Institute For The Future

Exploring a Decade of Fragmentation + Opportunity with Ten-Year Forecast

We can’t predict the future, but we can certainly explore it ...

#10YF2015

Each spring, we host the annual Ten-Year Forecast retreat, a multi-day event where thought leaders and strategists from nearly every sector and industry come together for an intensive and mind-expanding immersion into the opportunities and challenges of the next ten years. This year was our biggest event yet.

Over the course of three days, our Ten-Year Forecast team and program members delved into the fragmented reality of the Seven Economy Future, a future-oriented framework that expands our traditional understanding of the global economy to consider the seven distinct economies that will influence markets, communities and organizations in the coming decade.

With the help of visionary scientists, chefs and medical researchers, we tasted the future of microbially-enhanced foods and health products, and performed experiments on the gut bacteria that determine more of our well-being than we ever realized. We investigated the highly volatile future of work, the new class of micro-task workers who take their orders from APIs, and the sophisticated algorithms that seek to automate the management of entire organizations. And we examined the transformative coordination technologies being developed in the world’s criminal innovation zones, including deep-dives into the blockchain technology that allows everyone from criminal organizations to civic platforms to organize themselves across national boundaries like never before.

On the third day, we developed innovative new strategies, business models and value propositions with the Toolkit for the Networked World, a facilitated reassessment of the idle assets and underutilized capabilities that every organization can leverage in new ways in the highly networked and fragmented world.

Over the next month, we’ll be releasing several blog posts and videos that unpack more of the incredible possibilities and challenging dilemmas posed by this year’s research:

• From #10YF2015: The Microbial Future

As always, our goal is to empower individuals, organizations and governments to think structurally about the long-term future, so that we can all move from being passive bystanders to active participants in making the future we want for ourselves and our communities.

For those who feel likewise inspired to positively influence the future, we invite you to join us for next year’s research and retreat, which we’ll be sharing more about soon.

We can’t predict the future, but we are certainly called to explore it. We’d be crazy not to.