Discursive Futures: Mapping How Organizations Imagine and Materialize the Future

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.

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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.