Die Rolle des Corporate Foresight im Innovationsprozess: Ziele, Ausgestaltung und Erfahrungen am Beispiel der Siemens AG

This article focuses on activities of corporate foresight that constitute one of the core elements of strategic innovation management. Hence, corporate foresight plays a crucial role for the mid- to longterm competitiveness of firms. It typically comprises the stages of idea generation to idea selection. Forecasting activities are of particular importance to corporate foresight as they allow detecting future trends and discontinuities such as technology shocks. Though there is much theoretical knowledge on corporate foresight activities, there is only little empirical evidence that shows how these activities are actually conducted in practice. Using the example of the Siemens AG, this article reveals how corporate foresight is professionally implemented in this company, which goals are pursued with it and what kind of experiences have been made so far. In particular, the motivation of all employees who are engaged in this process and the general acceptance of the foresight process have been key to its success

Visually optimized image display using a small customizable color palette

Currently, many low cost computer monitors can only simultaneously display a palette of 256 colors. However, this palette is usually selectable from a very large gamut of available colors. For many applications involving natural color images, this limited palette size imposes a significant constraint on the achievable image quality. Error diffusion is a powerful method to improve the subjective quality of a displayed image, when only a small set of colors is available. In this work, we propose the design of a visually optimized error diffusion filter for monochrome and color image display applications. As a result, the displayed images contain errors mostly at high spatial frequencies, which are less noticeable to the viewer. We also examine the design of a universal and an image dependent color palette for use with halftoning methods such as error diffusion. The advantage of a universal color palette is that it is fixed and therefore allows multiple images to be displayed simultaneously. Our palette is designed by employing a new vector quantization method known as sequential scalar quantization (SSQ) to allocate the colors in a visually uniform color space. This SSQ method achieves near optimal allocation, but may be efficiently implemented using a series of look up tables. Finally, we investigate a visually weighted mean squared error measure to compare the performance of our optimized algorithm to standard error diffusion. Our metric is based on the color difference in CIEL*a*b*, but also accounts for the lowpass characteristic of human contrast sensitivity

Optimized universal color palette design for error diffusion

Currently, many low cost computers can only simultaneously display a palette of 256 colors. However, this palette is usually selectable from a very large gamut of available colors. For many applications, this limited palette size imposes a significant constraint on the achievable image quality. In this paper, we propose a method for designing an optimized universal color palette for use with halftoning methods such as error di#usion. The advantage of a universal color palette is that it is fixed and therefore allows multiple images to be displayed simultaneously. In order to design the palette, we employ a new vector quantization method known as sequential scalar quantization (SSQ) to allocate the colors in a visually uniform color space. The SSQ method achieves near optimal allocation, but may be e#ciently implemented using a series of look up tables. When used with error di#usion, SSQ adds little computational overhead, and may be used to minimize the visual error in an opponent colo..