The White House(June 2002): As each cabinet member marched in to describe his or her key challenges in such areas as education, energy, secutiry and healthcare, the very nature of their comments made it apparent thta a transformation was under way. They brought up the inability of computer databases to work together, the lack of trained people to inspect the nation's(nation in this entire book is USA) food supply, the immensity of secutiry issues and the work yet to be done to protect the nation.
I have become increasingly concerned that we are not moving fast enough to make the change essential to better manage our future. This may be due to the complex changes looming in the future that escape the capacity of most of our leaders in government to fully understand. We need to move faster to avoid risk and invest in opportunity.

THE TOP TEN TRENDS OF THE EXTREME FUTURE

Fueling the future (energy crisis)
The Innovation Economy (innovation as driving force)
The Next Workforce
Longevity Medicine
Weird science
Securing the Future
The Future of Globalisation: cultures in collision
The Future of climate change
The Future of individual
The Future of America and China

General electric, IBM, UPS(the logistics one from flat world), Motorola, Fujitsu, Philips, MasterCard <--> Institute for Global Future
Important and ordinary trends
Lessons from the future: ...observing what early stage innovations they(large companies around the world) are spending billions on. what is lab today is in the marketplace tomorrow.

Fueling the Future

Less energy(energy in general. oil is just where we get it from right now) will be a drag on GDP.
Governments in China and elsewhere are today locking up future oil reserves in the ground. The Chinese have contracted with the South Americans and Africans for future oil supplies reaching deep into the twenty-first centry.They are defending against Japanese rights to oil-potential deposits in the sea.
The Eurepoeans and Japanese have invested wisely for energy independent future based on nuclear technology and alternative energy like wind. Alternative enrgy in Germany alone account for more than 12% of overall energy. By 2020, this approach to diversifying their energy mix with nuclear energy will prove to be strategically smart.
...energy expenses for business and consumers will increase significantly. Access to energy will define competitive advantage in business. Put another way, energy issues will become central issue to comsumers, businesses and governments.

Finding Prosperity: The Innovation Economy

Already, every economy is deeply affected by innovation. Those effects will multiply over next years. The innovation economy forecasted here is a new direction. No longer based solely on governance, capital, talent, population and natural resources, the innovation economy is based on one thing more - personal access to radical innovation. Without radical innovation, traditional factors that determine the success of an economy such as productivity, progress and growth will not be enough. The central opportunity that innovation economy offer to individual is wealth creation on a scale never seen before.
Innovation crease new value, growth, solutions, profits, increased market share, and return-on-investment. every effort withing a capitalistic system that creates value that people will pay for qualifies. An inovation that proves its value is adopted and accepted by the marketplace or society. If a critical mass of customers is willing and able to pay for your innovation, it is a success.
The increased capacity for innovation and invention in areas ranging from biotech to nanoscience will emerge faster than at any time in the past. As dramatic as the industrial revolution seemed at the time, its pace will have been glacial in comparison.

Democracy Drives Innovation: innovation drives prosperity. prosperity enables productive, open societies.
industries in innovation economy,
Pharma/Health
Energy
Manufacturing
Communications
Transportation
Security
Entertainment Media
Education and Learning
Knowledge Engineering
Smart Materials


The building blocks and power tools of the innovation economy: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology and Networks, Neurotechnology
...IBM alone licenses thousands of patents worth millions of dollars every year. NASA and many universities have file cabinates filled with undeveloped patents. This futures market could capture and efficiently bring together buyers and sellers of innovative ideas to make business.
Todays logistics companies (walmart, ups) running global supply chains, provide more than just the products they distribute for leading brands. They often assembles the products and even produce some parts providing end to end solutino world wide. (for more info see ups example from flat world)
With only six billion people on the planet today, and about one billion on the Internet, the global supply chain is straining to keep up with business and consumer demand. Add another two to three billion consumers and businesses and you can begin to see the challenges.
Leaders often do not know what is next, yet they control the investment dollars that can create or stifle innovations and therefore bring or do not bring new products to market.

The Future of the Workforce

Talent, skilled human capital, innovative high tech savy people independent of any nation will be the lifeblood of the future organization.
The Next Workforce
Entire nations may encounter an inability to build sustainable society in the future due to a lack of talent, even a lack of population to join the workforce. According to U.S. bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. workforce will lose the skills and knowledge of forty-six million college educated baby boomers, who will retire over the next twenty years. They are not being replaced, at least domestically. This will become a crisis, not just in the U.S. but in Europe as well. Unless we drastically open the doors to immigration to offset low fertility and low productivity, quality of life will decline.

The central population dynamic over the next decade will be the aging baby boomers from weestern nations and the youth boomers in the developing nations of Asia, the middle est, and africa. There is a complementatry demographic here that might offset the decline of the baby boomers as they retire and the rise of the youth boomers as they enter the workforce: an exchange of almost eighty to one hundred million people from one part of the planet to the other, which might help address the coming talent and skills gap.
Globalisation changes: Increased skills of foreign workers, some with even more advanced skills that those of U.S. workers, will drive this trend in the future. Outsourcing will continue to be mecessary strategy as companies compete for talent in hypercompetitive global innovation economy.

The Hunt for Human Resources Workers skilled in the challenges and issue of the modern business world who are strong on innovation, multiculturally aware, speak a foreign language, will be highly prized assets in a world of more complexity chaos and uncertainity.
Workforce shortages will be highest among managers and skilled employees in tech, science and other innovation and service jobs.

Two workforce Futures Japan is not as open to immigration as the United states. The Japnese rather than opening their society to foreigners, are heavily investing in high technology and robots for a new cybernetic society. This is why the most innovative research in japan is about replacing people in the future. With foresight, increased immigration could offset dropping fertility rates in U.S. and Europe.

Outliving the Future: Longevity Medicine

Industy/business, hungry to tap into market of bilions of consumers eaget to enhance their health and extend their lives.
keyword: individual's right to enhancement.
what we call modern medicine in quite primitive and can accomplish only so much until we invent new tools. Doctors are waiting for the next generation of innovation tools that will enable them to do more to heal, restore and prevent disease.
Modern medicine is only 150 years old. If you look at the time line of medicine, we are only a few inches away from doctors offering patients wooden paddles to bite down on as the only palliative for pain.
Today we are living longer than any humans have lived on the planet. If you take average life span throughout human history, it would be about eighteen. Socrates was brilliant and dead before thirty-five. Hanibal led armies at twenty-two.
The convergence of pharma, biotech and nanotech industries will form the biggest global marketplace with one underlying theme: life extension.

When it comes to the market for health-enhancement products and services, there is little doubt that it will cater to a global consumer. As billion of dollars more are invested world wide, products will get closer to market.

Tomorrow's Climate

Global Tensions: The struggle between the developed and undeveloped nations of the world clearly exposes a global conflict that will be visited over and again as we grapple with threats to environment in future. More of these conflicts between the needs of nations and the need to protect the environment are coming.
Mismatch between local and global need is paramount to the issue of climate that will shape 21st century and beyond. Cultural clashes over climate and productivity, over food and land, over water and oceans, will persist as the global competition for scare resources defines the future existence of those who have and those who have not.
Getting the balance right between secutiry and climate, environmental health and industrial productivity pollution and quality of life will shape what the 21st century will look like.
China's 2 billion stomachs: rotting vegetables and fruits are a reminder that the capacity for eliminating hunger requires both the power to grow food and access to the logistics critical to distribute it.
Clean Tech Market: Leave it to business to figure out a new way to monetize pollution and environmental disaster. Get ready to save the future and make a buck. sounds like good marketing message.
Clean tech is a catchall industry that combines all clean technologies. This fast-growing idustry is a product of the convergence of the envirionmental, technologiecal, and scintific industries all with one design-a cleaner safer world.
Sustainable Investing: Investing in companies that are developing sustainable innovations that can better protect the environment will be an uptrand in the future. Companies in the future will gain a competitive advantage from haveing green corporate strategies that can attract both investors and customers.
Global Management for Nine Billion: global management of nine billion people who demand health, food, work, shelter and security will be the most daunting challenge any civilization has ever faced. It will shape scenarios of chaos for secutiry, liberty or dictatorship.

there are also inevitable changes coming that are natural and beyond our scope and control.

Cultures in Collision: future of globalisation

globalisation is about a new synthesis of ideas, trade, communications, collaboration that should promote future global prosperity, freedom and opportunity.
The Many Faces of Globalization: The danger if that if globalization evolves or is perceived as an dlitist western creation, designed solely to give huge corporations access to local markets while frustrating poverty reduction and cultural understanding, the true promise of global economic network will be doomed. we do not need globalization to be monopolized by forces of self interest that would dominate its future. Corporations have a historic leadership role to play in helping to shape the future of globalization.
Future of Globalization in Nutshell: Nations that fear globalization are concerned about the inability of their local industries to survive global competition. often, multinational organizations that have invested in innovation, conduct outsourcing or have access to large amounts of capital and labor pools are viewed by less fortunate nations as having unfair advantage.
2 worlds challenge: The two worlds are the aging developed world and youthful developing third world. The aging developed world the US Europe and japan controls the bulk of financial assets in the world. At the youthful other end of the world, most people are into poverty.

Securing the Future

The battle for the future will be won with ideas instead of guns, with economis instead of bombs.

Weird Science: What's Next

Invisible War: The Future of the Individual

research by the folks whose job is to figure out which new markets, products, and opportunities their companies should pursue.
subtle risks and spooky futures: the widespread use of mood-altering drugs is an epidemic of choice. There's a medication that fixes kids with ADD, dads with too much stress, mom with depression. We don't even know what the long-term effects are of individual decision making in a free society in which 50% of the public is on drugs.
keyword: information engineering reality
History of individual: one lens through which to view history is the battle between individuals and institutions over power, control, and rights.
Our history has been defined by the rules set by institutions for individuals. Usually an elite group of individuals sets the agenda for everyone else. Even today, perhaps more so than in the past, institutional doctrines seek to define individual choice beliefs and values.

Future of Europe: It is probable that without large and fast change, or an acceleration of imagination in the european union, the current standard of life will be reduced. This could be said about the future of the US as well. This simply would not do in France, where regardless of whether you are an elevator opertor or CEO, you have the right as an individual to a six week summer vacation.
In france, like most of the eurozone, health care is free for most of the population, education is fully subsidized, and a large percentage of capital resources are put towards social services these.
The society is not sustainable for the long term, given the growing price tag of these social services and coupled with lowere fertility rates. In addition, compared with US the overall productivity in the EU is low.

Dancing Dragon: The Future of China

China on override: From bicycle to mercedes, from village to megacities from poverty to wealth the accelerated growth of china is unprecendented in the history of civilization. You have to experience china to believe it.
The engines of productivity in china today are cheap labor, innovation and capitalism on steroids.