Posts from the 'hellofuture' Category

How To Pick Winning Ideas For Your Innovation Lab

Your innovation labs existential question: which idea is the billion-dollar idea?

The biggest problem I’ve seen companies struggle with, once they have launched a futurist innovation program, is not a low number of ideas. In fact, it’s usually the opposite.

After possible years of not providing any kind of systematized institutional method of capturing, collecting, reviewing, voting on, providing feedback on, and deciding on the fate of an idea, innovation labs are usually swamped with ideas once an effective program is launched. read more

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3 Reasons You Are Not Innovating

In a survey of CFOs completed by Robert Half last fall, the main reasons why innovation is floundering comes down to three main points:

Bureaucracy

By this, we mean the long and convoluted process many companies use in order to process (although it sometimes feels like squash) innovative new ideas. read more

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The Future of Shopping: Are you Ready for Conversational Commerce?

Welcome to the Future of Shopping. Are you Ready For It?

Lately, we’ve looked out at the near future and determined that there are several huge sociological, economic and technological shifts which are occurring in the world which are starting to affect our customers almost immediately. To that end, we have developed a set of strategies and technologies which our customers can implement today, to be prepared for tomorrow. read more

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6 Ways You Too Can Build the Next Snapchat

Can You Build The Next Snapchat?

A few weeks ago, SNAP – the parent company of Snapchat, went IPO. It’s the first tech IPO in a long time and it nearly doubled in price, then settled back down to slightly over its offering price, netting the founders about $5B each (as of this writing) read more

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This Is Not The Post You Are Looking For…

Enough With The Good Feels. GooFMeLT Is Making Us Post Crap.

About an hour ago, I finished writing an article for thinkfuture pulse and pressed schedule to schedule it for tomorrow at 6 am my time, the normal time I publish. As I was writing the post, I thought to myself – is this my best work? I kept writing and writing and writing, reworking and reworking it, asking myself over and over again – is this my best work – does it bring my readers any value? Even as I was thinking that and writing that, read more

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Forget VR and AR: Focus On Manipulated Reality (MR) Instead

What Will Reality Be?

How do you predict the future?

There are many ways, of course, but here are two which seems to work well for some things:

  1. You take something that currently exists today and extend it out in the future, then think about that world, for example, right now, there are a few autonomous vehicles out there – you just think of a time when all vehicles are autonomous, because it will happen, we just don’t know when. All you have to do then is think about that world, to project your mind into a world where all vehicles are autonomous. What kind of world will that be?
  2. You look at the past and look for repeating patterns. Find a pattern, a cycle which has repeated itself over time, then apply that pattern to a new domain, which should reveal the next logical step in that domain.

Here is how I see things in the “reality” space.

The Oculus Rift is finally on sale, well on pre-order, for about $600. You need that, plus a fairly high-end gaming PC in order to take full advantage of the full experience. If it’s as good as they say it is (I’ve been in a number of places where the line to try it out was so crazy long that I never had the time to try it myself) then I’m sure that it will be awesome. So everyone is talking Virtual Reality as the next hot space, and that it’s a complete game changer. Personally, I don’t think so, VR is actually the precursor to a new form of Augmented Reality. read more

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15 Ways to Wreck Your Innovation Program

How Wreckable Is Your Innovation Program

There are probably a few hundred ways in which to wreck your internal innovation program, so it took me a while to distil this down to a few of the most important ones. I also talked to a number of other innovation executives and got some great insights. read more

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The Need for Creativity Warriors

I’m a Creativity Warrior

Over the past few years, I called myself a Creativity Architect, then Creativity Agent, then Creativity Actuator.  During that time, I got a broader view of the wobbly state of creativity of individuals and in business, and decided those titles were insufficient to represent my mission and justify my tag line “When Creativity Is Unlocked, Extraordinary Happens.” I realized it will take a warrior mindset to unlock creativity and enable extraordinary to happen; then it will be fun and easy and remarkable! read more

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Startups, Innovation and The Future

Thinking About the Future Leads To Startups and Innovation

We get this question a lot – why do you focus on these three things on your blog? Well, if you ask me, innovation is all about attempting to predict the future – looking at the market, at trends, both mega and micro, and coming up with high level scenarios to determine the state of the world, the market and the company itself in that future. We look at startups because typically they have a lot to teach these enterprises: speed of development, innovative ideas, new technologies, etc. – we look at these startups not only as possible acquisition targets (although personally I prefer innovating from within, I understand a balanced innovation program of both internal innovation and external innovation – or even tapping into open innovation, is probably the best solution) we also look at their business models to determine if any of it can be applied within the organization. For example, are there places within the organization which could be better served with a more of a Lean Startup model, or some of its elements? Would we be able to bring more innovation into a specific process by introducing more of an agile methodology into the process? read more

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