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I signed up for a Twitter account in 2008, but never bothered using it.
I’ve finally succumbed, and am now using it to post updates about new blogs, my travels, who I’m keynoting to and things like that.
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In the interview just posted on my site (“What is a futurist“), I commented that “we live in transformative times — we’ll look back at 2009-2010 as the period of time in which we started to apply really transformative thinking to solving some of the big problems we have in health care, energy and the environment.”
I find that a lot of people don’t think about the major changes that are going to occur over the long term. Bill Gates caught this reality when he observed that “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”
I followed this line of thinking when I was the opening keynote speaker for the Alberta Senior Citizens Housing Association two weeks ago. The challenges faced by the industry are pretty stark:
Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that every baby boomer would hope that during their sunset years, they’d be able to live out their time in a wonderful retirement home.
That’s simply not going to be the case — the simple demographics of North American society indicate that society and retirement savings won’t be able to pay for this reality. Get into other areas of the world, including Asia, and the crisis in seniors housing is going to be even bigger, particularly that some countries aren’t even yet to the unit-level that we have in North America.
So what’s going to happen? We’re going to see big, transformative thinking. Rather than placing seniors in retirement homes, why not extend the retirement home concept into their own home. Community and family care is going to play a huge role here,
Technology will also play a big role in this transformative change, as it will move us to the concept of the “virtual retirement home.” By 2020, most seniors will live in their own homes, and their health conditions will be actively monitored through a network of intelligent bio-connectivity and other devices. We won’t have a lot of senior citizen homes — we’ll have virtual seniors networks.
In my keynote, I spoke about research that is underway now into this concept. (US Fed News, February 2009 Health-monitoring technology helps seniors live at home longer, University of Missouri Researchers find“). Two key points:
This type of research is real, and when we look back from 2019 or 2020, we’ll realize that this was the type of transformative thinking that would help to bring about a solution to a pretty big problem. And it’s important to realize that there’s a lot of activity going on in this particular field. Notes one key researcher from Intel, speaking about the research they are doing in this area:
“We have the potential to aim our innovation engine at the age wave challenge and change the way we do health care from a crisis- driven, assembly-line, hospital approach to a personal-driven approach, with people taking care of themselves with help from family, friends and technologies.”
When I look around me at the deep problems our world faces, I see a lot of innovative and transformative thinking, with big ideas as to how to solve those complex problems.
Transformative thinking — it’s all around you — you need to start watching.
I was the opening keynote speaker for a major credit union conference. In the room were the CEO’s and Board members for several hundred small to medium sized CU’s. This coming week on Friday, I’ll be the closing keynote speaker for the annual conference of the Texas Credit Union League in Austin. I spend quite a bit of time speaking throughout the financial sector.
One constant is that I always challenge my audience to think about how to become an agile, high velocity, innovation oriented organization. This isn’t simply an organization that has a constant stream of new products : it’s an organization that also responds to all the rapid change that is swirling around it.
From my slide deck, I’m outline that high velocity innovative organizations prepare for:
Through the week, I’ll post some observations from my slide deck on each of these points, but let’s take the first issue as a starting point.
I’ve long been suggesting that the financial sector is soon going to find a tsunami of change as our iPhones, Blackberries and other mobile technologies become the new form of credit card payment technology.
The New York Times reported on the trend this weekend, in an article, Visa introduces a credit card on a phone.
The rush to “contact-less payment technology” is going to happen, and it’s going to happen faster than most people in the financial sector think. It’s being driven at the speed of Silicon Valley, and some financial institutions — and many many credit unions — are still operating at a far slower pace. As a result, they can often be caught flatfooted by dramatic technological change, and end up having their business model disrupted in a substantial way.
On stage, I challenge this senior level type of audience to realize just how quickly everything around them is changing. In order to be innovative, they need to understand the new technologies that will impact them, and be prepared to ingest them at the rate that the market demands.
That’s a critical form of innovation, and sadly, there continue to be a lot of organizations who aren’t into that reality. That’s why there are so many organizations having me in to talk about how to become an “innovator in the high velocity economy.”
Apparently, I’m a member of “one of the world’s oldest professions.”
Hmmm…
That’s from the opening from this 10 minute clip from the CBC in which I’m one of four futurist interviewed (one of the others being Faith Popcorn, who coined the phrase “cocooning” during a previous economic downturn.)
The broad themes address what a futurist does, how we identify trends, and what we think might come next in terms of energy, the environment, the automobile and other issues.
On stage in Las Vegas, Jim challenges his audience to think about the importance of innovating in order to stay out in front of the recession.
There are two types of organizations in the world today: those that have retrenched, shut down their idea machines, and are trying to coast through the recession. Then there are those who are making sure that they keep their team focused on the future, opportunities, and the need for innovative thinking.
I’ve been confirmed to be the opening keynote speaker for the next global leadership/franchise conference for Burger King, one of the largest QSR chains in the world.
This is really quite an honor, and I think is indicative that my theme that “organizations need to stay on the innovative edge despite the recession” resonates strongly.
Every industry is changing at a furious pace, and the quick service food industry is no exception. We’re seeing rapid change in terms of branding and marketing, particularly in terms of outreach and interaction with the new mobile consumer. There’s a lot of fast paced change in terms of consumer preferences. If we think about issues of restaurant design and construction, there are fast and furious developments in terms of energy usage and environmental footprint. The list goes on and on – there is no shortage of opportunity for new and innovative thinking.
I’ll set the stage by challenging the audience to focus on growth, focus on opportunities, and think about how innovation can become a core component of how they progress into the future.
I wrote about these trends in a previous blog post, High velocity change in the food/consumer products sector.
(p.s. I found the photo on iStockPhoto, and dreamed up the “hunting innovation” title. It seemed kind of fun!)
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