Corporate foresight for the benefit of corporates' innovation climate

Abstract Corporate foresight (CF) can be considered a future‐oriented capability that incorporates perceiving and prospecting. Extant CF‐related studies tackle the CF−innovation relationship but do not provide details on how CF relates to innovation climate. As we assume that the innovation climate of companies is a relevant antecedent to innovation, we conduct a quantitative empirical study with 147 upper‐tier managers to investigate how CF and the respective training of managers relate to a corporate's innovation climate. Results show that strong perceiving and prospecting positively influence the innovation climate, whereby prospecting is of particular importance. Further, we find that training managers in future‐oriented capabilities is only under certain circumstances (i.e., low prospecting) beneficial to the innovation climate in companies.