Five years ago ScMI and the Faculty of Economics at the University of Paderborn started a fruitful co-operation. Every summer ScMIs’ scenario experts hold a scenario management lecture at the chair of Prof. Dr. Bernd Frick. Not for the first time had the students to deal with a topic that is not of everyday business. This is where the sponsor of the Future School 2016 comes into play.

The entire process was accompanied by the drive- and automation technology experts from LENZE SE. The family run and globally operating company is located in Hameln, East Westphalia. Together with the team from ScMI and the group of students they developed a set of scenarios for a market environment, that is subject to continuous and rapid change not only in terms of innovation dynamic or product life cycle, but also with respect to the intelligence of products up to the holistic transformation of the value chain. The direction and intensity of the change is unpredictable as the uncertainties exceed the certainties. In this regard, the Future School 2016 does indeed not offer the exact answer, the clear development path but rather point to seven development opportunities that decision-makers should be prepared for. In this sense, the developed scenarios help LENZE to develop a future robust strategy.