Ten-Year Forecast
feedFor nearly five decades, the Ten-Year Forecast has been a leading source of foresight for a vanguard of business, government, and community organizations. As a platform for tracking today’s latent signals, we help many of the world’s most influential institutions to navigate a complex ecosystem of technological, cultural, and social change, to build resilience and make better futures.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Visit the Ten-Year Forecast Program website
Contact Sean Ness at sness@iftf.org or 650-233-9517
Asia: Chinese Comsumer Collectives
2007 Ten-Year Forecast Perspective on Chinese Consumer Collectives.
10 Workplace Skills of the Future; the skills workers should strive to have and the skills employers should seek out and promote
In 2007 the Institute for the Future laid out 10 workplace skills. Originally used as part of the Superhero Skills from the 2007 Ten-Year Forecast annual retreat, they were then adapted as part of the Future of Work research, and finally repurposed as badges for the...
Super Hero Skills
Ping Quotient
Excellent responsiveness to other people's requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network
Longbroading
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles
Open Authorship
Creating content for public modification; the...
Dead Aid
Dambisa Moyo, a native Zambian , with a PhD in economics from Oxford University has published a very exciting book, Dead Aid. Dambisa is the first female economist who has published a book about development I have the opportunity to read. The development economics field seems to be almost 100% dominated by white Western males. Not only is Moyo female, but she is a native African. How...
Maker Faire Africa
We here at the Ten-Year Forecast Program and IFTF have been saying the Global South is developing it’s own global voice. The Global South is becoming stronger and louder, slowly changing the way the Global North has to do business, for lack of a better...
A political brouhaha in the making: Chinese workers sickened for cleaner energy in the West
The Times of London recently had an excellent article that will make you feel horrible every time you use a compact fluorescent lightbulbs to save energy--and that also suggests an emerging cultural flashpoint around which the Chinese public could organize in the coming years. "'Green' lightbulbs poison...
Chinese scientists taking kids home for a better education?
Christian Science Monitor had a great piece May 1 on what some call a "reverse brain drain," adding data to the still largely anecdotal trend of U.S.-based Chinese and Indian scientists going home to develop their careers. China is getting better at convincing Chinese...
Who's the baddest, Chinese peasants or grads?
Over the past few months I've heard two entirely different points of view about which groups in China are more likely to cause serious problems because of their unemployment. Will it be educated university graduates, or urban factory workers returning to their villages? Both groups have high expectations of being able to work and of becoming increasingly prosperous, and both have seen those...
SUPERSTRUCT: Welcome back, Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals!
We have good news to report and some exciting research to share. First, the good news: A few weeks ago, the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) honored SUPERSTRUCT as the "Most Important Futures Work of 2008!" This prestigious honor belongs to you, and to the entire global community of more than 7000 Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals. Superstruct was the world’s first...
Richard Posner on preconceptions and anticipating disasters
Richard Posner writes in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about the current financial crisis, and why experts didn't take early warnings about it seriously.
The financial crisis, when it finally struck the nation full-blown in September 2008, caught the government, the financial community, and the...
Ruby`s Bequest in Kenya?
I’ve been reading through Ruby’s Bequest and have been struck by how useful a similar exercise could be for Kenya. When it comes to caring for the mentally ill, many Kenyan’s still live in the dark ages. To begin with, there is little to no government support. There is little to no education regarding mental illness. Kenya only has 60 psychiatrists, one...
New on IFTF.org: IFTF Workshop Listings
IFTF has just posted a menu of workshops based on our most recent research, facilitated by IFTF staff. In today's volatile, uncertain world, it seems impossibly difficult to forecast the future. Yet now is also the time when forecasting can be most valuable. It's a time when looking long can give you perspective, when thinking about the future can...
10 Ways Ruby's Bequest Can Add Value to Your Organization
On March 16, IFTF launched the fourth in a series of ground-breaking open collaborative research platforms—Ruby's Bequest—and we know your company will gain value from participating.
Ruby's Bequest is an online...
Perhaps not the most health-related story, but a really cool picture
Although I am interested in new developments in prosthetics technology, this is not exactly what I had in mind. But the picture and its accompanying story made me laugh, so I thought I would start off the week by sharing it.
...
"Waterfront: The Conde Nast of Web Health"
I have to confess--that is not my headline; it is Business Week's. But it is just so perfect that I couldn't resist using it. A major source of health information online, founded in 2002, being compared to a worldwide magazine publishing powerhouse that has been around for 100 years? New media, meet old media!
The Business Week...
Tell it to someone who cares: Ruby's Bequest is live!
From "Caring from a Distance" to "Making the System Work (Better)," we have begun tapping the wisdom of crowds to gather stories of people's experiences of caring and caregiving at Ruby's Bequest...
Interesting question
One of the things that can powerfully affect the future is the radical decline in price of a currently expensive good or service. The invention of the printing press made books (and later newspapers) exceptionally cheap; the Industrial Revolution did the same for a whole host of manufactured goods; and more recently the same thing happened with information technologies.
It's easy to see...
IFTF Update: Winter 2009
2008 was an inspiring year for us and despite external forces in the world today, we are moving into 2009—our 41st year—with new vigor. As Distinguished IFTF Fellow Bob Johansen puts it, 2009 "has great potential to be a springboard year." Across the world now more than ever is the time to invest in looking at what lies in the coming decade and beyond. We...
Alternative Views of the Economic Crisis
This piece was originally published on BBC.com in a series of four pieces on the World Social Forum, held last week in the Brazilian Amazon.
A popular slogan at the Forums in the past has been "another world is possible". This year, at a moment of deepening global financial crisis, a global...
