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IFTF at 2011 World Business Forum in New York
On October 5, 2011 Marina led a session at the World Business Forum in New York, an annual two-day conference that brings together executives and change-makers to think about the key ideas and trends that are shaping the future of business. In this interview with IESE Business School Professor Marta Elvira, Marina summarizes how, over the last 40 years, we have shifted from centralized to highly decentralized and distributed modes of communication. According to Marina, this change will have a fundamental impact on all aspects of society, including education, health, energy and business.
Organizing to Create Value from IFTF on Vimeo.
Marina’s main presentation addressed the audience of 5,000 delegates at a session on Megatrends that also featured IFTF’s Anthony Townsend and Michael Liebreich from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Marina’s talk took up the theme of the future as a foreign land—one where we will see new landscapes evolving and encounter whole new ways of organizing society. Marina gave illustrations of this shifting landscape across a number of domains:
Energy: We’ll move from a tap-water or pipeline model of resource management, to one focused on accessing energy in small, lightweight, portable packages, just when we need them.
Manufacturing & resources: We’ll see radical change in the way obtain key resources from metals to meat; large scale extracting will give way to small machines in laboratories and mini-factories.
Bodies: Greater understanding of the more 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us will lead to a new view of our bodies as complex transport systems for hosts of bacteria.
Cities: As we create hypercities, we’ll be living at a scale never before experienced, and one that will require us to organize ourselves in new ways.
Organizations: Traditional institutions will give way to social production: ways of creating value from micro contributions by large networks, using social tools and technologies.
Picking up the theme of urbanization, Anthony's talk focused on his research around smart cities. Over the next decade we will be embedding technology into every aspect of our urban environments, enabling us to develop tools for smarter cities. While many large industrial and engineering companies are investing heavily in this technology, Anthony sees the greatest potential in the grassroots movement of start-ups and citizen hackers. As governments empower the grassroots with open data, they create an incredible environment for innovation. While there will continue to be an ongoing debate over our data - how and what is measured, and what is done with it - the democratization of technology tools means that many more people will have the opportunity to reshape their cities.