Institute For The Future

Open City Immersions: See How Makers are Reinventing Urban Systems

As part of our upcoming 2014 Technology Horizons program conference, Open Cities: How the Maker Mindset is Reinventing Urban Life, we're taking participants on immersions throughout San Francisco for a first-hand look into the transformation of markets, innovation systems, and urban life. From building a company in six hours to exploring the future of manufacturing, these build on our year-long exploration of maker culture in cities around the world to imagine the full range of possibilities for our future cities.

Immersions are for IFTF members only, and space is limited. Contact Sean Ness ([email protected]) today to reserve your seat! 

If you can't attend an immersion, follow along at #opencities2025 and join us October 4 at our free public Open City/Art City Festival in partnership with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts!

The Coordination Economy

How digital platforms are defining new business and civic engagement models

The Coordination Economy—aligning demand with goods and services—has never been faster, simpler, or more disruptive than now, thanks to new digital platforms that empower citizens to do anything from order cars to hire bodyguards from their smartphones within seconds. This new coordination economy is disrupting traditional business and civic models—and offering new opportunities for innovation. Non-traditional actors, like makers, hackers, and sharers, are all empowered by a simple but elegant practice to achieve a competitive edge: coordination. And it is changing business-as-usual in cities around the world.

If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur, this is the immersion for you. Andrew Trabulsi and Devin Fidler, your immersion guides, will show you how—by using the tools of the coordination economy—it is possible to build a functional company within just a few hours. Participants will incorporate a legal entity online, establish relationships with international vendors for product distribution globally, design and launch a professional website, and initiate an advertising campaign, leveraging social media tools and analytics. The result? You’ll go from business plan to launch before dinner. 

The Sharing Economy

How strategies for unleashing latent value in cities will remake our urban systems

The emerging sharing economy reflects a growing set of opportunities and strategies for unleashing untapped wealth in all kinds of assets and at all scales, from an individual to an urban neighborhood to a global corporation. This untapped wealth is not just financial wealth—nor is the sharing economy necessarily about monetizing latent value. Rather the sharing economy opens multiple pathways for the exchange of latent value in everything from space to cars to skills, with the potential for remaking our urban systems through viable alternatives to today’s most familiar market mechanisms. In short, it's a new way to procure the experience of daily life.

This immersion, led by Kathi Vian and April Rinne, will explore the motivations and mechanisms in the emerging sharing economy. It will probe key values such as intimacy, adventure, trust, locality, reputation, convenience, and self-expression as underlying motivations. It will explore key mechanisms for securing these values, from the design features of platforms to the cultural norms and practices that are emerging around those platforms. It will also consider what it takes to build and support these platforms, from VC funding to crowdfunding. Together, we’ll combine direct experiences of the sharing economy—ride sharing, space sharing, and lunch sharing—with micro-ethnographies of people who building the sharing economy. 

The Future of Work

How the maker mindset is changing the way we think about and define work

Maker culture has been leading a seismic shift in nature of work, unexpectedly shedding light on fundamental corporate issues. How are communication platforms altering HR processes? How can teams tasked with “doing more with less” maximize efficiency in transformative ways? And how are makers disrupting the meaning of work?. How will the maker mindset, online labor markets and platforms, and crowdfunding, not only impact internal R&D, but how will these shape an entirely new innovation ecosystem?

With these questions as a guide, Alex Goldman and Jake Dunagan will take you throughout San Francisco; looking at companies and people who are revolutionizing the ways we do business and the way we work. You'll learn about operating without managers and see how the maker mindset can be incorporated into conventional companies to be leaner, more creative, and faster to market. This immersion will culminate by asking participants to redesign established organizational processes based on insights they’ve gathered during the day. 

Maker Manufacturing

How the maker identity is shaping the new industrialization in cities

The San Francisco Bay Area has a strong tradition of innovating at the intersection between the physical and digital worlds. Over the past decade, innovators in the region have begun to identify as “makers”, and with this identity comes a more open, more social creative process. Three trends are emerging in the maker-manufacturer landscape: 1) The democratization of tools. The assembly line is being unbundled, automated, and distributed and is opening up the means of design and the means of production to anyone. 2) Making as the “other side of the coin” to industrial manufacturing. The maker movement has embraced the perceived inefficiencies of human emotion and creativity as the movement’s core values. What happens to a city when traditional manufacturing rediscovers and capitalizes on these wonderful “inefficiencies”? 3) Hardware is the new software. Over the past two years, San Francisco has been at the heart the “hardware renaissance.” Through accessible tools, a creative culture, and access to powerful manufacturing networks, the time it takes for an idea to go to market is approaching zero.

Guided by Lyn Jeffery and Nicolas Weidinger, you’ll meet and visit with makers at cutting edge at manufacturing labs, community-oriented maker spaces, and maker collectives that we believe are transforming industrial manufacturing - and writing the next chapter of San Francisco’s innovation history.

Open Food, Open Cities

How entrepreneurs are turning their eyes to food system reinvention

During the past century, our global food system has been radically transformed by efficiency, convenience, and taste. But it is clear that these strategies will not work for future generations. Urban challenges such as food deserts, rampant food waste, and health deterioration present an urgent call to rethink our whole food system—a call that Bay Area pioneers are answering.

California has been at the forefront of food system reinvention for decades. From Napa Valley to the Central Valley, farmers, manufacturers, and chefs have achieved unprecedented agricultural yields, revived age-old production methods with modern twists, and reshaped the way many Americans think about their food. Yet a new wave of food innovation and innovators are taking shape across the Bay Area, drawing from Silicon Valley's culture of hacking, rapid prototyping, fast-paced scaling to transform what the local community--and the world--eats. Proteins engineered in community labs, crowdfunded cooking appliances, and a data-driven approach to on-demand food delivery are becoming the norm in this new landscape.

Join Rebecca Chesney and Sarah Smith to journey into this new food culture, meeting the game changers who are rethinking food and remaking our world. From a rooftop harvest to cooking with the most innovative technology in home kitchens today, this hands-on immersion will give you a taste of the future of food.

For More Information ...

• Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@iftf and #opencities2025)
• For more information about IFTF's Open Cities Conference and research, contact Sean Ness ([email protected])