Strategic foresight challenges us to question the status quo, anticipate risks, and rethink dominant narratives to drive real transformation. At the BOYE conference in Aarhus, I explored how futures thinking can unlock new opportunities in digital health, especially in female health, a space long overlooked but now at the forefront of innovation.
For too long, women’s health has been defined by what it lacks: underfunded, under-researched, and built around assumptions borrowed from male biology. But the signals are shifting. A new generation of femtech companies, research initiatives, and data-driven platforms are rewriting what proactive, personalised care can look like, and strategic foresight is one of the processes we have to navigate that transition.
The shift from reactive treatment to proactive, personalised prevention is accelerating, powered by behavioural science, wearables, and AI-driven insights. The question is not whether this transformation will happen, but who shapes it, and how deliberately.
In the talk and workshop, I walked the audience through three moves that foresight makes possible:
1. Questioning assumptions. The dominant narrative in healthcare is still built around acute intervention. Foresight helps us surface the assumptions baked into that model and ask what a system built around continuous, contextual health data would look like instead.
2. Anticipating risks. The datafication of female bodies creates genuine opportunity, but also serious risks around consent, commodification, and algorithmic bias. Seeing those risks early, before they harden into infrastructure, is exactly where foresight earns its keep.
3. Opening up possibility space. The most powerful moment in a foresight process is not the scenario, it is the realisation that things could be really different. In women’s health, that possibility space is wide open. We are not iterating on a mature system; we are building something new.
If you want to explore how strategic foresight can support your organisation’s work in digital health or beyond, get in touch.
