Discursive Futures: Mapping How Organizations Imagine and Materialize the Future
Conferences
Lunch seminar in presence
Marina Candi
Reykjavik University's School of Business, Iceland
How people and organizations talk about the future shapes the innovations they pursue. The stories, scenarios, and visions they construct not only anticipate what may come, but also guide investment, design, and strategic action. Yet, despite growing attention to the role of futures in innovation, little is known about how people imagine and materialize the future. This presentation will report on early work to systematically map discourses about the future in the context of innovation. Drawing on a large corpus of media texts and using computational text analysis (natural language processing), the research examines how futures are discursively constructed and linked to concrete innovations. Preliminary findings reveal systematic asymmetries: projected futures dominate mainstream discourse, while more imaginative and utopian visions remain on the margins. This imbalance has implications for how innovation trajectories are framed, legitimized, and ultimately materialized.
Marina Candi is Professor of Innovation Management at Reykjavik University, where she teaches innovation management and supervises PhD students. She has an interdisciplinary background that combines technology and business and spans industry and academia. After completing an MSc degree in Electrical Engineering, with a concentration in artificial intelligence, she spent about ten years working as a software developer in the USA and Iceland. For the next ten years, she continued to work in IT firms but moved to management roles, including Director of Accounts Management, Director of Marketing, and Deputy CEO. All three firms she worked for were start-ups, and she was among the first or early shareholders of all three. Thus, she has first-hand experience in the world of business and entrepreneurship. Marina moved to academia when she embarked on PhD studies at Copenhagen Business School. Her academic career has been successful, with a large number of publications in high-ranking journals and several large funded research projects.
Time
12:15 - 13:45
Organizer
Politecnico di MilanoEvents
03 →
November
11
December 2025
LABORATORI POLITECNICI departments | territory | teaching | technology
03 →
November
09
November 2025
INEQUALITIES | Not for her. AI Revealing the Unseen
03
November 2025
Anxiety that Drives Kaizen: A Strategic Blueprint for Kaizen Implementation Across Borders
04
November 2025
Data & Decision Intelligence: pilotare l’AI per usarla davvero!
05
November 2025
From Rankings to Insight: International Benchmarking with Composite Indicators to inform Education Policy
06
November 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio 5G & Connected Digital Industry
11
November 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio Digital Identity
12
November 2025
Architetti e costruttori italiani in Argentina tra Ottocento e Novecento
12
November 2025
Discursive Futures: Mapping How Organizations Imagine and Materialize the Future
12
November 2025
Impatto, metriche e valore dell’Open Innovation: cosa conta davvero?
13
November 2025
Intelligenza (artificiale e umana) per il futuro della Logistica
13
November 2025
Innovazione per la biodiversità: le soluzioni per aria e suolo
18
November 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio Software & Digital Native Innovation
25
November 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio Quantum Computing & Communication
01
December 2025
Il profitto e la cura. La sostenibilità e le voci che non abbiamo ascoltato
02
December 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio Startup Thinking, Startup & Scaleup Hi-tech e Digital Transformation Academy
02 →
December
03
December 2025
For the General Public. Architecture Between Debate, Dissemination, and Narrative Strategies
04
December 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio Omnichannel Customer Experience
10
December 2025
Digital readiness and skills: a portrait of Europe’s large and super-large enterprises
11
December 2025
Convegno dei risultati di Ricerca dell’Osservatorio Fintech & Insurtech
11
December 2025