What does the future hold for visual health?

There are sev­er­al devel­op­ments affect­ing our sec­tor – along with oth­er sec­tors – on a glob­al scale. Rising demo­graph­ics, chan­ging life­styles and an age­ing pop­u­la­tion all have an impact on visu­al health and access to care. Glob­al warm­ing is put­ting increased pres­sure on com­pan­ies and their respons­ib­il­it­ies and is influ­en­cing people’s health. Lastly, visu­al health is marked by an increase in dis­orders such as myopia, which could affect 5 bil­lion people by 2050, a short­age of med­ic­al staff and poor access to eye care.

These under­ly­ing trends are well iden­ti­fied and present few uncer­tain­ties. How­ever, the dif­fi­culty lies in integ­rat­ing oth­er factors. We are famil­i­ar with these weak sig­nals includ­ing con­sumer beha­viour, use of digit­al tools and so forth, but their evol­u­tion is uncertain.

We work with­in a cer­tain peri­met­er – peri­od covered, geo­graph­ic zone, etc. – but our approach is hol­ist­ic: Foresight must be con­sidered from a glob­al per­spect­ive. This means pro­cessing a lot of data. To ensure that this data is intel­li­gible, we group major trends and weak sig­nals into four cat­egor­ies: demand, health­care reg­u­lat­ors, sup­ply, and the busi­ness ecosystem.

We pro­duce micro-scen­ari­os for each of them: they enable us to rep­res­ent all pos­sible futures. For example, regard­ing demand, one of the hypo­theses con­sidered is that, by 2030, European con­sumers will be divided into three groups: the most demand­ing, devot­ing a sub­stan­tial budget to their visu­al health; a grow­ing num­ber of con­sumers con­strained by their pur­chas­ing power; and con­sumers excluded from the mar­ket by lack of means or by choice. The ser­vice offer­ing will become the corner­stone of the pur­chas­ing act. Oth­er micro-scen­ari­os are being con­sidered: sobri­ety, for example, could become the new normal.

Over the past two years, we have stepped up our approach by deploy­ing an R&D foresight activ­ity with­in the Sci­ence of Foresight and Innov­a­tion labor­at­ory. Our pos­i­tion­ing is quite spe­cif­ic: we provide sup­port for innov­a­tion developed with­in the com­pany. Our aim is not to make pre­dic­tions, that’s nev­er the pur­pose of foresight. We build scen­ari­os that tell a story. This helps our research teams to pro­ject them­selves into pos­sible futures.

We used mor­pho­lo­gic­al ana­lys­is. This meth­od, inven­ted by Fritz Zwicky in the 1940s, enables us to explore the field of pos­sib­il­it­ies by con­struct­ing foresight scen­ari­os¹. The frame­work of each scen­ario is a com­bin­a­tion of hypo­theses on the evol­u­tion of sys­tem variables.

Our foresight work, car­ried out in col­lab­or­a­tion with the Futuribles insti­tute, is based first and fore­most on known past trends that are well described in sci­entif­ic lit­er­at­ure. These doc­u­mented facts shed light on future trends. Next, we define hypo­theses for future devel­op­ments. Once the micro-scen­ari­os men­tioned above have been developed, glob­al scen­ari­os are con­struc­ted. With­in each scen­ario, we have included the same vari­ables: for example, gov­ern­ment involve­ment in visu­al health. The scen­ari­os con­struc­ted are there­fore com­ple­ment­ary and com­par­able. The choice of time frame is also very import­ant: in too short a time­frame, the pro­spect­ive work may be use­less, and in too long a time­frame, it may decrease the com­mit­ment of the teams. Our work there­fore focuses on the 2030 horizon.

In the end, we came up with three scen­ari­os. The first is char­ac­ter­ised by sig­ni­fic­ant mar­ket strat­i­fic­a­tion, with most of the pop­u­la­tion con­sum­ing in a sober man­ner and oth­ers with high pur­chas­ing power. The second scen­ario is more ori­ented towards a visu­al health path con­sidered as a ser­vice. Our aim would be to provide access to good visu­al health in the broad­est sense, rather than just cor­rect­ive lenses. Finally, the last scen­ario is more focused on pre­ven­tion, which becomes a key ele­ment in con­sumers’ health­care pathways.

The point of the foresight approach is to help our R&D teams think dif­fer­ently and chal­lenge their own assump­tions. Apart from sup­port­ing innov­a­tion, the abil­ity to suc­cess­fully pro­ject into the future is key. For example, if we’re work­ing on a new product, for­ward-look­ing scen­ari­os help us to ensure that devel­op­ment will meet our needs. These scen­ari­os also encour­age us to work for visu­al health: by offer­ing sup­port solu­tions to pop­u­la­tions, we can con­trib­ute to lim­it­ing the incid­ence of myopia worldwide.

How­ever, foresight is only as good as the com­pany’s abil­ity to make it its own: our scen­ari­os are out of sync with the com­pany’s day-to-day busi­ness. The work of foresight does not stop with the cre­ation of scen­ari­os: com­mu­nic­a­tion is cru­cial. We con­sider that it takes a min­im­um of two years for our scen­ari­os to become the com­pany’s own.

Yes, in gen­er­al, know­ledge shar­ing is very import­ant in foresight. When devel­op­ing scen­ari­os, there’s an ele­ment of intu­ition. Each com­pany has a dif­fer­ent per­cep­tion of trends, and this shar­ing of know­ledge enables us to ori­ent­ate our hypo­theses accord­ing to each sec­tor. We have many exchanges with oth­er com­pan­ies involved in foresight work, par­tic­u­larly with­in Club Open Prospective.

Interview by Anaïs Marechal