IFTF + You
Programs
IFTF programs offer a long-term platform for augmenting your organization’s foresight IQ and building relationships with colleagues in other organizations and industries. Conferences, workshops, and foundational forecasts provide the outside context you need to develop resilient internal foresight and strategy.
For nearly four decades, the Ten-Year Forecast program has been a leading source of foresight for a vanguard of business, government, and nonprofit organizations. It is a platform for sensing today’s latent signals, tracking their intersections to understand the ecosystem of choices, and then designing platforms for future resilience.
IFTF’s Technology Horizons program illuminates future forces in science and technology that will transform how we live, work, and create change in the next decade. Tracking discoveries and discontinuities, the program helps organizations navigate the zones between technology disruption, shifts in human identity, and the tides of social change.
Over the past two decades, IFTF’s Health Horizons program has brought futures thinking to the world of health and health care, examining how well-being is constantly redefined by consumer electronics, health information technology, food manufacturing, packaged goods, social media, and the retail experience. The program brings together people ideas, and foresight tools to spark new insight into the challenges facing global health—and to spark positive change.
The Global Food Outlook program explores the tensions and possibilities of food futures—from people’s everyday food habits and choices, to the dynamics of global food markets, to the complex environmental issues that sustain food production. By helping organizations think systematically about the disruptions and dilemmas in food and agriculture, the program helps build more resilience into our global food systems.
The mission of the Governance Futures Lab is to reimagine and experiment with the basic architectures and processes of governance. We believe it is necessary to experiment with new systems and new rules to govern life on our planet. We have powerful tools to connect, organize and coordinate human behavior. We also have unprecedented amounts of knowledge about how the world works and humanity’s role in its own future.
IFTF is expanding on its education research to engage a diverse set of players in the new educational ecology to reimagine the future of higher education. IFTF research will unpack the complex forces behind the disruptive changes facing education to put forth plausible, internally consistent visions of the future. The goal of the project is to map key drivers re-shaping education, create future scenarios for higher education, and deliver actionable insights that will help participating organizations better prepare for the future.
We are seeing the rise of vibrant communities of smaller scale, fast-moving, and globally connected inventors, builders—and investors—who are working with a new set of assumptions about profit margins, production processes, creativity and industry, and maker-user relationships. These offer the first glimpses of a new set of rules of production that will shape the coming decades. The Future of Manufacturing program is an opportunity to immerse yourself in the laboratory of actors, innovations, and thought processes that will shape the new path to production.
IFTF is recognized as a thought leader on the future of work—recently we were named by Fast Company magazine as one of the five most innovative nonprofits developing responses to the changing world of work. We've tracked the intersection of technologies and work for several decades, starting with the first studies of the uses of Arpanet (the predecessor of the Internet), and more recently, looking at impacts of collaboration technologies, new organizational forms and changing workforce skills. We will build on our ongoing research to create a comprehensive and actionable set of tools to help organizations succeed in the rapidly changing world of work.
The unknown, urgent future calls for practical visionaries, who ask provocative questions and seek actionable, impactful answers. The IFTF Future for Good initiative brings together innovative social thinkers to start this process. They will meld seeing with doing and thinking with making, inspiring all of us to join—for the future belongs to everyone. We must all dedicate ourselves, our careers, and our aspirations to create a future for good, now and in generations to come.
Short-Term Programs
In addition to these ongoing long-term programs, IFTF frequently convenes shorter-term cost-shared projects that focus on emerging hot-spot topics. For example, we’re currently inviting participants to join the Futures: Impossible! project, designed to develop a new toolkit for radically unexpected futures.
Past examples: