Mini Matters--an Interview with John Vanston of Technology Futures on Looking for "Minitrends"

Futurists, wisely, study the big picture. But John H. Vanston, futurist and chairman of the Austin, Texas, consulting firm Technology Futures, Inc., reminds us that sometimes the most important developments begin at a very small scale. He stresses looking for “minitrends,” which he defines as “emerging trends that will soon become important, but are not yet generally recognized.” An adept observer can spot them before they do, he explains, and can take advantage of them to benefit his or her business or organization. In his 2010 book Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business and Technology Trends, Dr Vanston laid out a detailed game plan for detecting minitrends and devising ways to make the most of them.

He discussed his methods in-person at “MiniTrends 2012,” a conference that ran Oct. 17-18 in Austin, Texas. Nearly two dozen futures thinkers, including David Pearce Snyder, consulting futurist; and Rick Smyre, president of the Center for Communities of the Future, featured as keynote speakers and presenters. Stay tuned for Dr. Vanston’s follow-up conference, “MiniTrends 2013,” taking place this coming fall.

Dr. Vanston also spoke about minitrends in the following interview with THE FUTURIST. Rick Docksai, associate editor for THE FUTURIST, conducted the interview.

John Vanston

THE FUTURIST: In your book, you share a lot of helpful resources for discovering minitrends, and news media are among them. There are some widespread concerns about the quality of news media today, at least in this country: People worry that due to shrinking revenues and increasing corporate pressure, we have fewer reporters, and they are covering less substantive stuff. I wonder to what extent news media miss a lot of these minitrends; in that case, how do we manage to see what the reporters don’t see?

John Vanston: Although newspaper staffs are being reduced, I believe many do a fine job covering the news and, thus, remain an excellent source for uncovering attractive minitrends. However, I believe your question touches on a larger issue.

The objective of a minitrend application program is not to uncover every emerging minitrend. Rather, it is to uncover a sample of minitrends that could provide promising business opportunities.

You have to decide what trends you want to look at. And there are a few parts to that. One is the customers’ standpoint. Another is yourself—you’ll want to make a commitment to choosing what you want to do. You’ll want to find something you like. Then you can use approaches, such as comparing different minitrend possibilities and examining the overall attractiveness of the minitrends to the business community and to you, to determine which are worth pursuing.

THE FUTURIST: Businesses are making a higher priority of interacting with customers and in getting customers to promote their products and services by word of mouth. What opportunities exist for a customer or audience base being a help toward finding minitrends? And how might a business pursue it?

Vanston: You’ve got to listen to the customer. There are a number of companies such as BazaarVoices in Austin, Texas, who work with companies to get feedback from customers. And strong software programs are available to consolidate, organize, and analyze the feedback to pick up emerging trends. This process can identify important minitrends. I think that many times, the customers are very happy to tell you where something can be improved.

However, the consolidation of the input may well hide some important ideas buried in the consolidation process. More careful examination of individual responses may uncover minitrends that will lead to products and services that will truly delight customers.

Social media also provide a great way to gather views, opinions, feedback, and more from your audience base. Uses of such tools as UserVoice, Socialmention, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and even LinkedIn Group, can be invaluable when looking for important minitrends.

THE FUTURIST: What role could minitrends identification play in federal government agencies, when they are deciding which research initiatives or business ventures they will assist? -How fair would it be for someone to suggest that Solyndra, for example, was a failure of the Energy Department to recognize minitrends going on in energy R&D? Or, on the other hand, are losing some funds on some unsuccessful ventures just inevitable?

Vanston: The federal government is anxious to support truly innovative projects. The Small Business Innovation Research program, the Small Business Technology Transfer program, and the In-Q-Tel program reflect this reality.

To be truly innovative and make the most of taxpayer’s funds, these organizations need tools to help them when making investment decisions. Incorporating proactive minitrends identification practices to the investment decision-making process increases the country’s ability to be on the cutting edge of technology.

Obviously, the commitment to truly innovative investment will vary between departments and their leaders. As you point out, projects on the forefront of development have a higher probability for failure. Traditionally, venture capitalists are willing to accept a failure rate of four out of five investments if the one success is big enough. Such a failure rate would be politically unacceptable for a government agency, but there should be some realization that pursuing innovative approaches may involve some risk.

THE FUTURIST: You encourage individuals and businesses to set up formal minitrends programs for searching, evaluating, and exploiting minitrends proactively. To what extent can businesses or individuals utilize their own in-house resources for this? And in what ways are professional futurists still indispensable? What role would the latter play in the process?

Vanston: A successful minitrends exploitation program is widespread, exciting, and in consonance with an organization’s present structure and culture. The key to a successful program is the development in the organization of a MiniTrends Mindset process. By incorporating some of the techniques mentioned in the MINITRENDS book such as following the leaders, examining limits, and analyzing frustrations, the leadership of the organization can encourage the work force to be alert to any opportunities offered when a new law is passed, a new business is launched, an important person makes an unexpected statement, or a new technical or scientific discovery is announced.

This takes fullest advantage of the imagination of the organization’s primary asset—its people. It provides an avenue for all to be more agile, effective, imaginative, and, ultimately, successful. Ideally, new ideas are given consideration and useful ideas rewarded. The key as I see it is not so much the need for new committees and complicated processes, but rather, a change in the culture of the organization.

THE FUTURIST: On another note, I see that you conducted the first annual MiniTrends Conference in October, 2012. What are you looking forward to the most regarding MiniTrends 2013? And what’s something that has changed or newly emerged since the MINITRENDS book’s publication? Any new minitrends catch your eye?

Vanston: In regard to our goals for the MiniTrends Conference, we began by reviewing our basic mindset. Our overall objective is to make the MiniTrends Concept as well-known as megatrends and to familiarize as large an audience as possible with how to find minitrends and how to convert recognized minitrends into successful business and government operations.

It allows people who are not futurists to be engaged in the future. If they can establish this minitrend mindset, they can see a lot of trends and opportunities that they might not otherwise uncover.

I see interesting emerging minitrends almost every day because I have a Minitrends Mindset. For one, I see increasing concern about the trauma of military personnel returning from combat areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan. I believe new technologies and techniques for reducing this physical, mental, and psychological trauma will receive a great deal of interest in the near future. I believe that recent developments in DNA mapping will offer some new approaches to wellness and health.

In regard to health care, the Affordable Care Act will result in some forty million more people being covered by health insurance and the level of health care available being raised. This will result in a marked increase in amount of care needed, and it will probably be impossible for the number of available doctors to meet this need. Therefore, it will be necessary to change the structure of the health care system and the way health care is delivered, such as increasing need for doctors’ assistants and changing responsibilities of these assistants.

Progress in increasing the limits in processing large and complex data sets or “big data” offer many minitrend opportunities. For example, Streetline and Miltel are beginning to take advantage of sensing aspects of the advances.

I also believe that there will be new life in the minitrends examples that we discuss in MINITRENDS. For example, I think that we have only begun to see development of Web 3.0 techniques. New uses for Virtual Worlds are continuing to be developed. Certainly, the continuing increases in life expectancy offer opportunity for imaginative innovation. On the other hand, there will be needs for addressing the health hazards of growing obesity in the population.

Recently, I visited the Neste Oil company in Finland. This company realizes that it can’t compete with the Exxons and Chevrons of the world in commodity areas. Therefore, it is committed to be on the forefront of new developments. Currently, they are engaged in research to produce very low-contaminant diesel fuel and gasoline from various hydrocarbon waste materials such as fish residue.

THE FUTURIST: It sounds like, based on developments that you’ve described, futuring itself is set to evolve in fundamental ways. Can you tell me more about this?

Vanston: Basically you look at futurists, and you see two different parts to the overall group. There’s the group that sees the big things that are happening and says ‘we may not like them, but we can do things to change them and make them better.’

There’s the other group that says ‘this is what’s going to happen. We’re not going to take a position on whether it’s good or bad. We’re just saying it’s what’s going to happen, and you can use it to do what you want to accomplish.’

I think that the traditional futurists are the first group—we have energy problems, health care problems, and so forth. They’re defining the “megatrends”—major shifts in social, technical, economic, and political realities.

However, I believe that within the major shifts are smaller minitrends. Futurists identifying and analyzing these smaller trends are the second group, and I think this second group is going to become more important because those are things that you can utilize to make your own plans and so forth.