The future of urban air: innovations shaping air quality, smells, senses, and social divides

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Long-time followers of this blog will be familiar with the beautiful and insightful work of Richard Watson, including his Periodic Table of Disruptive Technologies and Innovation and Timeline of Emerging Science and Technology (both created with the Imperial TechForesight group at Imperial College London), as well as a number of frameworks Richard and I have created together, including Life Next Year and Beyond and the Trend Blend series such as Trend Blend 2009+.

Now Richard and Imperial TechForesight have created a beautiful map of the Future of Urban Air.
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The future of healthcare lies in building value-based ecosystems

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Healthcare will be at the center of our future, as populations age, expectations for quality of life rise, and a wave of incredible new medical technologies transform the industry.

Yet a central issue is the efficacy of healthcare amid rising costs, constrained governments, and deeply entrenched inefficiencies.
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Will Apple’s AR glasses be as transformative as the iPhone?

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Augmented reality indubitably has the potential to transform our interface with technology and information.

Virtual reality can potentially take us into extraordinary realms, but always away from our everyday reality. Augmented reality (AR) can and will be woven into our everyday.

It is inevitable that AR will, in time, be a major way for us to access and interact with information.
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Agile legislation must be at the heart of the future of government

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Last week I di a keynote on behalf of a major professional services firm to a group of senior public sector executives.

The topic was The Future of Government, so I provided a high-level frame on the forces dramatically shifting the role of government, and the opportunities to reshape government to transcend the government-citizen divide and catalyze resources to generate the sociel outcomes we desire far more efficiently and effectively.

My slides and an overview of my presentation can be found on my Future of Government keynote page.

One of the topics I touched on was the importance of agile legislation.
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The future of retirement: blurring boundaries, helpful houses, robot pets, hypersonic travel

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An article on the future of retirement in the most recent Good Weekend magazine, Rethinking the future, drew extensively on an interview with me. Below are some excerpts from the article.
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Creating business value and making a business case for using crowds and crowdsourcing

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Below is Chapter 3 from my book Getting Results From Crowds 2nd Edition, provided as a resource for those looking at using crowdsourcing in their organization or tasked with building an internal business case.

The business value of using crowds

Through history, companies have been limited in what they can achieve through the scope of their internal resources and how well they can draw on external resources. Crowdsourcing has the potential to create enormous value for businesses by giving easy access to an essentially unlimited pool of talent and capabilities. Those organizations that have the skills and competences to draw on external crowds, as well as in tapping the best ideas from their ‘internal crowds’, have an immense advantage over those companies that rely solely on their internal resources and traditional service firms.
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Three vital ethical issues highlighted by the vast potential of neural interfaces

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Last week I participated in a TV panel discussion on the implications and ethics of neural interfaces, together with the fascinating cyborg artist Neil Harbisson and Oxford University neuroethicist Stephen Rainey. A video of the full program is below.


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The future of project management and leading organizations to become agile

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This morning I gave the opening keynote at the Project Management Institute NZ Annual Conference on The Future of Project Management.

My keynote covered the fundamental trends shaping business, government, and projects, the changing nature of work and organizations, the new capabilities required by project leaders, and the nature of leadership for the future.

You can see the slides to my presentation here. Below is a summary of one of the core ideas I shared.
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Launch of Governance for Transformation Framework

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In a rapidly changing world, it is a truism that every organization must be transforming itself for the future.

Yet that is deeply challenging, not least because every organization, especially any with external investors, is framed by governance, oversight structures to ensure value to stakeholders.

Governance is essential, yet governance must not block transformation or it will destroy the organization. Governance must be an enabler of transformation.
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Seven Ways Boards Can Support and Drive Innovation

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I wrote an article for the most recent issue of Company Director magazine on seven ways boards can support and drive innovation.

The slightly edited final version is on the Company Director website. The full original text is below.

How Boards Can Support and Drive Innovation

One sixth of Australian businesses with a turnover of over $10 million in 2014 did not exist four years later. In some cases that was due to classic reasons such as cashflow management challenges, over-extension or project mis-management. However an increasing proportion of corporate failures is due to insufficient response to changes in the operating environment, including rapid technological progress, shifts in social attitudes and consumer behaviour and disruption from new business models.
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