UNdata
How governments research and communicate about the future
Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that they have a responsibility for structured thought and research about the future, both to shape their own initiatives, and to assist companies and institutions in the nation to survive and thrive in times of change. Examples of government futures groups include:Egypt: Center for Futures StudiesFrance: Centre d’Analyse StratégiqueIndia: Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment CouncilIndonesia: Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan NasionalMexico: 2030 VisionSingapore: Futures GroupSweden: Institute for Futures Studies Other governments, such as those of UK and USA, do extensive future studies, however these are distributed across a variety of departments and functions. Many of these operations do a good job at analysis, however usually communicate in traditional government-speak, including weighty reports written in officious language. The document below, Imagining the New Normal, is excellent. Imagining the New Normal
The Future of Advertising
Google Scholar
Scenarios
This scenario development process is based on the following principles: The highly prepared meeting. We interviewed a wide variety of people including all the participants in the first workshop ahead of time in order to understand the issues facing the Park and to solicit ideas about important actions, investments, changes in law and regulation, etc. that would be necessary for “good futures” to transpire. In this way, the participants were presented with a lot of ideas to work with and spent relatively little time getting started.Two-part definition of scenario. In this approach a scenario is divided into the endstate or outcome statement at the planning horizon (in this case 25 years from now) and a series of events that must occur or must not occur that lead us from the present to that outcome. Scenario: series of evens that lead to an endstate Back-casting: if your endstate has happened, what events must have happened (or not)? Like this: Like Loading...
How Technology is Recreating the 21st-century Economy
W. Brian Arthur, PARC Visiting Researcher series: Entrepreneurial Spirit 4 August 20115:30-7:00pmGeorge E. about PARC forum description Every 50 years or so a new body of technology comes along and slowly transforms the economy. Brian Arthur -- an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, pioneer of complexity theory, and longtime PARC Visiting Researcher – will attempt to answer these and other questions in this PARC Forum talk. Digital technology runs deeper than merely providing computation, internet commerce, and social media. presenter(s) W. Arthur pioneered the modern study of positive feedbacks/ increasing returns in the economy -- in particular, their role in magnifying small, random economic events -- and this work became the basis of our understanding of the high-tech economy. Arthur was the Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford University, and the first director of the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. audio
Union of Intelligible Associations
Methods of prospective > Softwares > Morphol : La prospective
Morphological analysis aims to explore possible futures Morphological Analysis Aim Morphological analysis aims to explore possible futures in a systematic way by studying all the combinations resulting from the breakdown of a system. The aim of morphological analysis is to highlight new procedures or products in both technological forecasting and scenario building. Description of the method Morphological analysis is the oldest of the techniques presented in this toolbox. In fact, it was first developed by the American researcher F. • Phase 1 : Building a morphological space In this first phase, the system or function under examination is broken down into subsystems or components. • Phase 2 : Reduction of morphological space However, certain combinations and even certain families of combinations are unfeasible, e.g., incompatibility between configurations. Usefulness and limitations The first limitation of morphological analysis stems from the choice of components. Practical conclusions
The Rise of the New Global Elite - Magazine
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that.
