BSR/IFTF Sustainability Outlook
feedSustainability has become a buzz word across all types of companies, posing strategic challenges and opportunities for innovation and market leadership. Everybody, from C-suites to marketing organizations to supply chain partners, is asking what sustainability really means and how it will change the future of brands, operations, and corporate strategy.
This year’s Sustainability Outlook project, conducted jointly by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and Institute for the Future (IFTF), helps answer these questions.
Sustainability strategies go beyond innovations in the marketplace. In fact, this year’s Outlook focuses on four approaches to sustainability strategies: new kinds of commons, new market strategies, potential policy frameworks, and new technological platforms. For each of these, we depict a horizon of “signals”—innovations that, taken together, can help us anticipate four very different future worlds.
To help you make sense of these worlds, the 2007-2008 Sustainability Outlook toolkit includes the following:
• A custom forecast map of the uncertain sustainability horizon, including the four strategies, plus signals, wildcards, and specific sustainability issues.
• Four strategic scenarios that bring the map to life with insights into the near-, mid-, and long-term possibilities of these four very different approaches to sustainability: Commons, markets, policy, and science and technology.
• A set of industry analysis cards that interpret the risks and opportunities for seven key industry sectors: High-tech, transportation, consumer products, extractives, food and beverage, professional services, and retail.
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...
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...
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...
Energy grid limitation on the growth of alternative energy
The New York Times recently had an article on how the U.S. electric grid is turning out to hinder the development of wind power:
When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at...
