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 lightweight innovation model which has evolved in the web industry to other industries, including those that rely heavily on capital intensive R&D.  

As a statistician who taught international development in grad school, I am really interested in looking at different measures of economic development of nations.

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.

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 turned into disappointment very soon after I read the full story.

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 experience. Cyberspace is not a place out there, it is not a destination, but it is tightly integrated into the world around us.

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 a heartthrob of millions. To put it in Hollywood terms, he has more celebrity than George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon combined on the Indian subcontinent. Shahrukh became the latest Bollywood star to adopt Twitter (his handle is iamsrk).

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.

Every alternate year we conduct the IFTF Signals Survey to track emerging behaviors in the areas of technology, health, work, sustainability and environment. We conducted our survey last year where we looked at  how many people participate in virtual worlds and online games, how they manage and develop their online identities, and what kinds of associations they form with others in online worlds/games.

Last year, Kathi Vian and I wrote a piece on new diasporas and identity management for the Ten Year Forecast program. Our basic premise was that we are all migrants, and we carry our identities with us as we move. In the coming decade, we will see the proliferation of tools, services and processes of managing our identities.