Despite being associated with technology, futurists have rarely used digital technology as a central tool of their work until recent years. Most methods developed or used for futures studies and strategic foresight (e.g. horizon scanning, system mapping) can be performed without digital technology. However, when futurists have integrated their methods into software, they have saved themselves countless hours of work and stress. Many organizations use their own proprietary software, but rarely is such software made available to the general public.

To assist futures professionals, we compiled a list of all the publicly available software that has been developed to perform futurist methods. We had two primary conditions for this list. First, it must be software that is specifically developed to perform the functions of futurists. As such we did not include any general purpose digital technology often used by futurists such as Google Alerts. Second, the software had to be publicly accessible, free or paid. This meant we did not include any software used to help administer RAND’s Delphi technique except for The Millennium Project’s Real Time Delphi which is freely available.
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Tomorrow I am giving the keynote on Platform Strategy: Creating Exponential Value in Connected Times at the Digital Single Market Cloud Stakeholder Conference in Vienna, Austria.

An increasing proportion of my work over the last years has been explicitly centered on platforms and platform strategy, but in many ways it is has been core to my work for almost two decades.

After working on financial market platform strategy for major banks around 2000, my 2002 book Living Networks delved into the emerging network economy built on standards and the early platforms it was enabling. My work over the last decade and more around social networks, future of media, crowdsourcing, future of work, enterprise technology, and strategy for emerging technologies such as AI, IoT and blockchain among other themes has all related to platforms.

Today platforms are intensely relevant in almost every domain, including not just obvious industries such as technology, media, and financial services, but also many others including health, education, government, infrastructure, democracy, and far more.

Click on the image for full-size pdf
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Just over three years ago we launched our Futurist Influence Rankings and Keynote Speaker Influence Rankings.

These both use a simple algorithm to combine measures of online impact including web traffic and social media impact to rank the influence of prominent futurists and keynote speakers.

Any rankings of online influence certainly shouldn’t be taken too seriously, however our simple charts offer a reasonable picture of relative impact given the limited measures available.

The demise of Klout

We have had to update the algorithm since the social influence platform Klout shut down earlier this year.
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In a short segment I recorded in Bangkok at the Oracle Impact Summit recently, I discuss the six facets of strategy for emerging technologies with some simple visual illustrations.

You can read more about the six facets of strategy for emerging technologies here.

The transcript is below. To subscribe to my future vlog episodes click here! :-)

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