Ten-Year Forecast
The Ten-Year Forecast Program provides a distinctive outlook on the changing global environment for a vanguard of players in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Focusing on the next three to ten years, the program anticipates discontinuities and emerging dilemmas--discontinuities because they challenge business as usual and dilemmas because they demand new ways of thinking about complex problems. Together, discontinuities and dilemmas provide a vista of new practices and points of view that will shape tomorrow's organizations and today's choices.
Kathi Vian | Director, Ten-Year Forecast Program
For more information on membership in the Ten-Year Forecast Program, please contact Sean Ness at sness@iftf.org or 650-233-9517.
Ten-Year Forecast Program 2010 Research Agenda
The 2010 Ten-Year Forecast will be a benchmark forecast for the decade. It will focus on five driving forecasts:
• The Carbon Economy, including basic forecasts for the energy costs of energy production, the potential for energy efficiencies, and the likely trajectory for carbon markets and their impact on overall energy strategy.
• The...
Sustainability Outlook Map
Sustainability Outlook is a forward‐thinking project that explores how changing social, cultural and technological conditions are likely to alter the ways that companies integrate sustainability into their business strategies.
Jointly sponsored by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), this ongoing project combines IFTF’s methodologies for...
Pro-Poor Foresight
Since joining IFTF I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about how forecasting can be used in development work. I have a lot of faith in the power of foresight, scenario planning, and forecasting methodologies to help us make a better, more resilient, and more just world.
I am constantly saddened by shortsighted development projects that have a very top-down, outsider is the...
Explore the Future of your Business at the Future Space Conference on Nov 16 in Vienna, Austria
IFTF will be presenting at the The Future Space Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Monday, November 16.
In turbulent times it’s becoming obvious that the future is unsecure and holds many surprises…and opportunities. To seize these however, your company needs to change: The way it does business, the way it thinks about success, the way it...
The astonishingly deep effect of primary metaphors in our lives
In 1980, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson described the notion of the embodied metaphor in their landmark book, Metaphors We Live By, mapping out the brain’s amazing exaptation of its motor functions into the fundamental...
Africa, The Final Business Frontier
The BBC World News, as of August 22nd, is hosting the weekly Africa Business Report. The show plans to look at the businesses and products coming out of Africa, the challenges and opportunities for companies trading there, as well as the business people themselves.
According to Dambisa...
"The Greenhorns" doc explores a new generation of American farmers
Building on the momentum of a series of high profile movies confronting the often appalling practices of food production in the US including Food, Inc. and Fast Food Nation, a new team of filmmakers is in the process of bringing audiences a fresh and much more optimistic take on the topic....
Being Honest About Somali Pirates
Johann Hari from Centre for Research on Globalization wrote an interesting and very revealing article on pirates and our war on pirates in Somalia. Although the pirates tales of Somalia may be a bit old by now, this article is great.
Hari not only explains how Somalia became the center or modern day...
Siemens Backs a 400 Billion Euro Initiative to Harvest Solar Energy in the Sahara Desert
The TYF team has been talking about tapping the solar energy of the Sahara desert for the past year or so. Siemens and other companies are now taking a big step in that direction.
On July 13th a group of European Companies, including Siemens, and...
Kenyans create bicycle powered phone charger from scrap metal
http://allafrica.com/stories/200907211006.html
Two 4th year Electrical and Information Engineering students at the University of Nairobi have created a bicycle mobile phone...
- Research Director Mani Pande is quoted in the Global Finance story "A wide open world"
- Marina Gorbis and David Pescovitz are quoted in the Times Online story "Hurtling to a scary future"
- Executive Director, Marina Gorbis, is quoted in the AP article "Our devices will spin denser webs of data in 2010s"
- Research Director, Anthony Townsend, testifies before a Senate Committee on Research Parks and Transportation
- IFTF's Executive Director, Marina Gorbis, launches her new blog From Odessa to the Future
- Signtific's FreeSpace game at SigntificLab is featured in a Good Morning Silicon Valley post, "Play your cards right and you, too, can be a futurist"
