Ten-Year Forecast
feedThe Ten-Year Forecast Program provides a distinctive outlook on the changing global environment for a vanguard of players in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Focusing on the next three to ten years, the program anticipates discontinuities and emerging dilemmas--discontinuities because they challenge business as usual and dilemmas because they demand new ways of thinking about complex problems. Together, discontinuities and dilemmas provide a vista of new practices and points of view that will shape tomorrow's organizations and today's choices.
Kathi Vian | Director, Ten-Year Forecast Program
For more information on membership in the Ten-Year Forecast Program, please contact Sean Ness at sness@iftf.org or 650-233-9517.
2010 Map of the Decade
The future is a high-resolution game. Never before has humanity been able to explore the emerging landscape in such detail, to measure the forces of change at such vast scales, and to fill in the details with such fine grain. But this high-resolution grid is not complete. It challenges us to envision and build the future we want. As both gamers and creators of the game, we will fill in the...
FutureCast: Cesar Harada on Open_Sailing (Aug 12, 11am PT)
Developing the International Ocean Station
August 12 at 11:00 am Pacific Time
Join Jerry Michalski in conversation with Cesar Harada to discuss Open_Sailing, an international community working to develop the International Ocean Station as an open-source project (...
Ten-Year Forecast 2010 Research Agenda: The Future is a High Resolution Game
The 2010 Ten-Year Forecast will be a forecast to build the next decade on. It will start from five benchmark forecasts that define the critical forces shaping the next ten years. From these foundational forecasts, it will develop alternative scenarios that use today’s signals to imagine how tomorrow’s world will look, depending on the perspective you take. All of these will come together with...
David Evan Harris interviewed by Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society
IFTF's David Evan Harris was interviewed at Harvard University's...
Superstructing the Next Decade: 2009 Ten-Year Forecast
We're excited to make the 2009 Ten-Year Forecast materials—Superstructing the Next Decade—available online.
What does "Superstruct" really mean, anyway? Superstruct means to build new structures that extend our reach, expand our capacity, and go beyond the...
2009 Ten-Year Forecast: Research Materials
[Conferenece PPTs with their scripts]
The 2009 Ten-Year Forecast Annual Retreat, "Superstructing the Next Decade," took place in historic Cavallo Point in Sausalito, CA on April 20-21, 2009. Materials from this meeting are available for download, including:
Overview
The Future is our...
Lightweight innovation for credit card companies
My colleague Anthony Townsend recently wrote a thoughtful report The Future of Lightweight Innovation for IFTF’s Technology Horizons program. The report is currently available only to clients, but Anthony has blogged about the report on several occasions. You can catch some important insights
here . He makes a compelling case for porting...
Getting rid of pesky fees
Bank of America announced today that it is going to do away with overdraft fees for purchases made with debit cards bringing an end to the era of $40 coffee. This certainly means that the bank will lose millions in revenue since it is easy and quick source of revenue. It is certainly good news for all Americans since other banks will have to follow suit.
I don’t think Bank of...
Quantifying well-being for measuring progress
As a statistician who taught international development in grad school, I am really interested in looking at different measures of economic development of nations. I am especially intrigued by the different yearly rankings from the World Bank of nations on different economic indicators like the Gross National Income (GNI) previously known as the Gross National Product or value of goods and...
Rise of p2p lending
What do retail banks do best? First, they are good for keeping your money safe. Money deposited in the bank is safer than money hidden inside the mattress. Banks with a deposit base are covered by FDIC insurance that ensures that your money will be safe even if the bank fails. Second, banks are hubs for moving money around in the society.
Since more than a century banks have been the...
Reducing Friction in online payments
This month’s Wired magazine has a cover story on the future of Money titled Money wants to be free. When I got the magazine in my mailbox at home, I was really excited to see Wired reporting on the future of money as I have been thinking, researching and writing about the future of money and finance. But my excitement...
Increasing Global Resilience: women becoming key players in peace movements
Women are doing a lot of work to create equality and peace throughout Africa, not to mention the rest of the world. What’s more, as women come together to fight for peace they cross political, religious, and tribal or clan lines that are often used as tools to perpetuate war. In Liberia Christian and Muslim women got together for the first time in the country’s history when they stood up and...
Facebook Credits and Blended Reality
In 2009 IFTF’s Technology Horizons program published the blended reality report. Based upon the ethnographic research that we conducted we found that people are pioneering new ways of living in the blended reality world: a new kind of reality in which physical and digital media, environments and interactions are tightly integrated to create a new seamless...
Bollywood, Shahrukh Khan, Twitter and the art of persuasion
If you are a Bollywood fan then you have probably heard of Shahrukh Khan. If you don’t then check out the Wikipedia entry on him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahrukh_Khan Khan is the biggest Bollywood movie star. He has starred in several successful movies in the last 15 years, and is...
The Great Recession and community currencies
The Great recession has brought into focus the role community currencies (sometimes referred as complementary currency) can play in fostering local communities, helping create local jobs, and making small local businesses thrive instead of lose their battle to a national chain. Community currencies provide an easily recognizable currency for local transactions that supports local commercial...
Ten-Year Forecast Program 2010 Research Agenda
The 2010 Ten-Year Forecast will be a benchmark forecast for the decade. It will focus on five driving forecasts:
• The Carbon Economy, including basic forecasts for the energy costs of energy production, the potential for energy efficiencies, and the likely trajectory for carbon markets and their impact on overall energy strategy.
• The...
Sustainability Outlook Map
Sustainability Outlook is a forward‐thinking project that explores how changing social, cultural and technological conditions are likely to alter the ways that companies integrate sustainability into their business strategies.
Jointly sponsored by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), this ongoing project combines IFTF’s methodologies for...
Pro-Poor Foresight
Since joining IFTF I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about how forecasting can be used in development work. I have a lot of faith in the power of foresight, scenario planning, and forecasting methodologies to help us make a better, more resilient, and more just world.
I am constantly saddened by shortsighted development projects that have a very top-down, outsider is the...
Explore the Future of your Business at the Future Space Conference on Nov 16 in Vienna, Austria
IFTF will be presenting at the The Future Space Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Monday, November 16.
In turbulent times it’s becoming obvious that the future is unsecure and holds many surprises…and opportunities. To seize these however, your company needs to change: The way it does business, the way it thinks about success, the way it...
The astonishingly deep effect of primary metaphors in our lives
In 1980, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson described the notion of the embodied metaphor in their landmark book, Metaphors We Live By, mapping out the brain’s amazing exaptation of its motor functions into the fundamental...
