise van die aard van omgewingsondersoeke en die toepaslikheid daarvan op strategiese beplanning. Die verslag voorsien 'n teoretiese oorsig tot omgewingsondersoeke en 'n bespreking van sommige van die instrurnente en tegnieke van omgewingsondersoeke. Binne hierdie konteks voorsien die verslag 'n kort aanduiding van die omvang van die uitvoering van omgewingsondersoeke binne die finansiele dienstesektor van Suid-Afrika. Die slot som die bevindings op van die huidige toestand van die praktyk van omgewingsondersoeke volgens die teorie, met die oog op voorsiening van 'n insig in die mate waartoe omgewingsondersoeke in Suid-Afrika toegepas word. Moontlike toekomstige rigtings van navorsing en ontwikkeling van die praktyk word ook geidentifiseer.

The purpose of this study was to examine scanning practices in a developing country by looking at the scanning behavior of executives of Nigerian manufacturing firms. Specifically, this study examined the decision maker's perception of environmental uncertainty (PEU), the frequency and degree of interest with which decision makers scan each sector of the environment, the frequency of use of various sources of information, the number of organizational adjustments made in response to actions of environmental groups, and the obstacles encountered in collecting information from the environment.

<p>The ability for companies to anticipate the future and stay in the forefront of the competition is essential for successful business. The tool of Environmental Scanning is basics in the process of developing prescriptive strategies as well as vital in evolving emergent strategies. The complexity lies in gathering relevant information and transforming the information into adequate data, which can be utilised by management to optimise strategies. The purpose of this study is to scrutinise how successfully operating Swedish manufacturing companies, listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange’s “Large Cap”-list, organise their Environmental Scanning actions and how this affects the development of strategies.</p><p>Prior research on the subject has been used as foundation to presenting relevant theories. Recognised analytical tools such as e.g. PESTEL, Porter’s five forces and SWOT have shaped our expectations of the outcome of the study. In the chapter regarding these theories the importance of Environmental Scanning has been recognised as a part of the strategic process.</p><p>Theory has been assessed and contrasted towards empirical findings based upon interviews with representatives from selected companies. These findings have revealed a tendency amongst Swedish companies to drift away from traditional theories in favour of homemade analytical tools highly adaptable for individual situation based requirements.</p>

The ability for companies to anticipate the future and stay in the forefront of the competition is essential for successful business. The tool of Environmental Scanning is basics in the process of developing prescriptive strategies as well as vital in evolving emergent strategies. The complexity lies in gathering relevant information and transforming the information into adequate data, which can be utilised by management to optimise strategies. The purpose of this study is to scrutinise how successfully operating Swedish manufacturing companies, listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange’s “Large Cap”-list, organise their Environmental Scanning actions and how this affects the development of strategies. Prior research on the subject has been used as foundation to presenting relevant theories. Recognised analytical tools such as e.g. PESTEL, Porter’s five forces and SWOT have shaped our expectations of the outcome of the study. In the chapter regarding these theories the importance of Environmental Scanning has been recognised as a part of the strategic process. Theory has been assessed and contrasted towards empirical findings based upon interviews with representatives from selected companies. These findings have revealed a tendency amongst Swedish companies to drift away from traditional theories in favour of homemade analytical tools highly adaptable for individual situation based requirements.

Environmental scanning, which acquires and use the information about event, trends, and changes in an organization¡¦s external environment, is an important process in the strategic management of an organization and permits the organization to quickly adapt to the changes of its external environment. Event detection that detects the onset of new events from news documents is essential to facilitating an organization¡¦s environmental scanning activity. However, traditional feature-based event detection techniques detect events by comparing the similarity between features of news stories and incur several problems. For example, for illustration and comparison purpose, a news story may contain sentences or paragraphs that are not highly relevant to defining its event. Without removing such less relevant sentences or paragraphs before detection, the effectiveness of traditional event detection techniques may suffer. In this study, we developed a summary-based event detection (SED) technique that filters less relevant sentences or paragraphs in a news story before performing feature-based event detection. Using a traditional feature-based event detection technique (i.e., INCR) as benchmark, the empirical evaluation results showed that the proposed SED technique could achieve comparable or even better detection effectiveness (measured by miss and false alarm rates) than the INCR technique, for data corpora where the percentage of news stories discussing old events is high.

This research project investigated the impact of education on an entrepreneur’s opportunity and threat identification skills through the environmental scanning activities and modes that the entrepreneur adopted. The aim of the research was to identify the types and levels of education which entrepreneurs should have in order that they can scan their environments effectively and achieve high growth rates. South Africa, like other developing countries, has a dire need to address poverty. Entrepreneurship is seen as a vehicle for poverty alleviation and socio-economic empowerment (Schlemer & Hudson, 2004) and a means of enhancing South Africa’s global competitiveness (Rogerson, 2004). The research was conducted with a view that it would contribute to the lessons of how to achieve entrepreneurial success. The study was conducted using quantitative research methodology. The target population was entrepreneurs in South Africa, within the Information Technology, Construction and Advertising industries. The study found that entrepreneurs with a secondary education scanned less effectively than entrepreneurs with tertiary qualifications. This finding is synonymous with low income countries where there is pressure to develop businesses. The research also found that entrepreneurs with a science background scanned the environment more than entrepreneurs with other qualifications and achieved higher revenue growth levels than other entrepreneurs. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Yes / Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the empirical reality of environmental scanning practices in sustainable supply chain management contexts. In particular it tests and extends a conceptual framework proposed by Fabbe-Costes et al. (2011). Design and methodology: The empirical data for this research were obtained from 45 semi-structured interviews with key informants, combined with a discussion of the main results with a focus group of supply chain experts. These data are compared with the literature and brought to bear on the framework. Findings - The research finds both breadth and depth in the scope of sustainability scanning practices of the respondents and provides evidence of multi-level scanning, with all respondents describing scanning activity at the societal level. It further demonstrates the adoption of multiple and diverse scanning targets at all levels in the conceptual framework. The articulation and ranking of scanning targets for sustainable SCM at all levels informs the development of priorities for practice. The paper also makes some observations about the boundaries of the scanning process. Practical implications: The results provide managers with guidance about what to scan in sustainable supply chain contexts. The validated framework can serve as a practical tool to assist managers with the organization and prioritization of their environmental scanning activities. Originality/Value: The paper is among the first to address the role of environmental scanning in sustainable supply chain contexts. It highlights the need for a multi-level framework for such scanning activities and opens up a debate about their implementation.

Firms in highly dynamic environments focusing on innovation in their products and services, often encounter elevated amounts of uncertainty regarding the future direction of technological change. Finding reliable and imbedded information enhances a firm’s ability to tackle new markets and take advantage of possible hidden opportunities. To reduce uncertainty, obtain hidden knowledge, and gain competitive advantage, environmental scanning, which is one of the main components of foresight, is recommended by scholars of strategic management. The process of detecting weak signals for shedding light what one authority calls “blurry future zones” (Day & Schoemaker, 2005, p.1) has currently been receiving attention in environmental scanning studies. Some studies emphasize the importance of the subject; yet they offer few practical methodologies for actual cases. To help address this gap, this research introduces a new approach for detecting weak signals during Internet-based environmental scanning by applying the Cluto toolkit (see Section 4.7) plus using human judgment. This novel methodology is applied to the application of Micro Tiles, a recent innovative product of a digital display company located in Ontario, Canada, Christie Digital Company. In the conduct of this exploratory research, about 40,000 HTML pages were retrieved from the Internet in a search during 2009. To extract weak signals information from the retrieved unstructured texts, documents were grouped into a number of clusters by the CLUTO software. Two subject matter experts compared and evaluated the cluster results for the purpose of finding potentially relevant information in regard to the company’s strategic intent. Analyzing the clusters, the experts reduced the number of clustered documents from the original corpus into smaller sets with the goal of finding more relevant and unexpected documents (weak signals). The relevancy and expectedness of information in documents were two measurements as related to weak signals. The trends of the study indicate that as anticipated both experts found more unexpected documents in the smaller sets rather than the larger ones. Moreover, regarding one expert’s analysis, the smaller sets contain documents that are more relevant to the domain of interest. Overall, according to one expert, documents existing in the smaller sets display more weak signals. This emerging methodology offers a practical procedure to apply web-based information in the development of a company’s environmental scanning procedures. Using this methodology, managers can employ both computer tools and human sense-making methods to detect potential weak signals and reduce certain biases in the detection process.

Environmental scanning is an important process, which acquires and uses the information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization's external environment. It permits an organization to adapt to its environment and to develop effective responses to secure or improve their position in the future. Event detection technique that identifies the onset of new events from streams of news stories would facilitate the process of organization's environmental scanning. However, traditional feature-based event detection techniques, which identify whether a news story contains an unseen event by comparing the similarity of words between the news story and past news stories, incur some limitations (e.g., the features shown in news document cannot actually represent the event described in it.). Thus, in this study, we developed an information extraction-based event detection (NEED) technique that combines information extraction and text categorization techniques to address the problems inherent to traditional feature-based event detection techniques. The empirical evaluation results showed that the NEED technique outperformed the traditional feature-based event detection techniques in miss rate and false alarm rate and achieved comparable event association accuracy rate to its counterpart.

<p>In the global and rapidly changing society Environmental scanning is becoming a more and more important tool. Today it is not the availability of information that controls an organizations behavior, but the information that the organization chooses to absorb. This is the case for a multinational cooperation as well as for the local golf club. Swedish golf clubs have during the last 100 years had an amazing development and today there are almost 600 000 registered Swedish golf players. The development has however stopped and even declined some during the last couple of years. This makes it important for golf clubs to actively scan its environment.</p><p>The purpose with this thesis is to investigate if Swedish golf clubs scan their environment and if they do, describe and analyze how such scanning is conducted. Our secondary purpose is to give recommendations.</p><p>We have, to fulfill the purpose, conducted a quantitative research based on a telephone questionnaire. We have interviewed 34 randomly stratified selected golf clubs, geographically spread all over Sweden.</p><p>Conclusions The analysis shows that not even one of four Swedish golf clubs conducts environmental scanning. This at the same time as almost eight of ten clubs state that they believe that environmental scanning is important, or even very important. The analysis also shows that those clubs that have a person responsible for the environmental scanning have fewer members that end their membership, than those that do not have someone responsible.</p><p>Even though fees from members are the largest source of income for the golf clubs only 21 % of the Swedish golf clubs had any kind of bases for calculation on how many members they could afford to loose before it would result in economic problems. This is especially remarkable as the analysis shows that the number 21 % is misleadingly high as many of the calculations are very vague.</p><p>The representatives for the clubs give a very pessimistic view on the future, where 61 % believe that the increase of members has stopped or even declined</p> / <p>Omvärldsbevakning är i dagens globala och snabbt förändrande samhälle ett allt viktigare verktyg. Idag är det inte tillgången på information som styr en organisations handlande, utan snarare den information som organisationen valt att ta till sig. Detta gäller det multinationella företaget såväl som den lokala golfklubben. Svenska golfklubbar har under de senaste 100 åren haft en fantastisk utveckling och idag finns det nästan 600 000 registrerade svenska golfspelare. På senare tid har utvecklingen dock avstannat och till och med minskat något. Detta gör det än viktigare för klubbarna att bevaka sin omvärld.</p><p>Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om svenska golfklubbar bevakar omvärlden och i de fall de gör det är syftet även att beskriva och analysera hur en sådan bevakning går till. Vårt bisyfte är att ge golfklubbar rekommendationer när det gäller omvärldsbevakning.</p><p>För att uppfylla syftet har vi gjort en kvantitativ undersökning i form av en telefonenkät. Vi har intervjuat 34 stratifierat slumpmässigt utvalda golfklubbar geografiskt utspridda över hela Sverige.</p><p>Slutsatser Analysen visar att mindre än en av fyra svenska golfklubbar bedriver systematisk bevakning av sin omgivning. Detta samtidigt som nästan åtta av tio klubbar tycker att omvärldsbevakning är viktigt, eller till och med mycket viktigt. Analysen visar vidare att de klubbar som har en person ansvarig för omvärldsbevakning har färre medlemmar som slutar per år än de klubbar som inte har någon ansvarig.</p><p>Trots att avgifter från medlemmarna är klubbarnas största inkomstkälla har endast 21 % av de svenska golfklubbarna någon form av kalkyl som upplyser om hur många medlemmar klubben kan tappa innan detta resulterar i ekonomiska problem. Detta är extra anmärkningsvärt då analysen visar att siffran 21 % är missvisande högt då många av kalkylerna är ytterst bristfälliga.</p><p>Klubbarnas representanter ger uttryck för en mycket pessimistisk syn på framtiden, där 61 % tror att medlemsutvecklingen har avstannat, eller till och med minskat.</p>