Strategic Foresight Lead

Location: London Ludgate, UK.

Job ID: R Date Posted: 2026-06-24.

Company Overview

Hitachi aims to be a global leader in continuously transforming social infrastructure through digital, contributing to a harmonised society where the environment, wellbeing and economic growth are in balance.

Hitachi operates worldwide across four sectors - Digital Systems & Services, Energy, Mobility, and Connective Industries - as well as a Strategic SIB Business Unit focused on new growth areas.

With Lumada at its core, Hitachi creates value by combining data, technology and domain knowledge to solve customer and social challenges.

Revenues for FY2025 (ended March 31, 2026) totaled 10,586.7 billion yen, with 606 consolidated subsidiaries and approximately 290,000 employees worldwide.

What you'll be doing

• Work across R&D and corporate functions to nurture organisation wide imagination on preferred futures that will inspire and enable business action today.
• Bring strategic foresight into the development and delivery of vision led and human centred research and innovation programmes through:
  • Horizon scanning and monitoring of market, societal and tech signals.
  • Scenario planning and framing ecosystem challenges and opportunities to show relevance to our core business.
  • Development of transition pathways to new market and social ecosystems and interpreting insights to business development roadmap and near term action.
  • Facilitation and engagement with internal and external stakeholders to build consensus.
  • Development of multi actor propositions that will shape new technology and business solution concepts aligned to long term visions.
  • Collecting evidence and creating compelling outputs to support the business case for innovation and incubation investment, including creating storytelling narratives and documentation to support organisational mobilisation.
• Lead planning, management and reporting tasks and deliverables for yourself and other project members.
• Present, monitor, and mitigate risks.
• Innovation pipeline and portfolio development support: Work with other internal leads to propose projects and secure internal or external funding for research and innovation programmes. Execute projects in collaboration with other designers, researchers, solution architects, data scientists, and creative technologists.
  • Lead activities to define and validate project assumptions and hypothesis through research and speculative prototyping activities.
  • Defining and developing visually engaging communication material for re imagined service experiences, operating models and touchpoints.
• Commercial and market validation: Aligning visions to clear near term commercial opportunities for R&D and the business units.
• Stakeholders and ecosystem engagement: Engage and influence relevant stakeholders through workshop facilitation at different stages of the innovation lifecycle.
• Capability building support: Support development and enhancement of foresight and value creation frameworks by integrating methodologies in an actionable and effective manner.
• Explore impacts of new AI driven tools on our foresight and design futures practice and propose ways to drive efficiency, productivity for more effective ways of working.
• Manage and mentor other team members from designers to non designers in strategic foresight.
• Partnerships: Help develop partnerships with internal and external organisations to develop our capabilities and delivery models.
• Travel within UK, Europe, Japan and US.

What you bring to the team

• Experience Proven experience in delivering transformational innovation programme activities within enterprise environments working across multidisciplinary research and innovation functions. Experienced project management and leading multiple project schedules to set deadlines and budgets, while mitigating risk. Line management experience and led teams to delivering impact. Working knowledge and experience of B2B social infrastructure domains, incl. energy, transportation and manufacturing. Demonstrable success in launching transformative and change making initiatives or products. Experience of working across different cultures and diverse environments.
• Skills Ability to apply futures thinking, systems thinking, and foresight frameworks to broad business challenges. Big picture thinking and the ability to map and grapple complex macro system challenges and value flows using systems thinking tools and methods. Sensemaking, insights synthesis and interpretation ability of macro and micro level unstructured information into business relevance. Ability to quickly become familiar with specific industry and business challenges to prepare for projects. Proven written/visual/verbal communication skills to articulate narratives and future scenarios in a creative and compelling manner through storytelling, visualisations, presentations and research reports. Strong commercial acumen to identify and understand how to unlock business value within new propositions. Curious and growth mindset for continuous improvement.
• Education Master's Degree or higher in a humanities, social science or design related field.
• Languages English proficiency (essential).

Benefits Package

• Company funded benefits: generous holiday entitlement, holiday banking scheme.
• Group personal pension.
• Private medical insurance with self funded option to cover family members.
• Employee assistance programme.
• Personal accident insurance.
• Voluntary benefits (funded by employee): Cycle to work scheme, gym membership, dental insurance (including dependent children), health screening, dining card.

Our Values

We are proud to say we are an equal opportunity employer and welcome all applicants for employment without attention to any factor that doesn't impact your ability to do the job, including race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

Hitachi's core values expressed through the Hitachi Spirit: Wa - Harmony, Trust, Respect; Makoto - Sincerity, Fairness, Honesty, Integrity; Kaitakusha Seishin - Pioneering Spirit, Challenge.

Our people love technology and they love making a difference. They have a passion for finding new solutions and working with brilliant colleagues. Every day they dedicate themselves to a wide range of projects, contributing to the Hitachi vision around the globe.