Future Trends

Every week for the last year and a half our team has produced a short video that highlights a future trend or disruptive force that could change the world. The invitation to you and your team is to watch this video and imagine how it might impact your industry, your...

Today’s Throw Forward Thursday is pre-recorded, I've actually been in hospital myself, but the content is strangely appropriate as we consider how to proactively and preventatively take care of ourselves. We don't have to jump too far into the future to imagine a...

In 2021, a Dutch supermarket chain, Jumbo, created a special checkout line - it was designed to be slower and give people the opportunity to chat with each other and the cashier. It has received rave reviews, and Jumbo is now rolling it out to all their stores. Part...

As we spend this last week of December battling to remember what day of the week it is, and finally finishing off the leftovers from our Christmas meal, here's a quick thought about food in the future. We will definitely be able to get more and more nutrients from...

We know that smart glasses, which include VR, AR and XR functionality and heads up displays are coming. But what if those glasses could also look back at us, and especially assess our physical and emotional state using biometric feedback from our eyes? TRANSCRIPT This...

We've talked about alternative and green energy solutions before on Throw Forward Thursday (Episode 6 and Episode 24). Today, we look not at the future but at something that happened last week as we got proof that nuclear fusion is possible. We knew it theoretically...

Our weekly series into future trends suggests that we might have dedicated 3D print shops, or maybe 3D printers in local building supplies stores that will be able to print out any 3D design for you overnight. A few decades from now we will probably all have...

This week we imagine a future where restorative justice and rehabilitation takes precedence over retribution and the prison-industrial complex. It's a dream, that doesn't imagine any criminals (we wish), but rather a different way of dealing with them. Throw Forward...

Sometime very soon, we need to change our view of what "old age" looks like, and especially change what type of facilities we think older people will be happy living in. The simple version is that we need tech-enabled smart homes for seniors. Watch the video for some...

Imagine a future where grandparents are younger (or at least appear younger because they're healthier and living longer), where they get grandparent leave from their companies, and where we combine child and senior care in the same facilities. This is a wonderful...

Every day, humans produce 2.4 quintillion bytes of data, and this doubles every two years or so at the moment. Most of this is now stored in "the cloud", which might be invisible to us, but is actually in massive data warehouses all around the world. If this continues...

Imagine using the technologies we are currently developing to help us with voice recognition and real-time translation to be able to understand what animals are saying, and even talking to them in their own languages? This is a very real possibility by the 2040s. What...

About the only reason to pay for a premium TV subscription these days is live sport. If you're a fan, you'll know the value of live sporting events. But come with me to the future - hopefully not too many years away - when live sports include a variety of immersive...

In last week's episode I shared our TIDES Model of Disruptive Change as a tool you can use to know WHAT to look for when you're looking at future trends. This week, we talk about WHERE you can look for evidence, examples and glimpses of the future. It's all about...

This is a special edition of Throw Forward Thursday, answering a question sent to us: "Where do you get all your ideas?" This episode I talk about our team's TIDES model of disruptive change, that helps us decide what to look for. These are the five most disruptive...

Our story starts 20 years after a fungal infection wiped out the world's frogs. It continues today as we see a resurgence in malaria and other tropical diseases because the frogs are not eating insects. And we realise that this is an all-too-familiar story of how our...

We all know that the world has a huge problem with water. We don't have enough of it in the places we need it. There are at least three solutions that could change this and could be available by the middle of this century: we could make water, seed clouds, and scale...

I don't know how far into the future we need to go before we find the end of emails, but in my opinion, it can't come soon enough. Emails need to go the same way as faxes, telegrams and telexes. It won't happen with one single replacement solution, but rather with...

More people - especially young people - around the world are choosing not to get married, not to have long-term relationships, not to have children, and to have less sex. No, it's not the time of free "drug, sex and rock 'n' roll" anymore. We are not predicting the...

We use sand for pretty much everything we can see around us - including the glass in the screen you're watching this on. And we are running out of sand. This is a bigger issue than you probably realise, and about as important as running out of water will be for our...