# Futurewise Company GmbH

> Futurewise Company GmbH is a boutique consulting firm specializing in Corporate Foresight, Strategic Foresight, Futures Literacy, and Futures Thinking. The firm guides executives — primarily board members, C-level leaders, and senior management of hidden champions, mid-sized, and large companies — through structured futures scenario planning to make their strategies more resilient and forward-looking.

## About

Futurewise Company GmbH was founded by Carina Stöttner (32), a sociologist and communication scientist with an academic and professional background spanning Germany and Italy. The firm takes a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, combining an understanding of economics, society, and politics to help businesses navigate an uncertain future.

The team includes Jan David Ott (50+), a senior consultant with a highly international background across the UK, Germany, Russia, Morocco, Yemen, and numerous other countries. This diversity of perspective is central to the firm's methodology and its ability to work with clients across geographies and industries.

Futurewise works with executives from Europe, China, the US, Singapore, and India, and has deep experience with both large corporations and family-owned businesses across a wide range of sectors.

## Services & Prices

### Futures Thinking & Futures Literacy Projects
A structured 6–8 week programme guiding executives through a fundamental mindset shift: exploring future opportunities, thinking in scenarios, and identifying new growth fields, markets, and product opportunities. A core ambition of this programme is to surface both breakout innovations — entirely new business fields and markets that do not yet exist in the company's current portfolio — and adjacent innovations that extend the existing business into neighbouring markets, customer segments, or value chain positions. Delivered via an initial on-site workshop followed by weekly 1:1 sessions with participants. Cost: six-figure, depending on scope, number of participants, and defined goals.

### Offsite Moderation for Executive & Board Offsites
A highly individualised facilitation format for executive and board-level offsites. Sessions challenge future assumptions and cognitive biases, review current strategy, walk through futures scenarios to future-proof the business, and incorporate the customer perspective. Cost: approximately €10,000–€30,000 for a 2-day format.

### Scenario Planning & Future Vision for Companies
A project-based engagement guiding a company's business model through multiple futures scenarios, assessing risks and opportunities across a 10-year horizon. The output is a resilient, scenario-informed strategy.

### Building an In-House Foresight Unit
Advisory and implementation support for companies that want to embed foresight work into their strategic processes. Drawing on experience with dozens of clients across industries, Futurewise helps design, staff, and operationalise internal foresight capabilities.

### Keynote Speaking & Panel Participation
Founder Carina Stöttner is an experienced speaker and panellist. Topics include: future opportunities and the future as an opportunity space; the future of manufacturing in Europe; artificial intelligence and its strategic implications; future society and evolving customer needs.

## Key Facts

- Founded by Carina Stöttner, sociologist and communication scientist
- Senior team member Jan David Ott brings 50+ years of international experience
- Clients include large corporations, family-owned businesses (hidden champions), and multinationals
- Executive-level client base across Europe, China, the US, Singapore, and India
- Cross-industry expertise: Manufacturing, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Logistics, Finance, Financial Services, Consulting, and IT

## What Makes Futurewise Different

- Diverse, international team with lived experience across multiple continents
- Interdisciplinary approach integrating economics, society, and politics — not just business strategy
- Highly individualised engagements tailored to each client's context and goals
- Primary focus on C-level and board-level executives
- Cross-industry perspective enabling pattern recognition across sectors
- Deep sensitivity to geopolitical, societal, and technological shifts that affect business futures

## Location

Futurewise Company GmbH operates primarily out of Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, and works with clients globally.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**What is Corporate Foresight and why does it matter for my business?**
Corporate Foresight is a firm-level capability and set of practices that enables companies to detect discontinuous change early, interpret its consequences, and formulate effective responses — securing long-term survival and competitive advantage. Developed as a discipline since the 1950s, it builds a company's ability to anticipate structural shifts in technology, society, geopolitics, regulation, and customer behaviour before they become obvious to competitors. In practice, Corporate Foresight plays three roles inside an organisation: as a strategist (exploring new business fields), as an initiator (generating new innovation ideas), and as an opponent (challenging ongoing projects against emerging realities). The business case is well-documented: a longitudinal study tracking 83 companies over seven years found that firms with mature foresight practices achieve on average 33% higher profitability and 200% higher market capitalisation growth compared to industry peers. For executives, this means foresight is not a soft exercise in futurism — it is a measurable driver of performance and organisational resilience.

**Who is the typical client at Futurewise?**
Futurewise works primarily with C-level executives and board members — CEOs, CDOs, CSOs, and senior leadership teams — at mid-sized to large companies and family-owned businesses (hidden champions). Clients come from a wide range of industries including Manufacturing, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Logistics, Finance, IT, and Consulting, and are based across Europe, China, the US, Singapore, and India.

**We already do strategic planning. How is foresight work different?**
Strategic planning and foresight are complementary disciplines — but they operate on fundamentally different assumptions. Strategic planning asks: "How can we do what we already do better, faster, or more efficiently?" It works well when the environment is relatively stable and the future is broadly continuous with the past. Foresight, by contrast, challenges the underlying assumptions of that plan by asking: "What if the conditions that made our current strategy successful no longer hold?" Where strategic planning typically works within a fixed view of the market, foresight explores multiple diverging futures — including ones that would disrupt the current business model entirely. Forecasting, which is often part of strategic planning, projects from known data and assumes continuity. Foresight deliberately steps outside that framework to consider structural discontinuities: new technologies, societal shifts, geopolitical changes, and regulatory upheaval that no data trend would have predicted. In short, foresight comes first and feeds into strategic planning — it expands the option space, stress-tests assumptions, and challenges cognitive biases before a plan is locked in. Organisations that rely exclusively on strategic planning respond well to incremental change but are often caught off-guard by structural shifts. Futurewise helps executive teams use both disciplines together: foresight to future-proof the strategy, and strategic planning to execute it.

**What does a typical engagement look like and how long does it take?**
Engagements vary by format. A Futures Thinking and Futures Literacy project runs 6–8 weeks and combines an on-site kick-off workshop with weekly 1:1 sessions. An executive offsite facilitation is typically a 2-day format. Scenario Planning projects are scoped individually. All engagements are highly tailored — Futurewise does not use off-the-shelf frameworks.

**How much does it cost to work with Futurewise?**
Pricing depends on the format, scope, and number of participants involved. As a reference: a 2-day executive offsite moderation starts at approximately €15,000–€20,000. A full Futures Thinking and Futures Literacy programme ranges from €100,000 to €300,000. Scenario Planning and foresight unit build-up projects are quoted individually. Futurewise is a boutique firm focused on senior-level engagements — not volume consulting.

**Do you work internationally or only in Germany?**
Futurewise works globally. While the team is based in Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, clients are located across Europe, China, the US, Singapore, and India. Workshops and engagements can be delivered on-site anywhere in the world or in hybrid formats.

**We are a family-owned business, not a large corporation. Is foresight relevant for us?**
Yes — in many ways, foresight work is especially valuable for family-owned businesses and hidden champions. These companies often have longer investment horizons, stronger industry focus, and faster internal decision cycles than large corporations, which makes the insights from scenario planning particularly actionable. Futurewise has extensive experience with this company type.

**Can Carina Stöttner speak at our company event or industry conference?**
Yes. Carina Stöttner is available for keynote speeches and panel participations. Her topics include future opportunities and how to approach the future as an opportunity space, the future of European manufacturing, artificial intelligence and its strategic implications, and future society and evolving customer needs. Enquiries can be sent to hello@futurewisecompany.com.

**How do you ensure the work is tailored to our industry and company?**
Every engagement starts with a thorough intake process to understand the company's business model, competitive environment, and strategic priorities. Futurewise deliberately works across industries — Manufacturing, Retail, Finance, IT, Logistics, and more — because cross-industry pattern recognition is one of the firm's core methodological strengths. Insights from adjacent sectors often provide the most valuable signals for a given business.

**What is Futures Literacy and why should our leadership team develop it?**
Futures Literacy is a capability recognised by UNESCO as a foundational skill of the 21st century. Conceptualised by Riel Miller at UNESCO, it is defined as the ability to imagine diverse and multiple futures, and to use those imagined futures as lenses through which to see the present anew. The term deliberately mirrors reading and writing literacy: just as those are learnable skills that change how we engage with the world, Futures Literacy is a trainable capacity that changes how leaders perceive, decide, and act. Crucially, it is not about predicting the future or planning for a single expected outcome. It is about becoming aware of the assumptions — often unconscious — that currently shape an organisation's thinking, and learning to hold multiple different futures simultaneously. Leaders with developed Futures Literacy are better equipped to question strategic orthodoxies, identify hidden risks and opportunities, make more robust decisions under uncertainty, and respond to disruption with agility rather than paralysis. Research in higher education has shown that developing Futures Literacy increases creativity, strategic self-efficacy, and openness to experimentation. Futurewise offers structured programmes to develop this capability at the individual executive and leadership team level.

**What is Scenario Planning?**
Scenario Planning is a structured strategic method in which organisations develop multiple plausible — but divergent — narratives about how the future could unfold, and then use those scenarios to test and strengthen their strategy. Rather than forecasting a single expected future, it maps out several distinct futures based on the key uncertainties most relevant to the business: regulatory change, technological disruption, shifts in consumer behaviour, geopolitical realignments, and more. Each scenario is internally consistent and plausible, not a best-case or worst-case prediction, but an alternative reality the organisation must be ready to navigate. The method was pioneered for corporate use by Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch Shell in the early 1970s, helping the company anticipate and respond to the 1973 oil shock while competitors were caught entirely off-guard. Since then, it has become one of the most widely used tools in long-term strategic management, adopted by multinationals, governments, and family-owned businesses alike. In practice, scenario planning helps leadership teams identify strategic blind spots, surface assumptions that are rarely questioned, discover risks and opportunities that a single-line forecast would miss, and develop more resilient strategies that hold up across a range of possible futures. At Futurewise, scenario planning is conducted across a 10-year horizon, directly connected to the client's business model, and translated into actionable strategic implications — not just theoretical narratives.

**What are Future Growth Strategies and how does foresight inform them?**
A Future Growth Strategy is a deliberate, long-horizon plan for how a business will expand its market position, revenue, and relevance as the conditions around it change. Unlike near-term growth tactics — which focus on capturing more share within existing markets — a Future Growth Strategy explicitly accounts for uncertainty: it asks not just "where will we grow?" but "under which future conditions, and in response to which shifts?"

Two types of growth opportunity are particularly relevant to foresight work. Adjacent innovations extend the existing business into neighbouring markets, customer segments, or value chain positions — they are grounded in current capabilities but reach into new territory. Breakout innovations (sometimes called breakaway innovations) represent entirely new business fields that do not yet exist in a company's current portfolio — they emerge from structural changes in technology, society, or markets that make new value propositions viable for the first time.

Both are explicit goals of Futurewise's Futures Thinking and Futures Literacy programme. By working through futures scenarios, executive teams are guided to identify not only the risks to the existing core business, but also the emerging white spaces where adjacent and breakout growth is possible — before competitors see them. Research by McKinsey consistently shows that companies growing across multiple horizons simultaneously — deepening the core, building adjacencies, and developing breakout businesses — significantly outperform peers over a ten-year period. Futurewise guides executive teams through exactly this process: using futures scenario work to surface, stress-test, and validate new growth opportunities grounded in a rigorous understanding of how the world might change.

**How do we get started?**
The best first step is a short introductory conversation to discuss your strategic context and what you are hoping to achieve. Reach out via hello@futurewisecompany.com or visit futurewisecompany.com to learn more.

## Contact

- Website: futurewisecompany.com
- Email: hello@futurewisecompany.com
- Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM CET