What if students didn’t just learn about strategy and innovation—they practiced it like professionals from day one?
At Stralsund University of Applied Sciences (Hochschule Stralsund, in short: HOST), that’s exactly what’s happening. With the help of FIBRES, a modern foresight and trend intelligence tool, students are developing real-world skills in futures thinking, trend analysis, and strategic foresight. They’re not just studying the future. They’re scanning it, mapping it, analyzing it—and shaping it.
A tool that grew with the program
Professor Dr. Björn P. Jacobsen, who teaches management studies and international management, first came across FIBRES while working on an EU-supported project focused on the future of tourism in the Baltic Sea region. Faced with an overwhelming amount of trend data and information, his team needed a structured way to extract meaningful insights and support collaborative analysis. “As usual, we were overwhelmed with the available material on trends in the tourism industry and tried to ‘extract’ and discuss the relevant data,” he recalls. “So, I looked for software which could support us in this endeavour.”
That search led him to FIBRES—one of the few companies that responded promptly and with genuine interest in supporting academic work. “FIBRES was the first to respond and also proposed cooperation with our university,” he says. This responsiveness, coupled with the platform’s capabilities, made it a natural fit for long-term collaboration. When HOST launched its new master’s program in International Innovation Management, FIBRES was integrated into the curriculum. According to Professor Jacobsen, the decision was driven by “the complete package of the software platform plus FIBRES’s supportive approach.”
Learning foresight by doing it
At HOST, foresight is not an abstract concept discussed in passing—it’s a core part of the academic experience. Foresight modules have been introduced not only in the university’s master’s program on innovation management but also in its long-established bachelor’s program in international management. Students are given structured opportunities to explore and engage with futures thinking from multiple angles. For instance, every year, students visit the FUTURIUM—Germany’s museum of the future—in Berlin, and record their insights and reflections directly in FIBRES.
This hands-on approach continues throughout their coursework. In applied project management modules, students use FIBRES to develop real foresight deliverables on topics such as the future of retail, mobility, and food. Professor Jacobsen explains that even students working on their master’s theses regularly turn to the platform to support their research. Topics have ranged from urban farming in Israel and Germany to the impact of plant-based dairy alternatives. These applications give students a structured, intuitive space to capture signals, organize trends, and create strategic foresight outputs that mirror what they might encounter in professional settings.
Student experience: building foresight skills with FIBRES
For Christina, a master’s student in innovation management, FIBRES has played an important role in shaping her perspective on foresight and trend research. “I have experienced FIBRES as a software that is perfectly tailored to the needs of foresight and trend research,” she says. “It provides a strong foundation for defining search areas, structuring information, and creating future scenarios.”
During one of her university projects, Christina and her team focused on how artificial intelligence is impacting the food industry. Using FIBRES, they explored weak signals, mapped out relevant developments, and categorized them according to thematic relevance, maturity level, and potential impact. She describes the platform as “an indispensable tool to support trend scanning and monitoring,” highlighting how its radar features helped the team detect early signs of consumer behavior shifts and identify emerging opportunities.
What stands out most to Christina is the platform’s balance of power and ease of use. “Despite the versatility of the functions and the complexity behind them, FIBRES is very intuitive and easy to use,” she says. “It helps to develop a broader understanding of the field of interest and upcoming developments.” She credits FIBRES with enabling her to connect insights, visualize trends, and “see the big picture” in a way that traditional research tools often do not.
Making foresight a mindset
According to Professor Jacobsen, one of the key benefits of using FIBRES in an educational context is its ability to bridge theory and practice. “From my perspective, the overall goal is to have the students use tools like FIBRES as early as possible to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world application,” he says. By working with a professional foresight tool during their studies, students become familiar with both the methodology and the technology that will likely play a role in their future careers.
FIBRES helps make foresight approachable without watering it down. Its interface and workflow design reduce the barriers to entry for complex processes like signal tracking, horizon scanning, and scenario development. Christina describes it as “both strategic and practical,” a tool that empowers users to dive deep into a topic while maintaining clarity and structure. She also points out that the built-in AI capabilities and the collaborative workspace features enrich the experience further, especially for group projects.
Educators as future enablers
For educators looking to bring more futures thinking into their teaching, the experience at HOST offers a compelling example. Embedding foresight into a curriculum doesn’t require building entirely new courses from scratch—it starts with the right tools and the right mindset.
“In fact, the future does not happen to us, but we do create it—a desirable future, I should add,” Professor Jacobsen reflects. “We need people who understand the relevance of foresight.”
That’s exactly what FIBRES enables. It doesn’t just support students in trend research—it helps them practice decision-making in uncertain environments, think systematically about change, and take ownership of the future they want to build. Whether in academia or industry, that’s a skillset that will never go out of style.
Interested in bringing FIBRES to your academic program?
Contact us to learn more about how universities are using FIBRES to teach futures thinking and innovation strategy or apply for an academic license of our foresight platform that enables practicing foresight and futures work with state-of-the-art foresight tools.
