I have just come across this – an excellent resource from PSFK on the Future of Retail.
The report covers 10 major trends:
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This is significant. While talk doesn’t necessarily lead to action, a significant shift in capitalism could be coming.
On Wednesday US SEC Chairman Mary Shapiro sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee. The letter is embedded at the bottom of this post.
Many have focused on the potential from the current SEC review to relax limits on shareholders for private companies, notably the rule that if a private company has 500 investors or more it has to disclose its finances. Changes to this and related rules could have a significant impact on capital raising for private companies.
Few seem to have focused on what I think is potentially a bigger issue from the SEC moves: opening up crowdfunding as a mechanism for equity investment. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece called SEC Boots Up for the Internet Age. The article begins:
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Chapter 5 from Living Networks, on Distributed Innovation – Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World, is still immensely relevant today. We are still relatively early on in working out the implications for innovation of distributed value creation.
Here is a section towards the end of the chapter which provides 5 recommendations on managing innovation in a networked world. While some of the tools have changed since this was written, the principles haven’t.
IMPLEMENTED DISTRIBUTED INNOVATION AND SHARED VALUE
At a scientific convention in Hawaii in 1972, Stanley Cohen from Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of the University of California met for the first time in what proved to be the beginning of a long friendship and collaborative partnership. Their joint work on a process for cloning genes in microorganisms resulted in three patents that formed the foundation of the nascent biotechnology industry. Stanford University ended up as the sole owner of the patents, reaping over $150 million in royalties as a result.
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I am writing this in the air over the Rockies, flying back from a scenario planning workshop I ran for a client yesterday.
Over the last dozen years that I have been running scenario planning projects I have observed that corporate interest in scenario planning is cyclical. The time horizons that executives think in tend to be driven by the health of their business, the recency of prominent unanticipated events such as the global financial crisis or Middle East upheaval, and visibility of challenges to their business model.
In my experience interest in scenario planning is picking up strongly, reflecting a variety of recent surprises of various kinds, as well as a general feeling of prosperity that permits budgets for the like of scenario projects.
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I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly.
I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study. Below are the notes I managed to catch on my iPad as we spoke..
The panellists were:
Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Jacob Murray-White, Head of Salmat’s Customer Solutions at Home Programme
Fernanda Afonso, National Chair of Australian Psychological Society and Specialist, Freehills.
Ross Dawson, Futurist
Les Williamson, Managing Director of Cisco Australia, told the story of how Cisco was born from love. Two academics at Stanford University were in a relationship, but worked on opposite sides of the campus. They created a multi-protocol router to communicate, started building them commercially in a garage, got funded, and grown spectacularly since then.
Below are live notes from the panel. I haven’t attributed them as they sometimes bring together comments from several people or my interpretation. It was a fascinating discussion.
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The current edition of Fast Thinking magazine has a feature article titled ‘Know Future’ on “the future of futurists”. It looks at the history and background of the profession and goes on to interview a number of prominent futurists. It quotes me:
Ross Dawson says becoming a futurist is pretty straightforward. “You can claim you are a futurist and people either believe you or they don’t.”
The very dynamic Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins of Bluewire Media recently did a video interview of me, asking me about the trends driving how the web will shape business.
Here is the video, with a summary of my headline points below. (Also see Bluewire Media’soriginal post of the video , which has my comments written up in greater detail.)
What do you see the future of the web being for businesses?
The fundamental trends include:
I’ve just finished a teleconference on The Future of Customer Relationships (follow the link for an overview), hosted by Focus.com and Brian Vellmure.
The panellists were:
Ross Dawson
Dr. Graham Hill
Dr. Michael Wu
Denis Pombriant
Our discussion will be available shortly as an mp3. For now, here are a few quick notes I took from the discussion. We certainly didn’t have the time to cover the full scope of the future of customer relationships in our 45 minute discussion, but we did get across some very interesting issues.
We started by talking about the big picture, where I covered a few of the themes from my map of the ExaTrends of the Decade.
The cover story on the current issue of MyBusiness magazine is on The Future of Business: Businesses to seek – or flee – in the next decade.
It features ideas from three futurists: myself, Bernard Salt of KPMG, and Christine Christian of Dun & Bradstreet.
Here are a few of the quotes from me they used in the article. I will do a separate post tomorrow that runs through some of my ideas on the specific industries that will grow and shrink in the coming decade.
Ross Dawson, a futurist and Chairman of Future Exploration Network, advises that it is not important to pick which industries will rise or fall. Canny business people, he believes, will try to preduct what those changes will mean for the way business is conducted. “It does not make much sense to think about rising or shrinking industries,” he says. “It makes sense to think about where value is going.”
Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:
Across communities, nations, and the world, there is a keen risk of increasing separation between those who have access to technology, tools, and basic needs, and those who do not. This is not inevitable. However it will require concerted action around the world to avoid an increasing schism between us.
See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:
