Prize Competition #2: Viewing the Past

Posted by FuturistSpeaker on April 27th, 2011

Viewing the Past 283

Prize Competition #2: Viewing the Past
When it comes to the topic of time travel, color me skeptical.
Do we even know what time is? Yes, we see the seconds clicking away on clocks, sunrise followed by sunset, tides coming in and going out, seasons changing from one to another, and little trees growing into big trees.
These are all things we associate with the movement of time, yet it is a topic we know very little about. From the standpoint of science, our understanding of time exists as a thimble full of wisdom in an ocean full of ignorance.
Because of this, Hollywood uses time travel as a magical tool for storytelling. With fanciful theories and scant attention to detail, time travel on the big screen is as easily demonstrated as hitting a switch and watching people fly into the future.
But things are never that easy. When NASA set out to put a man on the moon, they didn’t start by loading a team of people onto their first rocket and launching it into space. Instead, they tested each piece of the technology through hundreds of incremental steps.
When dealing with “time,” there are two fundamental proofs that must be demonstrated before we can reasonably think time travel is ever possible. These proofs include viewing things across time and communicating across time. Sending people across time will come much later.
It is this second proof of viewing things across time that I will to focus on here, and more specifically, viewing the past.
With this in mind, I would like to formally announce the second challenge of the Octagonist, a challenge to demonstrate holographically a fully viewable event from the past.
“All information, ever created, is still in existence” – - Futurist Thomas Frey
Fundamental Questions
Let me begin by asking three fundamental questions:
1. Is it not conceivable that people in the future will have a technology to view the past? And if so, do you think they are using this technology to watch us today?
2. If it is possible to communicate across time, why then haven’t we received any form of communication from people in the future?
3. Are there rules and governing principles that define the operating system for our universe? And do these governing principles define how we are permitted to affect our own linear existence?
For hard-to-fathom topics like this, simply asking the questions will cause our minds to move far beyond the safety net of present thinking and drive us to search for possible answers.
Looking Back in Time
When we look into space we are actually looking back in time. This is because of the speed of light which travels at 186,000 miles/second. At a short distance, the time it takes light to travel from point A to point B can be measured in a fraction of a second. But more distant points take far longer.
As an example, it takes a full 8 minutes for light to travel from the sun to earth, and 72 minutes for light to travel from Saturn to earth. So when we look at Saturn, we are seeing how it appeared 72 minutes earlier.
As distances get larger so does our “looking-backwards in time.” The closest star, Alpha Centauri, is so far away that its light takes 4.3 years to reach us. When we look at the closest spiral galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, we see it as it was 2 million years earlier.
The speed of light is a concept we’re all familiar with. When an event happens on earth, the light and energy trailings reflect off into space. So the earth is not just radiating light, its radiating information.
Information about the past already exists. The key question remains, can it be reassembled?
Communicating Across Time
Going back to the question I posed earlier, “If it is possible to communicate across time, why then haven’t we received any form of communication from people in the future?”
One possible explanation is that we haven’t yet invented a device for receiving these communications.
Communicating with the future is relatively easy. We simply make a recording and store it until it can be revealed at some designated time and place in the future.
But communicating with the past is more difficult. Will it require some kind of device to receive it? And what form will it take?
People in the 16th century had no technology that would allow them to think that any type of sound could be transmitted digitally or electronically. If they suddenly heard voices, even if they came from a device, they would most likely think it was the voice of God or some demon talking to them.
If voices appear in someone’s head, most people today would probably have similar thoughts.
Cross-time communications will require careful planning. Early experiments in this area will likely center around a scientist receiving their own communications prior to them being sent, only minutes earlier.
The Powers and Dangers of Viewing the Past
Would you rob a bank if you knew somebody could go back and find out exactly who you were? Would you start someone’s house on fire if you knew it was possible for someone in the future to see who lit the match?
When it comes to criminal justice, there will be few tools more powerful than this. In fact, it may work too well. In addition to halting crime, it has the potential for putting a massive number of people out of work in the criminal justice system – cops, lawyers, judges, security guards, security equipment manufacturers, and many more.
However, the biggest driver behind this technology will be whether or not people can make money from it. And the answer will be a resounding yes.
Viewing the past will be used for determining historical accuracy, mapping human genealogy, creating documentaries, doing biblical research, and a thousand other things that people will invent along the way.
At the same time, this is a technology with massive potential for unintended consequences.
Being able to view the past brings with it an awesome responsibility for us to both preserve the integrity of the generations who have gone before us, and not denigrate our contemporaries. We all have the frailties of being human and good judgment is everybody’s shortcoming at one time or another.
In the wrong hands, it should be considered as a treacherous weapon. It is for this reason that “viewing the past” was chosen for this type of competition, where country-sponsored teams are continuously monitored by a check-and-balance system of governing bodies.
Is it even Possible?
When it comes to answering the question of whether or not this technology is even possible, truthfully, we don’t know.
Events leave an imprint. Information emanating from an event travels in many different directions that may or may not be retrievable.
But we do believe that people will attempt to discover it. And if this technology is possible, that it needs to be monitored closely in full view of the public. Otherwise, the potential for abuse is far too great.
Requirements
The challenge, as we have defined it, will be to replay an event from no less than 20 years earlier in actual-size, full-holographic visualization. The viewing of this event must involve no less than 5 minutes of fully animated continuous viewing with sufficient clarity to allow handwriting on paper to be viewable.
Our thinking is that the technology will be set up around a room or specific location, and once in place, images of the past will come to life, filling the current void in much the same fashion as actually witnessing it in person.
Naturally, we would like to hear the audio along with seeing the visuals, but we realize that may not be possible with audio waves resonating differently than anything visual. So for this competition, the requirement will strictly be for re-creation of visual images of the past holographically.
Teams
As with all eight of these competitions, only countries will be allowed to enter teams, and each country will be limited to no more than two teams.
All teams will be required to maintain accurate records of their personnel, research data, and stages of progress.
The Prize
Similar to the Olympics, the winners will each receive a gold medal. However, the true value will come from the accomplishment.
This is a technology with the potential to unlock vast new industries oriented around rediscovering the past. Virtually every story throughout history can be retold with unparalleled accuracy.
More importantly, the team that wins will have carved out their own legacy with a permanent place in the next generation of history books, books that have to be rewritten using this technology.
Entrance Fee
The cost of managing a competition of this nature will be significant. For this reason the entrance fee for each team has been set at $1 million USD per team. The money will be used to fund an endowment to insure the long-term viability of this competition.
As the competition ramps up, an entirely new organization will be created. The resulting organization will require a highly skilled management team and staffing with extraordinary technical expertise. This team will need to be in place for many years, perhaps even decades.
The entrance fee represents a tiny fraction of one percent of the amount each team will need to budget for their efforts. Team budgets will likely be in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Governing Body
The competition will also require its own governing body. Since it will be a venture into the unknown, pushing the limits of science and technology, there will need to be an international governing body responsible for oversight and dealing with unforeseeable circumstances.
The exact makeup and responsibilities of this governing body will be determined over the coming months. But minimally it will include one representative per team from the countries they represent.
Final Thoughts
In July, I will be formally announcing all eight of these competitions at the closing plenary for the World Future Society’s “WorldFuture 2011” event on Sunday, July 10, 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
The first, the Race to the Core was announced last year. More will be coming soon.
Behind these announcement is our team at the DaVinci Institute. Our hope is that we may somehow stir the imagination of people around the world and, bare minimum, incite a global conversation.
At stake will be a combination of national pride, personal legacies, and laying claim to unprecedented achievements in science and industry.
The reason we have chosen eight competitions is because of the eight dimensions of the Octagonist, a competition framework that I will explain at a later date. Each of these competitions will be the most challenging ever imagined. Some may not be completed in our lifetime. They are designed to stretch human thinking and push the envelope of understanding.
More than just a series of competition, we view them as a turning point in world history.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

When it comes to the topic of time travel, color me skeptical.

Do we even know what time is? Yes, we see the seconds clicking away on clocks, sunrise followed by sunset, tides coming in and going out, seasons changing from one to another, and little trees growing into big trees.

These are all things we associate with the movement of time, yet it is a topic we know very little about. From the standpoint of science, our understanding of time exists as a thimble full of wisdom in an ocean full of ignorance.

Because of this, Hollywood uses time travel as a magical tool for storytelling. With fanciful theories and scant attention to detail, time travel on the big screen is as easily demonstrated as hitting a switch and watching people fly into the future.

But things are never that easy. When NASA set out to put a man on the moon, they didn’t start by loading a team of people onto their first rocket and launching it into space. Instead, they tested each piece of the technology through hundreds of incremental steps.

When dealing with “time,” there are two fundamental proofs that must be demonstrated before we can reasonably think time travel is ever possible. These proofs include viewing things across time and communicating across time. Sending people across time will come much later.

It is this second proof of viewing things across time that I will to focus on here, and more specifically, viewing the past.

With this in mind, I would like to formally announce the second challenge of the Octagonist, a challenge to demonstrate holographically a fully viewable event from the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prize competition, technology trends 3 Comments »

The Grand Experiment – Micro Agronomy

Posted by FuturistSpeaker on April 22nd, 2011
The Grand Experiment – Micro Agronomy
On Sunday, April 17th I had the privilege of being the opening speaker at the TEDx event at the University of Chicago. The lineup of speakers was quite impressive and I felt honored to be presenting on the same stage with them.
The event attracted a young, high-energy crowd that combined college students, techies, business people and an assortment of other interested parties.
I opened with a talk on the topic of “Communicating with the Future” and discussed my theories on the personal relationship we all have with the future. I then went on to explain how we can leverage our understanding of the future to the point where we can exert influence, even control, over it.
Our ability to manage, influence, and control the future is something far closer than what most people think. In fact, we are at a point where a team of us at the DaVinci Institute are planning an experiment to test the limits of this theory.
The team working on this includes two of our Senior Fellows – Jeff Samson and Bert Vermeulen, along with Kevin Weller, Brian Baker, and myself.
After discussing several possible themes, we hit upon the topic of micro agriculture which conjures up a strong sense of fascination among nearly everyone we’ve talked to. For this reason I would like to take a couple minutes to explain the grand experiment that we are planning:
Controlling the Future
I should first mention that whenever I start talking about “controlling the future” that people start freaking out. If I were to say you need to control your own future or control your company’s future, people are okay with that. But when it comes to controlling “THE” future, that’s where I run into trouble, and the gods of the future will strike me down with lightning bolts for speaking such heresy.
To be clear, I’m not referring to controlling “THE” future, just part of it. The smaller and more focused the piece, the more influence and control we can have over it.
Most of us have been led to believe that the future just happens, and we, the victims, are relegated to the role of accepting whatever the future has to dish out.
As humans, we tend to focus on the volatile and ignore that which is stable. Buildings, trees, and mountains change very little from one day to the next. Driving down a street we typically don’t worry about trees falling onto the road. Only rarely do they undergo a radical transformation quickly.
The earth’s orbit around the sun, the speed of light, the changing of the seasons, the schedule of tides, the frequency of quartz crystals, and the laws of gravity are all predictable with a high degree of probability.
Most of our future is being formed around stable, slow-moving elements that are highly predictable.
As we begin to delineate between the stable and volatile aspects of the future, our options for adding some dimensions of control become clear.
The Experiment
Let’s start with the simple question, “how does the future get created?”
The future gets created in the minds of everyone around us. Virtually everyone has a hand in it, but not all contributions are equal. As you might imagine, a small group of people armed with powerful ideas can make a disproportionately large impact.
But creating the future needs to involve much more than just ideas. The ideas create a starting point but need to be put into a visual context, massaged, enhanced, and somehow made to spring to life.
This is very similar to the way the advertising geniuses on Madison Avenue take existing products and give us the visual tools to imagine how existing products can be integrated into our lives.
When we talk about micro-agronomy, what images come to mind? If you are struggling to put an image with the idea, you’re not alone. And that is a key part of the problem we’re trying to fix.
Images can be very powerful tool when they are combined with stories and purpose. So here is what we are thinking along the lines of story and purpose.
Micro agronomy is based on the notion that a decentralized food grower’s network will lead to greater biodiversity, and greater biodiversity will lead to a healthier supply chain to meet the hyper-individualized needs and desires of future generations.
Naturally the stories will become longer and the purpose will diverge from this central theme, but this is a starting point.
When we add a range of stories to a series of pictures, illustrations, storyboards, models, and videos, the growing body of work will begin to influence global conversations, and those conversations will begin to change the way people make decisions today.
At least that is the plan.
This grand experiment in micro agronomy will involve a six step process that starts with building a community.
Step 1 – Building the Community
Today’s web-based communication systems give us unusual abilities to pair and match people and ideas in ways never before possible.
No person has a monopoly on ideas, and un-nurtured ideas tend to shrivel and die a very lonely death. For this reason, the first step in this journey will be to build a community of like-minded free-thinkers to establish a fledgling brain-trust for the work that follows.
Our micro-agronomy community will be comprised of people who believe that small-scale farming has the potential to change in the future and want to be part of it. The last decade has been an exciting time as people started growing gardens up-side-down and even on vertical walls. Small farm, back yard and indoor vegetation has become a new experience.
The health benefits go beyond just small amounts of food, to improving air quality, the natural environment and providing healthy exercise. In fact, gardening is rated among the top ten best forms of exercise.
Some people will want to join this community for reasons of self-sufficiency and others just for the fun of it. Farming is tied to our happiness, well being and the good life. Will it always be just that memory of a day on the farm or can we all begin to grow our own food supply?
As a community we can learn from each other and build a knowledge base of ideas that will morph and grow as we begin to change the world.
Step 2 – Breaking the Paradigms
“All knowledge and habit once acquired, becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as
a railway embankment in the earth.” – Joseph Schumpeter
Much of our thinking today is rooted in old visions and old ideas. So how do we jettison the old and accommodate the new?
More importantly, how do we decide which of our current methods are worth saving and which ones need to be revamped?
Working with a self-selected group of innovators is a great starting point. Add to it a safe environment for creative ideas to flourish, a few resident experts to answer questions, some tools for breathing life into ideas, and suddenly we have the makings of a vibrant innovation factory.
Step 3 – Building New Visions
Our toolkits for crafting new visions will include a wide variety of elements in it. The first and foremost will the intense levels of creativity resident in all of the participants. This creativity will be leveraged with a visioning process that builds on itself over time, including:
1. Short stories
2. Storyboards
3. Graphic art
4. Animations
5. Models
6. Surveys
7. Interviews
8. Videos
Creating the visions will be an iterative process involving people with a diverse range of skills and talents. Shifting perspectives will lead to new stories, and these new stories will lead to new visuals. Over time, the few crude concepts used to start the exercise will be dwarfed by the layers of ingenuity that follows.
Step 4 – Turning Visions into Attractors
An attractor is an event in the future that we are somehow drawn towards. They exert a powerful force on the world around us.
Leonardo DaVinci dedicated over 500 drawings and 35,000 words to the concept of flying. In the late 1400s, this was a long time before most people thought we would ever be able to fly. But over time, DaVinci’s ideas were added to a growing body of work by other visionaries, turning the notion that humans could fly into an inevitable force of nature – an attractor.
We have many examples of attractors throughout history, and even today. Flying cars, cures for cancer, the first person on Mars, teleportation, and space hotels are all persistent concepts that drive the energies of people on earth.
Attractors are ideas that have been perpetuated through movies, books, science fiction, artwork, and other media. They will all eventually come to pass because of the consistent level of intellectual bandwidth being dedicated to keeping the visions alive.
Another way of saying this – these visions have become self-perpetuating.
The obvious question then becomes, how do we create new attractors?
The process for turning our visions into attractors, as it is currently envisioned, will involve the following five steps:
1. Start with a vision
2. Add dimension and realism
3. Build elements of purpose
4. Create relevance to the world we live in today
5. Rinse and repeat
Realism and purpose help drive viability in the minds of the visionaries, but the key to building a new attractor comes with an ever-expanding body of work. Stories lead to other stories and artwork and movies need to lead to other artwork and movies.
Once a sufficient body of work is in place, the vision will begin to exert its own influence on the world.
Step 5 – Unleashing the Vision
At a point where the body of work reaches a suitable level for mass consumption, a strategy will be put into place for publishing the visions.
There are many ways to “infect” the world with an idea-virus, so this becomes a critical decision point. Some options include traditional media such as radio, television, and newspapers, but may also include more viral components like YouTube videos, blogs, mobile apps, and social media.
The primary objective at this stage is to begin the global conversation and start influencing the influencers.
Once the concepts are in place, competitions, prizes, and other incentivize can be used to build awareness.
Step 6 – Monitor the Results – Anticipatory Analytics
Anticipatory analytics is the tool that I have devised for “communicating with the future.”
Communication, in its most basic form, is nothing more than a signal sent and a signal received. By unleashing the vision as described in step 5, we are sending out a signal in the present for people to receive in the future. These visions will be tagged with unique keyword phrases for us to monitor.
That is the “signal sent.”
Once people have immersed themselves with the concepts and visions, and start integrating the keyword phrases into their daily conversations, we can begin to assess the impact they are having. By monitoring keyword usage through Google searches and with other tools, we can evaluate both short term and long term effects.
This is the “signal received.”
When the frequency of keyword phrases reaches critical mass inside of the “global conversation” we can determine:
1. When the vision will become self-perpetuating
2. When the market is ready for products and services related to the vision
Once there is a sufficient body of work and sufficient global conversation, the visions becomes self-perpetuating, and the future will happen quicker
Our Goal
Our goal in doing this is to test the theories of the “communicating with the future” process.
Our first meeting will take play on May 24, 2011 – Details here.
We hope to build a cohesive community that becomes emboldened around the theme of micro agronomy. Once the community is ready, our plan is to host a weekend event where talented and creative people come together to build a series of long-term visions of the future.
After that has been completed, we hope to be able to unleash these visions in a way where they can begin to influence the global conversation.
Our plan is to go through each of the steps above, and if done correctly, begin to reorient the world’s thinking around micro agronomy.
This is our first attempt at doing something like this, so we expect to encounter a number of failures along the way. When we do, we will adjust and move on.
Final Thoughts
As you’re reading through this, there are many questions that will come to mind. And I’d love to hear your thoughts.
In a recent conversation, a close friend of mine listened to my thoughts on this topic and asked me, “When it comes to controlling the future, how much control do we really have?”
To this I answered:
• “We can ignite the spark”
• “We can drive the vision”
• “We can cause the world to take notice”
• “We can implant new visions into the minds of the decision makers”
• “We can track the progress”
• “We can act on the results”
He then persisted, “No seriously! How much control do we really have?”
I concluded, “It’s less than we want, but more than we think.”
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Micro Agronomy 672

On Sunday, April 17th I had the privilege of being the opening speaker at the TEDx event at the University of Chicago. The lineup of speakers was quite impressive and I felt honored to be presenting on the same stage with them.

The event attracted a young, high-energy crowd that combined college students, techies, business people and an assortment of other interested parties.

I opened with a talk on the topic of “Communicating with the Future” and discussed my theories on the personal relationship we all have with the future. I then went on to explain how we can leverage our understanding of the future to the point where we can exert influence, even control, over it.

Our ability to manage, influence, and control the future is something far closer than what most people think. In fact, we are at a point where a team of us at the DaVinci Institute are planning an experiment to test the limits of this theory.

The team working on this includes two of our Senior Fellows – Jeff Samson and Bert Vermeulen, along with Kevin Weller, Brian Baker, and myself.

After discussing several possible themes, we hit upon the topic of micro agriculture which conjures up a strong sense of fascination among nearly everyone we’ve talked to. For this reason I would like to take a couple minutes to explain the grand experiment that we are planning:

Read the rest of this entry »

future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, social trends, technology trends 7 Comments »

Next Generation Home Ownership

Posted by FuturistSpeaker on April 15th, 2011
Next Generation Home Ownership
Most young people today are asking the very simple question, “Why should I buy a home?”
In the past answers were always framed around phrases like “rapid appreciation,” “good tax write-off,” “long-term investment,” and “building equity.”
Today, real estate sales agents are quick to use different phrases like “pride of ownership,” “stable home for your family,” and “you no longer have to deal with a landlord.”
Saving up money for a down payment and closing costs is now a risky investment.
If you do find a home that you love, the real question you should ask yourself is, “Is this a house I will still want to own if the value of the property drops 10% or even 25%?”
For decades, cities have been throwing together cheaply-built housing developments under the guise of affordable housing. But young people are reading this as code words for “future slums,” “high maintenance costs,” and “sucker with a capital S”
The idea of home ownership is on the verge of massive change, and this change will bring with it some unusual new opportunities.
History of Mortgages
The origins of our current mortgage system began in 12th century England where British common law included a clause that would protect a creditor by giving them an interest in the debtor’s property. Even though the creditor held title to the property, if the debt wasn’t paid, the debtor had the right to sell the property to recover their money.
The history of the actual word “mortgage” is very interesting. In the word “mortgage”, the “mort”- is from the Latin word for death and “gage” is from the sense of that word that means a pledge to forfeit something of value if a debt is not repaid. So mortgage is literally a dead pledge. It was dead for two reasons, the property was forfeited or “dead” to the borrower if the loan wasn’t repaid, and the pledge itself was dead if the loan was repaid.
However, it wasn’t until 1934 that modern mortgages came into being. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) played a critical role. In order to help pull the country out of the Great Depression, the FHA initiated a new type of mortgage aimed at the folks who couldn’t get mortgages under the existing programs. At that time, only four in 10 households owned homes. Mortgage loan terms were limited to 50 percent of the property’s market value, and the repayment schedule was spread over three to five years and ended with a balloon payment. An 80 percent loan at that time meant your down payment was 80 percent — not the amount you financed! With loan terms like that, it’s no wonder that most Americans were renters.
FHA started a program that lowered the down payment requirements. They set up programs that offered 80 percent loan-to-value (LTV), 90 percent LTV, and higher. This forced commercial banks and lenders to do the same, creating many more opportunities for average Americans to own homes.
The FHA also started the trend of qualifying people for loans based on their actual ability to pay back the loan, rather than the traditional way of simply “knowing someone.” The FHA lengthened the loan terms. Rather than the traditional five- to seven-year loans, the FHA offered 15-year loans and eventually stretched that out to the 30-year loans we have today.
Current Housing Issues
When it comes to housing, cities now have plenty of inventory, but it’s all the wrong inventory.
• Baby boomers don’t like houses with steps, so there will be very little demand for bi-levels, tri-levels, and quad-levels.
• Within a decade, over 50% of all workers will have the option of working from home. Houses with a home office, where work environments and living environments are well-meshed, require an entirely new set of design requirements.
• Gen Y as a whole has little tolerance for home maintenance and repair. They may currently be renting a place in a “good enough” neighborhood, but they will not put money down and invest in that same fixer-upper community.
• Houses in the suburbs are designed around easy access to the garage, with the social needs of the occupants a distant afterthought. People today have a driving need to be more socially active than their isolationist-era neighborhoods allow.
• Until now, houses have served as warehouses for everything we own, and we all own too much stuff. Rather than a half-functional “stuff museum,” future homes will be designed around functional spaces to maximize our social and digital experiences.
Fluid Populations
We live in a very fluid society. Many of the regulatory impediments that governments have put into place to help stabilize communities are now working against them.
In a fluid society, companies and people tend to migrate towards communities that inspire them. As soon as the economy dropped, Detroit, Florida, and Nevada saw their populations decline almost immediately.
In the future, the most attractive communities will be designed around ways to stimulate new ideas using such things as creative environments, imagination sparkers, and inspirational architecture.
They will also be designed around new ways for people to meet people. Future communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing positive human collisions.
The flow and ease with which people move and exchange ideas both inside and outside a community will determine the overall appeal of the community.
Primed for Something Different
As a culture, our relationship with our homes is undergoing a fundamental shift. Depressed housing prices combined with excess inventory and a desire to live “fluidly” are all factors contributing to what I believe will be a new kind of home ownership.
Gone are the days where our homes are considered an investment. Once that perspective was removed from the table, we begin to think about houses and real estate in a whole new light. And the financial commitments we are willing to make began to change.
Beyond financial obligations is an emotional commitment, and that too is changing. In the future, the emotional commitment we are willing to make to a property will be as transitory as our desire to shift jobs and communities.
Here is a new way to think about classes of home ownership:
• Long Term Ownership. There will always be a group of people who will want to own homes and make a long term commitment to the land, building, and community. But this will be a shrinking percentage of society.
• Yearly Ownership: A growing number of people will want the stability and benefits of home ownership but only for something approximating a year at a time.
• Monthly Ownership: Living a transient lifestyle has its benefits and appeal, particularly to younger people who do project-based work in multiple cities. For the monthly ownership group, apartment living has too many rules and is too restrictive.
• Weekly Ownership: When it comes to week-at-a-time thinking, hotels are far too expensive, but their lifestyle demands that they move often. Their nomadic existence will be driven by employers and work-related demands, but it is the lifestyle they are attracted to.
• Flexible Ownership: Move whenever it becomes necessary or desirable.
The reason why these will be considered a form of “owning” as opposed to renting has to do with a person’s willingness to buy into a lifestyle.
As an example, if a person who currently owns a home decided to contribute their house to a pool of homes, the company managing the operation would handle all of the maintenance and upkeep, but the residents would transition in and out on a regular basis. Similar to the way people “buy” condos in a resort and then rent them out whenever they are not in use, “house pooling” might become the hot new form of home ownership for temporary workforces.
Similarly, with cheap housing in many cities, larger corporations could buy up large numbers of houses and create their own worker pool housing to meet the needs of the business. Employees will be far easier to attract if an employer can provide housing as a benefit.
Other forms of home ownership may include:
• Transportable mortgages
• Transferrable mortgages
• Time-share mortgages
• Location-share mortgages
• Lease with an option to buy
Digital Lifestyles
One of the primary contributors to our willingness to move often will be our emerging “low stuff” digital lifestyles for today’s young people. To this group, all of life’s essentials have been digitized and are easily transported from city to city.
Things like furniture, draperies, lawnmowers, and appliances will soon be systematized to the point where they are available when needed and styled according to an acceptable level, but will not move when the resident moves.
Flexing along with our relationship to our home will be flexible schooling and daycare for children, flexible healthcare and social activities, and increasingly shallow loyalties to any particular community.
Final Thoughts…
We live in an increasingly mobile society. Information speeds between people at the speed of light and our transportation systems are allowing us to move efficiently from place to place.
As soon as houses stopped being a “good investment,” our cultural thinking shifted from “this is my city, I’ll have to make it work” to “I’ll move wherever I need to.”
Our financial systems still haven’t come to grips with the fact that it still takes six months to sell a home, but only one day to walk away from it.
Current real estate systems are being regulated out of existence.
The market is perfectly poised for a new form of a new form of home ownership and a new style of living. All that remains if for someone to figure out what it will be.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Home-Ownership-091

Most young people today are asking the very simple question, “Why should I buy a home?”

In the past answers were always framed around phrases like “rapid appreciation,” “good tax write-off,” “long-term investment,” and “building equity.”

Today, real estate sales agents are quick to use different phrases like “pride of ownership,” “stable home for your family,” and “you no longer have to deal with a landlord.”

Saving up money for a down payment and closing costs is now a risky investment.

If you do find a home that you love, the real question you should ask yourself is, “Is this a house I will still want to own if the value of the property drops 10% or even 25%?”

For decades, cities have been throwing together cheaply-built housing developments under the guise of affordable housing. But young people are reading this as code words for “future slums,” “high maintenance costs,” and “sucker with a capital S”

The idea of home ownership is on the verge of massive change, and this change will bring with it some unusual new opportunities.

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Eight Critical Skills for the Future

Posted by FuturistSpeaker on April 8th, 2011
Eight Critical Skills for the Future
On Monday evening I presented my thoughts on the “Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals” at our monthly Night with a Futurist event. My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion with three of the industry’s brightest minds – Michael Sitarzewski, Lisa Calkins, and Gary Moskoff with Karl Dakin moderating the discussion.
Several people left this event saying their heads were ready to explode with all the fascinating new ground we covered, and I credit these four with helping us push the envelope on this topic.
At one point the conversation turned to social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, and Buzz that encourage users to log in and share their location. This feature is packaged as a fun way to find friends and stay social. But there is a downside.
Michael Sitarzewski was quick to point out a new site called ‘Please Rob Me’ that aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.
‘Please Rob Me’ aggregates and streams location check-ins into a list of “all those empty homes out there,” and describes the recently-shared locations as “new opportunities.”
While this seems comical on one level, the dangers are quite obvious, and even more apparent is our poor understanding of the demands being placed on us individually, and the skills we will need to function in this unchartered new territory.
With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of the eight critical skills that we will need in the future that are not being taught in school today.
New Planet Scenario
I often think about what it would be like to colonize a new planet and start a new civilization from scratch. Starting with a clean slate, and knowing what things work well and not-so-well on earth, how could we construct a significantly better society?
As with every society, it begins with creating a series of new systems, and these systems are all formed around rules.
Rules create order. They create the inter-relational fabric of society around which all of our actions are woven.
Much like colonizing a new planet, we are just now coming to grips with the need for rules and order in the emerging digital information age.
Eight Critical Skills for the Future
Equally as important as the social systems, we currently have very few rules for how to live our lives in a fully immersive world where explosive amounts of information are flowing to us and around us on a second by second basis.
Since each of us interacts with this information differently, it is up to us to master the “new rules of engagement.”
With that in mind, here are eight skills I see as being critically important in our future:
1. Communication Management – How much is too much?
According to Nielsen, teenagers in the U.S. sent and received an average of 3,276 texts per month in the last quarter of 2010.
A Pew Research Center study from 2010 reported that more than four out of five teens with cellphones sleep with the phone on or near the bed, sometimes falling asleep with it in their hands in the middle of a conversation. Pew’s Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist, said “many expressed reluctance to ever turn their phones off.’’
Its getting to the point where hospitals are starting to see young patients who come in exhausted from being “on call’’ or semi-alert all night as they wait for their phones to vibrate or ring with a text.
Communication is an essential ingredient in all of our lives, but too much or too little can have devastating effects.
With new communication channels springing to life in games, social media, and smartphone apps on a regular basis, people suffer great anxiety over not keeping up with their friends and family. And when they turn things off, they suffer even greater anxiety over feeling left out.
Effective ways of managing our communications is a critical skill currently not being taught in school.
2. Reputation Management – Our reputations are no longer something that builds up around us that we have little or no control over. With highly personal online content being generated about us from many different sources, it is now up to us to exercise control over what people are saying, the images of us that appear online, videos we’re in, bylines of our work, and virtually every other indicator of who we are and what we stand for.
About 57 percent of adult internet users in the United States said they have entered their name into a search engine to assess their digital reputation, according to a new Pew Research Center study “Reputation Management and Social Media.”
That’s a significant increase since 2006, when only 47 percent of adult internet users said they had looked their name up on a search engine. The findings show “reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life,” the study concludes.
The study also found that young adults are more apt to “restrict what they share” and manage their online reputations more closely than older internet users. This is “contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations.
Clearly this is another critical skill that schools have yet to come to grips with.
3. Privacy Management – Privacy and transparency live on opposite ends of the same social spectrum.
Pew also studied online privacy study and found that social networkers ages 18 to 29 were the most likely to limit their profile privacy settings. The percentage who did so was 71 percent, compared with just 55 percent of the 50-64-year-old bracket. Altogether, about two-thirds of all social networkers who were surveyed said they’ve tightened security settings.
People derive significant benefits from sharing their personal details as they take advantage of relevant and useful services online. However, once collected, businesses often exploit and monetize personal information, leaving people exposed and placing their information in predatory danger.
Yes, protecting and enforcing privacy is an added burden for business, but a lack of privacy creates risk for users and reduces trust. Trust plays a key role in innovation.
The free flow of personal information that respects privacy can fuel and cultivate innovation. Optimizing the risks and rewards across the stakeholders may lead to new forms of innovation and the release of new economic value. The big challenge ahead will be to establish legal frameworks that foster innovation and facilitate information sharing across jurisdictions in global business environments.
Understanding both sides of this equation will be a critical skill for future generations.
4. Information Management – In 2008, Roger Bohn and James Short, two researchers at the University of California in San Diego did a study to determine the amount of information people have entering their brains on a daily basis.
In rough terms, 41% come from watching television, 27% – computers, 18% – radio, 9% – print media, 6% – telephone conversations, 4% – recorded music, and smaller amounts from movies, games, and other information sources.
As it turns out, the average American spends 11.8 hours every day consuming information. Many other countries are posting similar numbers. People today are being exposed to far more information than ever in the past.
How can we manage all this information better? How can we be smarter about the information we consume and the sources we’re getting it from?
Our ability to effectively manage our personal information inputs and outputs will greatly determine our ability to compete in the global talent marketplaces of the future.
5. Opportunity Management – The average person that turns 30 years old in the U.S. today has worked 11 different jobs. I’m predicting that in just 10 years, the average person who turns 30 will have worked 200-300 different projects. Short work project will replace long-term employment for many.
Business is becoming very fluid in how it operates, and the driving force behind this liquefaction is a digital network that connects buyers with sellers faster and more efficiently than ever in the past.
Opportunities are springing to life all around us. Having an ability to find, select, and capitalize on opportunities will be a critical ingredient in how successful people run their lives in the future.
6. Technology Management – New tools are entering our lives on a minute by minute basis. What should we be paying attention to, and what can we dismiss?
Our choice of technology defines who we are and our ability to function in an increasingly technology-dependant world.
The tech-selection process has been largely relegated to tech insiders and key influencers with product manufacturers often playing a key role.
However, technology management goes far beyond hardware and software purchases. Both tend to evolve over time and the functionality is shifting on a daily basis with new apps giving us tools we never dreamed possible before.
Our relationship with our personal technology will continue to be an ongoing challenge and improving skills in this area will be highly advantageous.
7. Relationship Management – In a world immersed in social technology, we know lots of people, but what kind of relationship do we have with them? How do we qualify the value of those relationships?
As the size of a person’s social network increases, it becomes more difficult for someone to have meaningful conversations with each person in their network. Different rules apply to those we have strong ties with versus those who we maintain only a weak relationship with.
The way relationships are managed in the digital age is changing, especially when it comes to marriage.
Contrary to the way traditionalist would have it, for most college-educated couples, living together is like a warm-up run before the marital marathon. They work out a few of the kinks and do a bit of house-training and eventually get married and have kids. Those without a college degree tend to do it the other way around — move in together, have kids and then aim for the altar.
Our understanding of the shifting nature of relationships will be one of our most critical skills to manage in the future.
8. Legacy Management – How will future generation remember you? How will they perceive your successes and failures, your accomplishments and misguided efforts, and your generosity and perseverance?
While many still view inheritance as the primary way to leave a legacy, people now have the ability to manage the information trail they leave behind. In fact, they can very easily communicate with their own descendants who have not even been born yet.
The body of work we leave behind will become increasingly easy to preserve. So if we chose to let future generations know who we are and why we set out to achieve the things we did, we can do that today with photos, videos, and online documents.
Future generations may even have the ability to preserve the essence of their personality and make interactive avatars that can speak directly to the questions and issues future generations will ask.
As all of us age, the notion of leaving a legacy becomes critically important, and furthering our skills in this area will serve us well.
Some Final Thoughts
In addition to what I view as the eight “new” skills are two traditional skills that need to be radically updated to mesh with the needs of today’s world.
1. Time Management
2. Money Management
Time management classes of the past are a poor fit for the incessant pace and demand of living digital, and money management takes on an entirely new dimension with the any-time any-place tools at our disposal.
This was not intended to be an all-inclusive list of skills for tomorrow. There will be many more that will be needed.
My goal was to draw attention to eight of the most critical ones that currently seem to be overlooked today.
But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Let me know what I’m missing and where I may be off base. The ideas of the many are almost always greater than the ideas of the few.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Pondering the Future 2030

On Monday evening I presented my thoughts on the “Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals” at our monthly Night with a Futurist event. My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion with three of the industry’s brightest minds – Michael Sitarzewski, Lisa Calkins, and Gary Moskoff with Karl Dakin moderating the discussion.

Several people left this event saying their heads were ready to explode with all the fascinating new ground we covered, and I credit these four with helping us push the envelope on this topic.

At one point the conversation turned to social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, and Buzz that encourage users to log in and share their location. This feature is packaged as a fun way to find friends and stay social. But there is a downside.

Michael Sitarzewski was quick to point out a new site called ‘Please Rob Me‘ that aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.

‘Please Rob Me’ aggregates and streams location check-ins into a list of “all those empty homes out there,” and describes the recently-shared locations as “new opportunities.”

While this seems comical on one level, the dangers are quite obvious, and even more apparent is our poor understanding of the demands being placed on us individually, and the skills we will need to function in this unchartered new territory.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of the eight critical skills that we will need in the future that are not being taught in school today.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, social trends, technology trends 20 Comments »

Rethinking the Future of Health Care

Posted by FuturistSpeaker on April 1st, 2011
Rethinking the Future of Health Care
It wasn’t what I had planned on a 70 degree day last week when “springtime in the Rockies” was in full bloom. But I was on my way to the hospital, and over the next 24 hours I would learn much about a healthcare industry that is woefully unprepared for the changes that lie ahead.
Just moments early I had woken in a daze on our living room carpet with blood spattered everywhere, and only a vague recollection of what had just taken place. My nose was bleeding, my lungs were having a hard time getting enough air, and I was feeling fatigued. Very fatigued.
Slowly I started regaining my memory of the coughing spell and my inability to catch my breath, and then everything went black. But only for a few seconds.
After a little time spent cleaning blood off the carpet, and briefly toying with the idea of going for a bike ride instead, I decided going to the hospital was a more prudent course of action.
Little did I realize, but the next 24 hours were going to be my journey into understanding next-generation healthcare and the overwhelming challenges ahead for doctors and hospitals.
I entered the Kaiser Permanente facility north of Broomfield, CO thinking I’d be in for a long wait because I didn’t have an appointment. However, once I described my symptoms the attendant dialed a code-red number into the phone and I was quickly phalanxed by a cadre of nurses who put me in a wheelchair, began checking my vitals, and escorted me to an examining room on the fourth floor where a doctor greeted me in less than five minutes of my arrival.
This was far better service than I was anticipating.
Over the course of the next hour the doctor had run a number of tests, including an EKG and blood tests, and quickly came to the conclusion that more tests were needed.
In the hospital every patient is like a giant Suduko puzzle and the tests they run provide the missing numbers as they attempt to win the examination game. In my case they were still missing a ton of numbers.
For this reason the doctor suggested I be moved to the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital which was just down the hall from Kaiser.
Unlike Hollywood’s version of the ER being an energized feeding frenzy of attentive doctors and nurses, my experience has been just the opposite. After they connect you to some machines, time slows down and progress is measured in one-hour blocks with brief moments of nurses doing feigning to pay attention.
Eight hours after my drive to Kaiser, I found myself being admitted to the hospital for overnight observation. My desire for quick answers and quick solutions were nowhere to be found, and this was about to become a very painful experience.
More on this later.
The Future of Healthcare
The speed of information is affecting virtually every industry, and this is especially true when it comes to healthcare. The consumer marketplace is heavily influenced by information, and health-related topics are typically great attention-getters for any media publication.
As soon as the marketplace becomes aware of a new piece of information, there are three ways people will react:
1. React immediately. If it answers a lingering question or explains something that has previously been unexplainable, a small percentage of people will immediately take action. These immediate actions will include things such as setting up an appointment with a doctor, tell others, buying or not buying a product, or in some way, altering their lifestyle. For investors, it may also affect an investment strategy.
2. React slowly. Sometimes information will trigger a thought that needs more investigating. This is true for a much larger percentage of people.
3. Store it away for later. The vast majority of people who consume a new piece of information will do little more than tuck it away into their vast storehouse of memory cells and cogitate on it later.
For people who react immediately or slowly, their actions are traceable in the online world. Activity surrounding keywords and keyword phrases leave definable metrics that industry insiders can track and measure.
Unlike decades past where studies and reports were mostly relegated to collecting dust on the shelves of researchers and analysts, virtually no information today is value neutral. It almost always has some affect, and the cumulative effect of this information is causing seismic shifts in the way healthcare will be measured, monitored, and managed in the future.
Cumulative Awareness
Psychology students who are involved with studying behavioral abnormalities are quick to identify aspects of the traits within themselves. Introspection is a powerful tool.
With every piece of health-related information that an individual consumes, there is an accompanying moment of introspection.
People today are far more adept at connecting cause and effect relationships between everything from food and the body’s energy, to physical activity and mental alertness, to sleep and daily performance.
The more we know about the human body, the more we become aware of its deficiencies. Our health is a common topic of conversation and we now have names for thousands of additional medical conditions and physical performance issues than even 20 years ago.
Over time the number of treatable conditions for us to contend with will increase exponentially. Enterprising people will devise treatments for virtually every slight deviation from the norm, and many will prey on those who are hypersensitive to their own physical maladies
This cumulative awareness is building towards something, and this something I believe will involve more personal control, greater efficiencies, and a focus on the concept of “self.”
Exponential Growth in Awareness Tools
In 1714 Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury thermometer. But it wasn’t until the mid-1900s when thermometers became common household tools that enabled average people to make one small diagnostic measurement on themselves.
Similarly in 1896, Italian physician Scipione Riva-Rocci invented the first mercury sphygmomanometer, which used an inflatable cuff on the upper arm to nullify the arterial pulse and measure blood pressure. This device was very much like the blood pressure monitors in use today. With inexpensive home units, monitoring blood pressure today is almost as common as taking someone’s temperature.
The massive surge in smartphone technology is setting the stage for a wide variety of health-related peripheral devices to spring to life, revolutionizing how healthcare is monitored and managed.
The combination of smartphones, functioning as small anytime, anyplace computers; wirelessly connected peripheral devices such a ultrasound wands, blood pressure cuffs, EKG monitors, skin-monitoring patches, and ingestible cameras; along with a rapidly growing app-builder community capable of finding uses for equipment that manufacturers never dreamed possible, and the stage is being set for an entirely new health system to emerge.
It is this convergence of smartphones, peripherals, and apps that is on the verge of granting us, the consumers, a whole new level of awareness, and the ability to live with far fewer gatekeepers in our quest for optimal health and physical performance.
Future Medical Peripheral Devices
Here are just a few of the possibilities for future medical peripheral devices. Some are already on the market, others just months from being introduced.
• Heart rate monitor/analyzer
• Digital stethoscope
• Galvanic skin response monitor
• Skin dryness measuring device
• Blood pressure cuff
• Skin microscope
• Sweat analyzer
• Body fat measuring devices
• Hair quality analyzer
• Personal EKG
• Stress level tester
• Foot pressure analyzer
• Portable ultrasound wand
• Intra oral cameras to inspect teeth
• Ingestible camera
• Blood analyzer
• Oxygen level tester
• Digital thermometer
• Caloric intake monitors
• PH level testing device
• Vitamin deficiency monitor
• And many more
Over the coming years we will see thousands of these kind of devices hit the market, and each, in turn, will spawn thousands of apps to run them and analyze the results.
A few will go the route of getting FDA approval, but the vast majority will not, opting instead to position themselves as personal alternative healthcare devices.
The great age of experimentation is about to begin.
The Explosion of “Self”
The future of healthcare will be far more oriented around the concept of “self” – self-diagnostics, self-monitoring, and self-medication.
People today tend to resent medical doctors as the gatekeepers of their own health. They resent having to orient their life around the doctor’s time and location, and the finely metered access they grant whenever a need arises.
A recent study published in USA Today showed that about half of all 18-50 year old men don’t even have a doctor to go to if the need arises, and one out of five do not take prescription drugs because of cost.
As we move away from our heavy reliance on doctors for answers, we will begin to see a number of shifts occur.
The “Good Enough” Trend
Most people who are searching for information do not require 99.999% accuracy. They are looking for 10 second nuggets of information, and once they find the piece they are looking for, they move on. They are only concerned with information that is “good enough.”
In medicine, doctors are trained to view the world through a very analytical mind with high degrees of precision. Because of malpractice lawsuits, doctors are held to a very high standard and medical procedures are constructed to be exhaustively precise so as to protect both the doctor and the hospital they work in.
This, of course, comes at a price…. a very high price.
For this reason, most hospitals are in the business of selling tests. In all the thousands of tests done at hospitals, only a small percentage actually reveal something actionable. Most are little more than a way of defining the white space around the given subject matter.
Given the option, people are generally fine with less testing and less accuracy. They are far less interested in protecting the assets of the doctors and the hospitals and far more interested in simply finding an answer that is “good enough.”
Their objective is to get their life back to normal by expending as little time, money, and effort as possible.
Will We Still Need as many Doctors in the Future?
With all of these advances in personal inspection devices, the natural question to ask is, “Will we still need as many doctors and nurses?” And the answer is a qualified “yes.” But their jobs will be different.
People who have the ability to monitor and test themselves on a regular basis will find more things wrong and will require more advice, not less. Many will email photos, charts, and videos to their doctors for feedback before making an appointment.
Very likely, this will give rise to a new breed of non-doctor medical advisers who are trained as intermediaries. To the extent this new class of healthcare adviser is permitted under law will determine the rise or fall of doctor demand.
Finishing My Story…
The primary reason I was admitted to the hospital was for one final test which they hoped to run in the morning, an echocardiogram.
When I offered to come back in the morning, they were quick to say that I would have to schedule a separate appointment and it would likely be days before I could get the test done.
I found myself in the unusual position of having to argue against the seemingly insane hospital-centric rules that were clearly not in my best interest.
So reluctantly, very reluctantly, I agreed to spend the night. This is a decision I would very much regret in the morning.
Several times I was given papers to sign with very little explanation as to what was actually in the documents.
Hospitals are not a place where you get very much sleep. Throughout the night I had devices monitoring me and nurses periodically coming in to draw blood and check my blood pressure.
The nurses were ruthless with the stick-on patches and the connecting wires they used to monitor my heart and lungs. Throughout the night they attached no fewer than 100 of these dreadful patches, and each one was a painful exercise in removing them from my hairy chest.
I don’t know this for certain, but I’m fairly confident that if I had demanded an itemized list of every cost before it was incurred, the whole series of events would have ground to an immediate halt. The process of calculating a final bill (hospital, doctor, and related costs) is so muddled and opaque that few people have the ability to make heads or tails of it.
I was surprised when a nurse showed up to give me my meds, which she explained were pills that some doctor had prescribed. The nurse was equally surprised when I asked her to give me a detailed explanation of each pill, turning down about half of the mystery batch.
Somewhere around 7:00 am a lady showed up to perform the echocardiogram, a test that took around 10 minutes to perform. She said the doctor would be in to give me the results in about 2 hours.
Five hours later, never having seen the doctor, I decided I had had enough of this fun time in the hospital, got dressed and was getting ready to leave. At this point the nurses were scrambling, paging the doctor with hopes that he would show up before I was ready to bolt.
At one point a cardiac nurse showed ups with preliminary results of the echocardiogram, saying basically that all of the testing indicated virtually nothing wrong with me.
Just as I was ready to walk out the door, the doctor finally arrived. To his credit, he was very understanding, letting me know that his patient load at the hospital had more than doubled in the past couple days, apologizing for all the delays.
After a quick check of my vitals and scanning through the charts he said that none of the tests revealed anything seriously wrong. The reason I passed out was because of a sensitive vagus nerve problem that is fairly common, and my coughing and shortness of breath may be because of the onset of bronchitis even though they weren’t able to detect anything in the lungs.
In the end he prescribed some antibiotics, more on a whim than for any concrete reason, and sent me on my way. The antibiotics worked like a charm.
I wish I could say that my stay in the hospital was a good experience, but it wasn’t. I also wish I could say the people I encountered were quick and efficient, always with my best interest at heart. But that also wasn’t true.
What was clear was the fact that the entire healthcare industry is poised for a massive transformation, and virtually none of the transformation will have anything to do with the new healthcare legislation passed in Washington.
We are in for some huge changes, and it will be up to us to decide how they affect us personally.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Future health care 7

It wasn’t what I had planned on a 70 degree day last week when “springtime in the Rockies” was in full bloom. But I was on my way to the hospital, and over the next 24 hours I would learn much about a healthcare industry that is woefully unprepared for the changes that lie ahead.

Just moments early I had woken in a daze on our living room carpet with blood spattered everywhere, and only a vague recollection of what had just taken place. My nose was bleeding, my lungs were having a hard time getting enough air, and I was feeling fatigued. Very fatigued.

Slowly I started regaining my memory of the coughing spell and my inability to catch my breath, and then everything went black. But only for a few seconds.

After a little time spent cleaning blood off the carpet, and briefly toying with the idea of going for a bike ride instead, I decided going to the hospital was a more prudent course of action.

Little did I realize, but the next 24 hours were going to be my journey into understanding next-generation healthcare and the overwhelming challenges ahead for doctors and hospitals.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, social trends, technology trends 12 Comments »