Futuring

As we say goodbye to Endeavour and look to the future of space travel in the US and around the world, we wanted to take a moment to admire the futurist concepts that inspired NASA's space shuttle program.

Citizen engagement is essential to our fast-changing civilization. Politics could certainly use more empowerment of common citizens. So could innovative commerce, and even national defense relies on a robust citizenry. But one area with especially bright prospects, is crowd-sourced -- or individual participation in -- inventiveness and science.

Against the common belief that the success or failure of foresight entities is determined by the strategies they take or their management ability in running a business, I want to highlight that larger forces in the environment, typically unseen by managers, allow some foresight entities to succeed and others to fail.

As something of a grand finale to their 11-week, full-immersion Ruby on Rails class, our first graduating class of DaVinci Coders took the stage on Demo Day to talk about the projects they worked on.

Understanding long-term trends is an important tool in identifying opportunities and risks.  STEEP analysis looks at the world through five different perspectives – Social, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Political. 

The following are the major themes that are presently shaping the future...

The leading cause of car accidents is pretty obvious - its human error. The only way to truly make driving safer for everyone is to give the person behind the wheel more tools to drive safely - or even remove the human element altogether.

originally posted at The Trend and Foresight Blog

Most Americans still associate childhood with long days outside making up games in the backyard or exploring a playground or park. But for today’s young children, that’s not the reality anymore.

In the late 1980s I was still working at IBM, but had taken on a number of side projects to expand my horizons. One of those projects was working with the City of Denver on the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport. At the time Stapleton was still in operation, and the new airport, DIA, was little more than a politician’s dream with a bunch of drawings and reports being pitched to the media.