Strategic Foresight Lead

Location:

(HEU) London Ludgate

Job ID:

R0134589

Date Posted:

2026-06-24

Company Name:

HITACHI EUROPE LTD.

Profession (Job Category):

Engineering & Science

Job Schedule: 

Full time

Remote:

No

Job Description:

Company Overview

 

Through its Social Innovation Business (SIB) that brings together IT, OT(Operational Technology) and products, Hitachi aims to be a global leader in continuously transforming social infrastructure through digital, contributing to a harmonized 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. Visit us at www.hitachi.com.

 

Founded in 1910 as a machine repair shop, Hitachi is now the global leader in digital innovation and sustainable solutions. For over 110 years, we have solved social challenges through technology, data, partnerships and innovation and we pride ourselves on being trusted by our customers.

 

Hitachi’s Research and Development is at the forefront of identifying and developing breakthrough technologies enabling market transformations across energy, mobility, sustainability, smart cities and resilient industries. Vision driven and design-led approaches are used as a catalyst for growth and effective business, environmental and social outcomes.

 

Our team’s mission is to shape the responsible adoption of emerging technology into society through R&D driven new business incubation. We work across organisations to help accelerate business transformation in harmony with people, and planet.

 

For details on Hitachi Europe R&D, please visit:

R&D in Europe : Hitachi Global

Design : Research & Development : Hitachi

 

What you’ll be doing

 

Hitachi is shaping our social infrastructure through the convergence of digital and physical environments into smart and intelligent systems. This is an exciting opportunity to join a creative team working at the core of Hitachi’s research, innovation and transformation across Europe and beyond, to identify market making business opportunities driven by complex social and environmental challenges and enabled by technology disruptions and new business models.

 

As a Strategic Foresight lead within Hitachi’s corporate R&D organisation, you will play a crucial role working across different R&D and corporate functions, and business units to identify business transformation opportunities and feed into R&D led business incubation.

 

The role will also be responsible for:

 

Nurture organisation-wide imagination on preferred futures that will inspire and enable business action today.

 

You will be responsible for bringing 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 business case for innovation and incubation investment, including creating story telling narratives and documentation to support organisational mobilisation.

 

Leadership and Visioning

• Leverage strategic foresight and systems thinking approaches together with human-centred design to develop business transformation strategies across energy, environment, and mobility sectors in a highly collaborative environment.

• Analysis of macro trends, developing human centred foresights and future state service and system visions.

• 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 including:

  • 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 – including planning and shaping project scope, strategy development, project execution.

• Engage with senior management and executives to mitigate risks and build support.

 

Capability Building

• Support development and enhancement of foresight and value creation frameworks by integrating methodologies in an actional and effective manner that brings consistency of practice within members of Hitachi’s R&D organisation and beyond.

• 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.

 

You will also be guiding team members and colleagues through communicating and visualising complex ecosystems and concepts in visual, written and schematic formats with designers, researchers, engineers and external partners.

 

What you bring to the team

 

We’re looking for a team player, who is motivated by delivering great work and the Hitachi vision. The role will be a mixture of remote-hybrid work with days in the Hitachi Office: 7th Floor, 1 New Ludgate, 60 Ludgate Hill, London, EC4M 7AW, United Kingdom

 

 

The ideal candidate will possess the following skills and background:

 

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 - with the option to buy up to an additional 5 days per year

• A Holiday Banking scheme allowing you to bank untaken holiday to use another year

• Group Personal Pension

• Private Medical Insurance with self-funded option to cover family members

• Employee Assistance Programme available to all employees

• Personal Accident Insurance

 

Voluntary Benefits (funded by employee) including;

• Cycle To Work scheme

• Gym Membership

• Dental Insurance with option to include 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.  We are proud of Japanese heritage, with our values expressed through the Hitachi Spirit:

 

Wa – Harmony, Trust, Respect

Makoto – Sincerity, Fairness, Honesty, Integrity

Kaitakusha-Seishin – Pioneering Spirit, Challenge