World Future Society 2005 Conference Volume--Executive Summaries

Foresight, Innovation, and Strategy:
Toward a Wiser Future

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Executive Summaries

Part 1: Innovation and Impact

Discerning the Contours of the Emerging Super-Paradigm
by Jens Jerndal
The purpose of this essay is to provide a tool for predicting the way of the future by identifying the most significant past and present trends and phenomena that clearly characterize and shape the now emerging super-paradigm. Once we have done so, we are better equipped to orient ourselves in time, judge in which direction we are heading, and predict which ones of present phenomena and trends are likely to continue and prosper and which ones do not have what it takes to survive and flourish in the changed climate of the new super-paradigm.

Seeing how the changes follow a cyclic pattern, we will also be able to predict approximate turning points in the evolution of the emerging paradigm and in the prevailing general mood.

Looking beyond Today’s Genetic Engineering
by Clifton E. Anderson
Capable of altering the genetic properties of all forms of life, genetic engineering is a world-changing revolutionary force. While there is still time, a global strategy needs to be worked out—a working plan directed toward keeping biotechnology within safe, manageable limits. Ecological safety is a key issue. Despite their present imperfections, genetically modified crops could become environmentally friendly, transformed by scientists who share ecocentric goals. Present-day problems should not obscure the possibilities of a more productive, less-polluted world—a highly creative milieu in which genetic engineering will play a significant role. Many difficulties may impede our passage to this utopia. Injustice and insensitivity to others’ needs are obstacles to progress. We need better rules concerning patents and other economic matters. We need a clear realization that the world is one and that the industrialized North must appreciate and assist the developing South. We must avoid any thinking that is fixated and inflexible, all philosophies that are deterministic—including genetic determinism. To build a society in better touch with its own environment, we should experiment with bioregionalism and other constructive, challenging ideas.

Protecting New Inventions in Nanomedicine
by Raj Bawa and S.R. Bawa
New paradigms are shrinking our world. Tiny is in, and patents will be essential for success in nanomedicine. In fact, patents are already shaping the nascent and rapidly evolving field of nanomedicine. A swarm of patent applications pertaining to nanomedicine are headed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. As companies develop products and processes and begin to seek commercial applications for their inventions, securing valid and defensible patent protection will be vital to their long-term survival. As we enter the "golden era" of medicine, or nanomedicine, in the next decade, with the field maturing and the promised breakthroughs accruing, patents will generate licensing revenue, provide leverage in deals and mergers, and reduce the likelihood of infringement. Since development of nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine-related products is extremely research-intensive, without the market exclusivity offered by a U.S. patent, development of these products and their commercial viability in the marketplace will be significantly hampered. This paper highlights critical issues relating to nanomedicine patenting. Effects of the "nanopatent land grab" that is under way in nanomedicine by "patent prospectors" is examined, as startups and corporations compete to lock up broad patents in these critical early days. Since nanomedicine is multidisciplinary in nature, patenting here poses both unique opportunities as well as challenges. While patents are being sought more actively and enforced more vigorously, the entire patent system is under greater scrutiny and strain, with the Patent Office continuing to struggle with evaluating nanomedicine-related patent applications.

The Superlongevity Revolution: The Extended Life Span Phenomenon and Its Impacts on Work and Family
by Michael G. Zey
The human species is in the early phases of the Superlongevity Revolution, the expansion of the average human life span into the hundreds and beyond. Average life expectancy across the globe has increased dramatically over the last century. The scientific innovations that will extend life—biotechnology, bionics, nanotechnology, tissue regeneration, stem-cell research, and cloning—will also enable people to remain physically "young," healthy, and productive for most of their lives. This paper examines how this demographic phenomenon will impact work, marriage, career, retirement, and leisure patterns. It also explores strategies that society and individuals can pursue to adapt to these changes.

Part 2: Science, Spirit, Body, Mind

Religion, Science, and Immortality
by José Luis Cordeiro
The quest for immortality has been the most fundamental existential problem for Homo sapiens since the species became conscious of its own mortality. Humans, unlike other animals, have been conscious of life and death since prerecorded history. The early hominids used religious ideas as their only way to think about physical mortality and spiritual immortality. To deal with the problem of death, organized religions created the concepts of resurrection and reincarnation, but now other explanations and solutions are possible.

The new approach is based on science and not religion, on physics and not metaphysics, on reason and not faith, on natural and not supernatural views. Modern science is not just concerned with the possibility of life after death. We are now looking for ways to prevent death and to extend our physical or material life indefinitely. From a scientific point of view, death is the termination of life, so immortality would be life’s ultimate achievement. When the first multicellular organisms appeared, immortality was their objective; when intelligence evolved, immortality was its goal; and now, technology shows the potential to finally make it happen.

The Coming Conflict between Religion and Cognitive Science
by William Sims Bainbridge
Cognitive science immediately threatens religious faith in two ways: by explaining away religion as an error resulting from accidents in the evolutionary history of the human nervous system and by failing to find evidence that humans possess souls. Over the coming decades, information technology may undercut people’s need for religion by offering practical forms of cyberimmortality (CI). The plausibility of religion may also be eroded by the coming unification of science and the associated convergence of the "NBIC" technologies: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based on cognitive science. Religion’s response could be to join with other reactionary forces in society to halt scientific progress.

Religious Paradigm Updates for the Infotech Age
by Don C. Davis
We have crossed a great divide in which science and technology now hold greater promise of helping us understand the working dynamics of the world and life than does religion.

Traditional religious paradigms are running significantly behind the information and technology base of our time.

Three paradigm shifts are needed for the infotech age:
1. Our faith should be so informed by dependable information now available through scientific research that it makes sense.
2. The gifts of technology that have increased our potential to build a better future make us highly accountable for our place in history.
3. Worship experiences should reflect all the scope of human learning and exploration that have changed our paradigms of God and people. Worship can be a creative, future-oriented identify focus in which we adjust our values and vision.

Our world has changed. We can no longer live as though we have not left an old world behind and arrived in a new world of the infotech age. Every advance in science and technology enables us to see ourselves in new ways and gives us increasing potential to create the greatest era of history the human family has ever known.

Part 3: Planetary Foresight and Strategy

Strategy for the Food-Security Challenge

by Lester R. Brown

The challenges to ensure future food security are complex, and the efforts required to reverse the trends undermining it are enormous. Halting the advancing deserts in China, arresting the fall of water tables in India, and reversing the rise in carbon emissions in the United States are all essential to future world food security. Each of these efforts will require strong leadership, international cooperation, interagency coordination, multidisciplinary thinking, and a new initiative that demands a wartime sense of urgency. Without this, food security could quickly eclipse terrorism as the overriding concern of future governments.

The Biggest Consumption Boom Ever: New Consumers and the Influence of Affluence on the Environment
by Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent
China and India are currently among the fastest-growing economies in the world, and, while enormous economic inequalities remain, many of their people are climbing out of poverty. There are more than 1 billion such new consumers in 17 developing and three transition nations with sufficient affluence to begin to enjoy middle-class lifestyles, including buying cars, eating meat regularly, and using many household appliances or electronics. The path established by long-developed nations, such as the United States, of overusing limited natural resources is unsustainable. All countries need to move toward sustainable consumption—not least those in the developed world who have thus far set a trend of unsustainable consumption.

Life Insurance for the Globe
by J. Steven Lovink
Humanity’s quest for sustainability hinges on its ability to find innovative ways and means to shrink its Ecological Footprint (i.e., to live well within the reality of one planet) and share the earth’s common assets equitably with fellow citizens from around the world.

The combination of Ecological Footprint metrics, Shrink & Share, and Eco-Insurance—a proposed life insurance policy framework for the planet—yields a practical toolbox for decision makers in government, the private sector, NGOs, multilateral organizations, academia, and global citizens anywhere to better manage mounting risks to environmental, economic, and human security. The approach enables stakeholders to visualize different futures that can be used to evaluate and agree on the adoption of appropriate targets for a successful transition to a sustainable future.

International negotiations on mandatory targets are complex and time-consuming. Since time is of the essence, serious consideration should be given to initiate voluntary targets and investment strategies that would realize "One Planet Living" by 2050.

Three Middle East Peace Scenarios
by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon
Three normative scenarios provide new stories for the Middle East. They were created through a process developed by the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University, involving an international panel of several hundred participants. The scenarios are: (1) Water Works: The trigger to an evolving peace is the initial cooperation that develops into increasing trust as the two sides focus on extending the supply of water available to both. (2) Open City: Religious leaders take action to solve the Jerusalem problem, and this foundation leads to an evolving overall peace. (3) Dove: A grassroots peace movement in Israel appears, spreads, and leads to peace.

Part 4: Organizations and Change

Decision-Making Processes in Cyberspace
by Wim J. de Ridder
A new social order is coming under the influence of citizens who are organizing themselves in networks. This gives rise to a new elite, which is gaining a great deal of power. Subsequently, it will be established that futures research can exert a great deal of influence on decision-making processes in which citizens play a role.

In this field, scenarios may have an important function, especially in the case of interactive networks that have been put together by people who have collectively experienced a flow of understanding and enthusiasm. Their images of the future are powerful elements in negotiations, because these pictures are built independently of the existing negotiating parties. Formal negotiations are increasingly being replaced by negotiating processes with self-appointed stakeholders. Virtual negotiations with (almost) unknown actors are also making their appearance.

The paper continues with a description of a study made at the regional level in the Netherlands. The results support the hypothesis that a group of citizens can create their own future by making good use of contributions made by futurologists.

"Extra-Preneurship": Reinventing Enterprise for the Information Age
by David Pearce Snyder
The U.S. Labor Department’s current 10-year projections of the changing makeup of the U.S. economy and labor market give no indication of an emerging new class of high-value-adding middle-income jobs to replace the millions of median-wage positions that have been—and continue to be—eliminated from the workplace by automation, info-mation, and globalization. The historic record of previous technoeconomic revolutions makes it clear that the rising productivity and broadening prosperity of the maturing industrial economies over the past 300 years has not been due simply to the introduction of ever more powerful physical technologies, but has also required the invention of complementary social technologies (institutions). A new organization of employment is proposed as a means of enabling basically skilled workers to use online groupware to add more value in all current and future rank-and-file jobs.

Institutional Change: Transforming the Structures of Society
by William E. Halal
Institutional change differs from organizational change by focusing on entire classes of organizations that form the structure of society—business, government, education, the military, health care, etc. This paper summarizes the views of prominent authorities to outline how institutions are now being transformed by the onset of a knowledge-based global economy. Examples of institutional change are examined, and forecasts are offered to sketch out how major institutions are likely to evolve in the years ahead.

Integrating Futures Studies in Public Policy Making
by Martijn van der Steen
Futurists can add much value to public policy making. However, the reality is that futuring is not of much importance in the average process of public policy making. This paper investigates the question of whether or not futurists can add more value to the quality of public policy than they are doing currently, and in what way we can integrate future-orientation in public policy making and in political debate. We analyze by what mechanisms future-orientation gets lost in the process of policy making and how it can be brought back in on a more regular and permanent basis. We argue that not only will this produce better policy, but it will also enable policy makers (both civil servants and politicians) to learn from experiences and adapt more quickly and proactively to changing circumstances.

Corporate Foresight: The European Experience
by Andreas Neef and Cornelia Daheim
A growing number of the most successful businesses recognize the necessity of long-term thinking despite having to act on a short-term basis. In the last few years, corporate foresight in Europe has grown more widespread as well as more professional and diverse. An overview of current developments in Europe shows there is a new orientation toward combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies, with qualitative methods gaining ground, and, more importantly, toward shifting the focus from technology and economic factors to more consideration of societal issues. In answer to the challenges corporate foresight faces today, the "5 C Model of Corporate Foresight" underlines that five main factors need special attention in order to successfully integrate corporate foresight into strategy and innovation processes: topical, methodological, and operational competence; creativity; communication; cooperation; and continuity.

Part 5: Foresight and Futuring

The Value of Future Consciousness
by Tom Lombardo
Future consciousness—the psychological abilities, processes, and experiences that humans use in order to understand the future—includes foresight, goal setting, planning, decision making, problem solving, and other key skills vital to our psychological health and future well-being. Future consciousness has evolved throughout human history, and we must continue to expand this capacity in order to thrive in a world of change. This paper examines the ethical, philosophical, cognitive, and pragmatic features of future consciousness.

Strategic Planning Revisited: A Futures Perspective
by Maree Conway
Traditional strategic-planning processes involve a large amount of money, time, and effort, yet often fail to live up to expectations. Recent literature emphasizing implementation as the crucial element of successful strategy suggests that "bad" implementation can be a cause of failure, rather than the process of developing strategy itself. A futures perspective on planning suggests that the process for developing strategy and associated plans is a success factor that is overlooked. Many organizations lack a systematic approach to developing an understanding of future options to underpin strategy development. Instead, strategy is based primarily on information about the past and present. By reconceptualizing the strategic-planning process as a broader, three-stage model of thinking, decision making, and implementation, it is possible to find a "home" for thinking about the future in strategy development. This paper explores how futures approaches might be used routinely in traditional strategy development and planning processes in order to better prepare organizations for the uncertainty of the future.

Integral Futures: A New Era for Futures Practitioners
by Richard A. Slaughter
Early futures practitioners sought to understand and address changes that they perceived in the external, visible, world. Yet, it also became clear that underlying the latter are two other, more-intangible worlds—those of "interior human development" and "interior cultural development," both of which have multiple implications for futures studies and applied foresight. As our understanding and knowledge of these domains has grown, so futures methods and approaches that that openly acknowledge them have emerged. This paper summarizes a 40-year process of development that unifies our understanding across interior and exterior domains. It is a process that is generating new futures methodologies and new options for placing the discipline on a more secure and productive basis.

Part 6: Futuring Case Studies

Future Innovation through Design
by Bengt-Arne Vedin
Design is evolving into a force for innovation of equal importance to technology push or demand pull. Industrial design is more than styling. It is also concerned more with end users than with blueprints for manufacturing. The industrial designer’s charter is threefold: (1) taking the end user’s view, adapting the product (service, function) not just to needs and demands but also to allow for ease of use; (2) offering a truly comprehensive approach to the functionalities involved during the entire product life; and (3) styling, including interaction and information design and symbolic values.

Design allows for complexity to be translated into innovative features that are easy to understand and use. An overall design philosophy, possibly through strategy design that includes interaction and information design, may generate coherence to a company’s offer, a user’s desktop, or a factory’s shop floor. Sometimes designers are involved in redesigning an organization to increase its innovativeness; sometimes they are called upon to design an entire value chain. In several ways, the future is created through those three interdependent industrial design approaches.

Talk 24 Assist: A Case Study in Practical Futures
by Stephen Aguilar-Millan
The purpose of this essay is to establish a case for micro-futures, to examine the interface between futures studies and corporate strategy, and to highlight the significant trends facing small business out to 2020. Drawing upon research in the United Kingdom, the essay examines the long-term trends facing small business. By means of a case study, it describes how this research can be used to devise a corporate strategy and business model to help the small business become future ready. In this way, we hope to help futures studies become more relevant to small businesses.

The Future of Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry
by Jay Herson
The number of applications by pharmaceutical firms to regulatory agencies for new molecular entities to treat disease has been in decline worldwide since 1997. This downward trend has taken place despite increased research in the medical sciences and efforts by Western regulatory agencies to harmonize requirements and the application process. This stagnation is attributed to increased cost of development and the use of development methods that have not kept the pace with medical research. It is increasingly difficult to predict the success of a drug candidate or to control development cost. This paper reviews several recent trends and creates scenarios that explain how innovation can be made more efficient and less risky. The solutions are driven by the ability of venture capitalists to think outside the box to reduce their own investment risks, by benefits of globalization, by the research and development resources in developing countries, and by the ability of government laboratories worldwide to form research and development consortia to perform joint development and reduce cost and risk to any one firm.

Redesigning UTA: The Creation of a 21st-Century Transit Organization
by Drusilla Copeland
This paper recounts the journey of Utah Transit Authority during the last decade of the twentieth century. The objective of this redesign effort was to become more responsive to the transit needs of Utah’s rapidly growing Wasatch Front region and to provide a better work experience for UTA employees. In this paper the reader will find some of the reasons for the journey, the people and the methods used to bring about this transformation, and some of the early results. This is not your parents’ Transit Authority.

Part 7: Learning for Tomorrow

Sparta and Athens
by Thierry Groussin and Manfred Mack
We want to put forward the hypothesis that the type of engineering that has now to be developed is not only technological, chemical, or mechanical, but primarily social and psychological. We have chosen to present an experience that significantly exemplifies such a dynamic. In the authors’ opinion, this experience is not a sheer pedagogical innovation: It is a social innovation, a kind of model for the future, a process for creating a new economy and a new society.

An Educational Approach for an Era of Profound Technological Change
by Barton Kunstler
Society’s learning structures have always been closely linked to its dominant technologies. A progressive taxonomy of technological complexity begins with Level 1, basic tools with only one moving part, such as a spear, through succeeding "levels" culminating in the Level 5 technology of the computer age. Now, we are on the verge of Level 6, a major technological transformation in which the mind itself will interface directly with other minds and with computers. Yet our educational systems are still geared largely to Level 2 and 3 technologies. Nine domains of educational activity can prepare learners of all types for this era of profound technological change. The domains include ways to train the imagination, sharpen perception, and build strategic and analytic skills so that areas of the brain, generally dormant in both educational and professional settings, are awakened and fully utilized. Other domains develop even more profound methods of mental training, shift the institutional and disciplinary bases in which learning currently takes place, deepens and humanizes learning by a focus on interpretive activities, and trains learners to push the limits of their thinking. The methods are ultimately applicable to all subjects, including science, math, and "techne"—artisanry, engineering, design, and invention—and to the envisioning and development of values-driven communities, organizations, and educational institutions.

Futuristics in K-12 Classrooms: Riding an Educational Third Wave
by Arthur B. Shostak
Schools could be redesigned with futures studies as a meta-curriculum. This would refocus all traditional school subject matter—arts and sciences, business and industrial arts—to emphasize big-picture and systems thinking and creative problem solving, along with sharpening students’ skills in specialized futures techniques such as cross-impact analysis, trend extrapolation, and technological forecasting. Futurists can play a special and even decisive role in helping to promote this overdue educational gain.

Unchaining Prometheus: Using Standards and Learning Tech to Enhance Futures Thinking
by Jonathon J. Richter
As our modern world becomes increasingly frantic, frenzied, and fragmented, the pressing need for dynamic, authentic assessment tools and personal methods to visualize and reflect on the effectiveness of our ability to learn and adapt to change is growing geometrically. Educators, planners, developers, and institutional and community leaders are grasping for the development of innovative frameworks within which the contexts of various strategies, plans, and activities—as well as people’s responses to them—may be systematically and actively examined. While technologies remain a primary driver in the development of change dynamics across a host of dimensions within our lives, this paper proposes that the focused, purposeful, and ubiquitous use of learning technologies—particularly standards-based digital portfolios, or e-portfolios—may also enhance the future-focused activities of individuals, organizations, and communities. By combining developmentally appropriate future-focused educational standards and effective teaching strategies to develop a learner’s consciousness of the future within the milieu of the e-portfolio, human learning organizations may discover a particularly powerful tool in breaking free of the "imprisonment of the present."

Part 8: Wisdom for the Ages

The Future of Great Ideas: Team Collaboration in Basic Science
by Alex Pavlak
The nature of man’s intellectual progress during the second half of the twentieth century is substantially different from our progress between 1850 and 1950. Our progress has become evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. We are progressing through small, incremental steps rather than through great insightful leaps by heroic genius.

Have we reached John Horgan’s "End of Science," or has science just become too difficult for humans? This paper is based on the view that there is plenty of undiscovered opportunity. But the cutting edge of science has become so multidisciplinary that no one person can grasp all aspects and nuances of a whole field in the same sense that Einstein understood all aspects of space and time. If man is going to continue to progress, we need to change our methods. We need to learn how to use multidisciplinary expert teams to think more effectively.

The Future Starts Yesterday: Preserving Temporal Diversity and Other Futures for the Past
by Lane Jennings
Building the future need not mean abandoning the past. Like exploring alternative futures, the emerging field of alternative history can help futurists spot where different choices might have succeeded better. Other ways futurists can use the past include:
• Study: Realizing how much change has already occurred makes today’s crises seem less daunting.
• Preservation: Safeguarding historic sites and natural resources saves elements of the past for future generations. Yet today’s "treasures" may burden our descendants.
• Experience: Trained interpreters, experimental archaeologists, and reenactors help individuals sample life and work in another era. This can clarify our ancestors’ motives and values and recover neglected tools and wisdom.
• Extension: Artists often create new works using old methods. So can scientists and other professionals. Testing traditional medicine against modern Western norms reveals that innovation is not always progress. Volunteers using reconstructed "period" equipment might solve some problems better than conventional for-profit R&D.

Past and future coexist. People futurize the way they age—at different rates and toward different endings. Futurists must either use the past and welcome competing values in a sustainable world or promote a lockstep future where dissenters have no place.

The Road from Delphi
by Stephen Bertman
American culture is being shaped by the combined effect of seven challenging social and psychological forces: the influence of materialism, the seduction of the senses, the power of technology, the impact of speed, the increase in artificiality, the loss of memory, and the erosion of security. Our deliberate response to these challenges can define America’s future.

How Values Shape the Future
by Herbert London
Values serve the advancement of societies by connecting individuals with the larger community. This connection is made via "mediating institutions" such as the family, church, and schools. When these institutions break down, as is happening today, the values they support are compromised. In the United States, the preeminence of individual autonomy over community needs has contributed to this breakdown, and a reassertion of the importance of public virtue is needed.

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Note: Foresight, Innovation, and Strategy is free for attendees of the World Future Society's 2005 annual meeting. Institutional and Comprehensive Professional Members of the World Future Society will also receive a complimentary copy of the volume. For more information about the conference and membership programs, visit www.wfs.org.

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