The conversation would go something like this with a mom talking to her young son in 2028: “Honey, Exxon used to make gas to run cars. I know – really, It sounds funny but they used to be what we called a ‘oil and gas’ company, when cars ran on gasoline – and they made hundreds of billions of dollars doing it (that was a lot of money back then, son).” But apparently with the adoption of hydro-electric cars (brought on by legislative and economic incentives (read: subsidies)), that made the auto industries ‘dream to be green’ possible. Exxon therefore had to find a new industry or go out of business, It was shocking, really. With tremendous real estate and technology assets on their balance sheet (refineries) they wondered what else could be done with these refineries now that drilling for oil wasn’t a major revenue stream anymore.  So, after fighting Mother Nature all these years, they finally embraced it. Sun (solar), wind power, water and manufactured land platforms at their disposal in the oceans across the globe (with some architectural tweaks) they became the largest farmer in the United States with more water/farm land than the states of (Nebraska, Iowa..and…). Exxon’s offshore farming industry took off – growing vegetables and farming fish while creating new eco-environments with the reefs they created. Now with grazing land at such a premium, both the Argentinean and US governments have asked Exxon to begin using some of their platforms for raising livestock. We expect the first offshore cattle to be ready for market in 2 years.

As we slide into the (relatively) relaxed summer months, we’re looking forward to the opportunity to help our clients take stock of their innovation efforts so they can be prepared for the strategic planning season that lies ahead. We’re increasingly reminded of the important role that strategic foresight can play in this process. While organizations of all sizes could afford to experiment and innovate freely during better times, everyone today is being much more careful about how and where they allocate innovation resources. Strategic foresight—the process of carefully analyzing trends and the broad marketplace to identify opportunities for the months and years ahead—allows organizations to place fewer bets that collectively have a higher likelihood of success in the long run.

As Mark Hausfeld, an Innovation Manager at P&G recently told us in an interview, “We constantly challenge ourselves to understand what the big opportunities out there are, and then articulate those needs in a way that can help us really drive innovation around that opportunity area. Some organizations say: Let’s find all the cool technologies and ideas out there, and then we’ll go find a problem that they solve. We take that and we reverse it. We say: Let’s have a clear understanding of the problem we need to solve. We make sure the problem is well-defined first, and then come up with the innovations to solve those problems.”

Strategic foresight practices will help you better identify opportunities and problems in need of solutions so that your innovation efforts can be more focused and successful. Luckily, the summer is the perfect time to start embedding strategic foresight activities into your regular routine. Identify a few niche blogs or forums that cover your industry and start scanning these sources regularly. Set up a Google Reader account to easily track and view these blogs. Sign up for a few new newsletters and trade publications. Beefing up your scanning list will allow you to easily track the pulse of the marketplace so that you’ll have a better picture of what could happen in the future.

How will you engage foresight activities as we enter the strategic planning season?

By 2030, we have a social (and psychological) issue that we can no longer ignore – and some say has reached a crisis. Technology and ‘on the go’ lifestyles force us to interact more using shorter bursts with ‘get to the point’ sound bytes and bullet points. We speak in headlines not prose and while we continue to be connected – we ask, are we personally CONNECTING at all? Essentially, communal places are where everyone goes to be alone, together (think Starbucks today…but everywhere). Isolationism – or a feeling of it when even surrounded by people is common. We know so much about each others habits, whereabouts, friends (think Facebook) but have lost the ability for deep conversations. We spend so much time living in a world of ‘doing’ that ‘thinking’ and ‘being’ has been, well, lost. Communicating on these deeper levels is hard to recall – and harder to ‘learn’, complain many. Each generation has of course morphed its communication abilities to match the context of the world they live in but it appears at this point, we lost too much. A surprising result happens – something that hasn’t happened for a few generations (at least not in Western cultures). Elders are respected for their skills and capabilities on this subject and are paid great sums of money to reintegrate communication skills into our technology driven world. Getting ‘Connected Again’ becomes a movement. The past 20 years we spent so much time knowing information about each other, we forgot how to connect the dots.

We’ve just published our latest white paper, a compilation of learnings from a series of interviews with innovators. (Click here to download a free copy) What did we learn? While innovation remains important in today’s economic environment, it is beginning to take on different forms in some organizations. While innovation efforts in the past may have focused predominantly on growth, companies are now using innovation to streamline operations and realize opportunities for cost-savings. Savvy organizations are then taking those cost savings and funneling them back into innovation efforts to fuel future growth and ensure long-term success.

While C-suite support and strategic oversight have historically been important and will remain so going forward, other themes emerged from our conversations that raise some thought-provoking questions:

• How is innovation defined within your organization and what is the ‘mandate for innovation’?

• Is your organization actively exploring innovations that result in lowering operating costs and realizing efficiencies?

• How can your team best support innovation within your organization – by incubating ideas, facilitating processes, or both?

• Does your organization have enough of an understanding of its employees to effectively tailor and personalize rewards and recognition around innovation?

The biggest shift in focus seems to be around the “front end” of the front-end of innovation. Innovators are taking on the role as ‘problem definers’ in addition to being ‘problem solvers’. In doing so, they are uncovering deeper consumer insights, building alternative scenarios of the future, and identifying the optimal hunting grounds in which to innovate.

How is your organization building the necessary skills that enable employees to better identify and capitalize on opportunities for your business?

Click here to download a free copy of Innovation in Good Times & in Bad.

In the future, you can sell everything you do. Your actions are literally, revenue streams. Sell the energy you generate on the tread mill at the gym – and earn a discount on your monthly membership. Save your search results on an obscure topic, add notes to it, and boom – sell it to a University who aggregates your search with searches from hundreds of others that more quickly enables academics to see a new perspective on a topic (and you do the work for them).  Buying something at Target? Wear a tracking device when you enter the store that lets you sell your retail and ‘in-store wandering’ behavior to Target’s Retail Strategy Team so they can better set up their stores (get $5 or $5 off your purchases at checkout – your choice). A Toyota-sponsored tracking device in your (Toyota) car gets you $.10/mile for providing all the driving information they get from you, telling them specifically how THEIR drivers use THEIR cars.

This is Part II of a series of predictions of the future in 40 years. Click here to view my previous prediction, Microwave World.

It’s all about the package.

Thanks to the proliferation of computers and online commerce across all economic classes, in the future we all use online shopping for 80% of our purchases. No more grocery stores (who needs them when there’s Fresh Direct or Peapod? People used to waste an hour in a grocery store? It’s one less stop in the ‘food chain’ if I get it right from a ‘distributor’ like Fresh Direct anyway right?).

With all of our food being delivered directly to our door, our first point of interaction with a brand for many is now AFTER the purchase decision has been made, not before.

What’s the implication of this? Marketers and brand experts now put almost all their emphasis on the packaging of an item – injecting all kinds of functions, incentives, and whiz-bangs into it – ensuring that your brand ‘interaction’ is good when you open the grocery box that arrives at your door. The most important part of branding is no longer about the ‘pre-purchase’ which used to be ‘at shelf’ in the store – this is due to the shift in consumer purchase habits; marketers now almost solely focus on the POST purchase and what they can do to make their package stand-out in the delivery box.

Perhaps the most important, but often overlooked, aspect of innovation is in knowing what questions to ask and what problems you’re looking to solve. This “front end” of the front-end of innovation-foresight-allows organizations to better define problems, ask smarter questions, and innovate more effectively using focused approaches.

At futurethink, we’ve been busy developing a new training curriculum to help organizations build their foresight capabilities. Our goal is to make foresight techniques accessible and easily understandable to business people. With a global economic climate that limits our collective ability to experiment freely, it’s more important than ever to approach innovation with clear objectives and goals. Over the past few months, we’ve interviewed people in charge of innovation at numerous organizations in both the public and private sectors. Nearly everyone we spoke with, from P&G and Pfizer to NESTA and Sandia National Laboratories, mentioned the importance of using foresight to “get the right ideas for the right problems.” Foresight is comprised of three overarching components:

1. Scanning, Synthesizing, & Analyzing: a phase of broad-reaching research during which “weak signals” and opportunities are uncovered.
2. Scenario Planning & Opportunity Recognition: the phase where insights from research and scanning are explored, and translated into dynamic ’stories’ of possible, probable, and preferable futures .
3. Visualization & Communication: the final phase, during which scenarios are published to wide audience so that they may serve as a platform for idea generation and innovation.

To help you better stay on top of the future, we’ve added a Foresight section to our newsletter. This section will provide you with resources, articles, and insights relating to futurists, scenario-planning, scanning, and futures research.

Looking forward, past the economic uncertainty and recession, what will your business look like?

When WIRED UK asked me to predict what the world would be like in 40 years, I came up with a short list of predictions, some of which were included in Charlie Burton’s “What’s Next?” article. I’ve decided to share the rest of my predictions here over the next two months. I’ll be posting one prediction per week. This week’s prediction focuses on the need for speed:

Microwave World.

As our “everything-to-go” culture only gets more intense, insta-technologies become feature #1 in lives and our products – especially in our homes. Microwaves in the bathrooms that warm towels and quickly dry shirts or hand-wash items you need in a pinch; hair dryers that take 2 minutes to do their job; regular and convection oven cooking is now only used by either the ‘foodiest’ of foodies in their kitchen – and even they have 2-3 microwave appliances in their kitchen – ovens now cook/roast food, but 10 times as fast. We have microwaves in our garages and mud rooms to dry coats and shoes, and so on.

More and more companies are tapping the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to develop new products. The latest company to capitalize on this trend is LG Electronics.

LG Mobile Phones is challenging consumers to design the next LG mobile phone. The company is partnering with crowdSPRING (an online marketplace for creative services) and Autodesk (a leader in 2D and 3D design and engineering software) to define the future of personal mobile communication. The competition starts today, April 20th, and runs until June 7, 2009.

Visit www.crowdspring.com/LG to learn more and submit your designs.

The New York Times recently featured an interesting  article on innovation; specifically, on the need to innovate innovation. In it, author Alice Rawsthorn discusses how misuse and overuse of the word innovation are threatening it’s survival.

Once hailed as a panacea, [innovation] has been so diminished by hyperbole that it risks seeming irrelevant. (”Transformation” is the fashionable favorite to replace it.) Yet just like “design” and “contemporary,” “innovation” is losing credibility as a word at the very time when it is needed most urgently.

To combat innovation’s extinction, Rawsthorn outlines the different shapes innovation takes today. Specifically, she mentions: 

• Old-school innovation (the creation and design of completely new products)
• Green innovation (innovations that focus on the ‘greening’ of existing products)
• New-school innovation (creation of new products, services, and technologies facilitated by technologies that have only become available in recent years)
• Social innovation (innovation that focuses on improving various social conditions)

While we agree that innovation is certainly one of those words that’s abused and misunderstood to the point that people have become generally disenchanted with it; we think it’s about a lot more than just the four categories above. Yes, Green is certainly a powerful platform upon which many companies are discovering their ability to create new things. And yes, new technologies definitely allow us to ‘innovate’ differently than we ever have before. But the four buckets outlined in the article fail to really capture the spectrum of innovation in which real organizations tend to play. 

We try to constantly drive home the message that innovation doesn’t always have to be big, risky, and breakthrough. Innovation isn’t just about design. It’s not just about new products and services. Smart companies today innovate as much internally as they do externally. They focus as much on innovating the way they innovate as they do on innovating the things they sell to customers. They innovate how their customers purchase and experience their offerings. They innovate the channels by which customers learn about their offerings. They do a lot more than just sit around and be creative. They focus on their businesses, from end to end, and try to uncover ways to do things a little differently—to make things a little better. 

Read more at the New York Times.