André Winzer is the founder and CEO of Schaltzeit, a Berlin-based foresight and innovation company working with public-sector organizations, businesses, and NGOs. With a background in business administration and business model development, his work focuses on connecting strategic foresight with innovation and organizational practice.
He is particularly interested in how emerging technologies and new approaches are changing foresight practice – especially what AI means for the role, skills, judgement, and ways of working of foresight practitioners. Rather than focusing on technology for its own sake, he explores how it changes the way we scan, interpret, and make sense of emerging developments. A particular focus is where human judgement remains essential in the construction and evaluation of futures.
At the same time, he is interested in the human side of participatory foresight. How do we engage people who are not foresight experts in exploring possible futures? How can serious games, learning journeys, and other participatory formats create curiosity, ownership, and a willingness to act? For him, foresight creates value when people can connect with its insights and use them – rather than when its results end up in a report on a shelf.
Alongside his work at Schaltzeit, André teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Dresden, where his topics include business models, innovation, and strategic foresight. He has completed professional training in mediation and brings this perspective into the design and facilitation of collaborative foresight processes. André is a member of the Advanced Foresight Group, the Netzwerk Zukunftsforschung, a German network of futures researchers and practitioners, and Kapitel 21, the alumni network of the Master’s program in Futures Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.