I’m working doing some research, out in the yard, next to this little fellow –now known as
- Captain Gnome.
One of my sons just painted him up. It’s a great time to be creative, and innovation rocks!
It’s summer — and it’s in to be out!
Forgive me if you’ve seen me recycle this post, but it’s a good trend overview. It’s summertime, I’m writing a book, and I’m preparing for an upcoming keynote for the American Nursery and Landscape Association in Vail.
A year and a half ago, I was engaged for a New York City publicity event, where, I met with the editors of O (Oprah Magazine), Elle, Family Circle, Parenting, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Working Mother, American Baby, Soap Opera Weekly, Woman’s Day, Glamor, Teen Vogue, Seventeen, Good Housekeeing, Family Circle and about 40 other national trade magazines, in New York City.
My focus, on behalf of a consumer products company, was the presentation of my “10 Trends that Will Rock the Outdoor World.” You can read the list and see the “fun facts” 
here.
In preparing, I undertook detailed research and analysis of leading lifestyle, demographic, social and cultural trends, to put into perspective what we can expect in terms of active, outdoor living in the future. And while I prepare for next week, it’s certainly proving itself to be a document that is bang on.
The future of snowboarding and skiing
A journalist recently asked me about the future of snowboarding; there’s a lot going on with “sticks and planks” as people have come to call them.
- snowboards and skis will continue to gain intelligence. Rapid advances in on-board chip technology, combined witih insight into kinesiology, will see a lot more on-board motion analysis as well as direct links into muscle contraction, with approprirate real-time ride adjustment. Seriously. Both sticks and planks are due to gain quite a bit of on-board tech in the next decade.
- The arrival of on-board tech will produce an industry boost similar to shaped skis a decade ago. On-board integration will make it easier for new boarders to learn to ride; insane boarders to be more insane in jumps and curves.
- De-aging strategies. Board companies will come up a new line for aging Gen-X’ers, who will finally realize that like the boomers before them, their bodies can’t quite take it the same way anymore. We will likely see a unique set of boards that will use on board tech to provide a smoother ride for aging Gen-X’ers — with the result that the first real boarding generation will still be able to do their thing even as they start hitting 45+
- Connectivity everywhere. Every board will soon have it’s own IP address that it will grab from an in-park server. Once it has an Internet address, all kinds of creativity will blossom as we see the integration of software with the board. Smart board companies will adopt the open-source model, allowing anyone to hack cool applications for a board.
- Video everywhere. We will likely see some terrain parks get wired; I do my ride, the park picks up my RFID signal (Radio Frequency Identity Tag), films me with a variety of cams in the park. When I jump into the hot tub later on, I merely swipe my park card, and there’s the video of me in the park, greatness and ugliness all. If I paid the premium fee, the video will have been edited so that only my great jumps are shown.
- Smart-goggles will become part of the scene. They’ll use the same virtual-cockpit helmet-mounted display that the military is using. With a voice command, I’ll be able to pull up an integrated trail map/condition report ; it will be displayed on the thin film of your goggles so that it simply “appears” in the air in front of you.
- Connectivity will provide an opportunity for on-hill marketing. Sticks and planks will link to LCD displays both indoors and outdoors, which will instantly change and evolve to show advertisements related to the boarder/skiier profile.
- Faster innovation. We will see much more rapid marketing-induced change in the basic tech of planks. Advanced Ceramics had a 4 year deal by which HEAD was using it’s carbon tech for skis; but HEAD dropped it after the 4 year term. I suspect they likely found it was a cool marketing hook for a while, but they’re now moving on to the “next big thing” (which for skis is also a degree of intelligence in the ski — see the new Atomic line). I think there will be a lot of innovative products, both chip and non-chip based, but the ski/board companies will use them for a shorter time as marketing becomes more intense
Seriously. I’m not making any of this up; this is just a projection of a variety of trends that surround us.
It might be summer outside, but it’s only a few more months till the season!
Bio-engineered body parts, the Cold Store and personalized medicine….
I’m doing a very futuristic talk tomorrow for a major health care company; I’ll be talking from the year 2030, taking a look at where we are in the world of health care some 25 short years from now.
A couple of the bullets from the presentation:
- “There was now a huge industry of personally engineered bio-body parts – and the never disappearing group of baby boomers like me was certainly taking advantage of this stuff to continue living an active lifestyle!”
- “I was taking a little pill that would directly attack the virus I had picked up — it was based on my own particular gene profile and would target the darned condition pretty directly.”
- “The pill bottle linked into my home network grid in order to interact with the prescription drug company. They had specifically engineered this medicine the day before for my own bio-code, based on a quick sampling of my blood and sinus condition that was done at the local Cold Store.”
Far fetched stuff? Not at all — as I note later in the keynote, when I take a look back to today: “In 2006 we were right at the edge of what would prove to be the biggest change ever to hit the world of health care ….. a shift in medical philosophy from “reacting” to disease and illness, to doing far more to “prevent” health care problems through highly personalized medicine.”
How do you sell the future to people who have no interest in it?
There have been dozens of keynotes through the last few months. All kinds of industries; executives; professionals; markets; challenges.
There’s a lot of change going on out there, and the brutal reality is that some get it — and a lot do not.
Each and every keynote has involved a lot of research, plenty of discussions, and a fair bit of time spent understanding how an industry or profession is changing. You learn some amazing things — farmers and funeral homes, for example, are some of the most change-capable people out there. Both are innovative, realistic, practical, and open to new ways of thinking. (Maybe this has to do with the fact that global food production has to double in the next few decades to keep up with global food consumption, and that most of those people will become customers of the latter at some point. Ok, there is room for optimism….!)
Through all the discussions and all the preparation and all the time spent on stage, there’s been enough material to write a dozen new books, but I’m going to distill it into The Masters of Business Imagination Handbook (the “current” new working title) which will go to the think-factory in a few weeks.
Suffice it to say, there was a crystallizing slide that I pulled together when I keynoted a PWC conference a week or so ago, in which I outlined to a number of executives how they could best segment their customer base in order to determine where to best find opportunity.
The more I think about it, that slide probably contained some really cool insight into how to sell into today’s economy.
I suggested to the audience that they should look at a company / client / industry, and undertake a measure of their change-quotient. If it is low — if people / executives / an industry can’t cope with reality — if they are hopelessly mired in “today” – and hence, they;ve got a pretty low change-quotient – then bail out. If they are thinking that tomorrow’s market / strategy / products / skills / capabilities will be fulfilled by what they have in place today, their change-quotient is hopelessly low.
Worse than low – they simply can’t deal with change.
And you can use that measure – the change-quotient — to segment your client / customer / industry base, and determine where you should best focus your energies.
How do you determine the change-quotient? I suggested a few factors:
- velocity ratio : what is the rate of change within the industry? What’s the velocity of business model change? How many new competitors are there, are how quickly is the industry blurring? What’s the staff turnover rate? How quickly do new products come to market? Pick high-velocity ratio targets, since they are more likely to be focused on making change work.
- rising tides: how quickly are customer expectations changing? If you’ve got an industry in which there are rapidly rising tides in terms of minimum service delivery, you’ve got an industry in which there are countless opportunities for innovative, future oriented products,
- innovation index: is the industry widely innovative, or are there only a few scattered folks who dare buck the current reality? Is it an industry stuck in 2003, or are they somewhere that is just about right now and a bit more of tomorrow? I’ve met a lot of industries who are sleepwalking into the future; on the other hand, I’ve met many who are awake and ready to go.
- creativity capability. Gosh, just who runs the industry? Who are the CxO’s? Is it mostly a lot of folks who really good at just running things? Then run away – that’s why I coined the phrase “Masters of Business Imagination” in the first place!
- retirement rate: Not to be crude, but how many boomers are there hanging around who want the benefits, want the salary, and want the executive responsibility, but don’t want to have to do anything to confront change? This, more than anything, can be one of the key measures for change.
- generational tolerance: At the age of 47, I’ve realized I’ve been meeting thousands of Gen-X and Gen-Connecters in a lot of industries who scream in silent frustration each and every day. They’re stuck in organizations with management who actively work to kill new ideas. They’re full of innovation, but they have no outlet for it. On the other hand, there are other industries where the frustration doesn’t boil away, but instead, is tapped for opportunity. Spot those industries — where “young people” are welcomed as a source for ideas — and you’ve got an industry with massive agility.
- wisdom wealth: Boomers need not be change-barriers; indeed, there are some who understand where change is occurring, and who are using their years of experience – often with devastating effect – to spot and capitalize on opportunity. These are some of the most powerful organizations on the planet. They’ve merged the generations, and are change-masters.
It comes to this: if you are a company that is selling the future, don’t even try to deal with those who don’t want to deal with it.
There seems to be an entire generation of CxO’s with the fundamental strategy of not seeing the future, don’t hear the future, and don’t do the future. You can discover this by studying the change-quotient of the industry and of the company.
Focus on the high-change-quotient targets — on those who get where we are going — and you’ll do much better with your strategy, and have way more fun.
Racine County, Wisconsin — something *big* is happening here….
I did a keynote the other night for the Racine County Economic Development Corporate, located in, of course, Racine County, Wisconsin.
There is something *really cool* happening here ; when I get a chance I’m going to pull my thoughts together and summarize what I see. Suffice it to say, it is a community focused on opportunity, not threat; agility, not challenge.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran an article in advance of my talk, below.
‘Agility’ called key asset for Racine’s future
Business needs to be flexible in thinking, working, says author
Posted: May 27, 2006
Jim Carroll, a futurist and innovation and trends expert, wants Racine County business leaders to learn and to live one word.
Agility.
Carroll isn’t talking about the physical ability to scale a wall or touch one’s toes. He’s talking about agility in thinking, managing and manufacturing methods.
“One great word is agility. That’s what we need, that’s the trend, the capital we need. How do we develop the agility to deal with the future that is coming at us faster than ever before so that we can shift on a dime?” Carroll said.
Carroll will speak at the 21st anniversary celebration of the Racine County Economic Development Corp.
The event will be held starting at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Racine Marriott Hotel, 7111 Washington Ave., Mount Pleasant.
An example of agility is General Motors’ plan to use a more flexible manufacturing model, said Carroll, author of “What I Learned From Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward-Thinking Innovation.”
“That’s a trend that impacts every manufacturer,” Carroll said. “Consumers are coming to expect more choice.”
Racine County is like many other communities that have found the old ways of doing business are no longer lucrative.
“Everywhere has been through a huge amount of complex and difficult change,” Carroll said. “Too many of us sit back and say how we wish we could get things back to the way it was. It won’t.”
Communities like Racine have to continue to look ahead and to build on the community’s attributes, he said. For Racine County, the attributes include things such as location, easy transportation, lifestyle and workforce, he said.
Carroll, who is from of Toronto, said communities need to recapture the spirit and the passion they once had.
“There was a perfect storm in 2000-2001, with the dot-com collapse, 9-11 and the war in Iraq,” Carroll said. “If you look at the excitement that existed in the business community in the 1990s, there was a tremendous belief there was a lot of potential. That went away. A lot of folks stopped looking at the future. They have been getting too dispirited by what’s happening in the context of globalization.”
Recapture that positive attitude, Carroll said. See where the opportunities are, he said.
Specialized manufacturing, for example, is a growth area.
“To take on some of these higher skilled manufacturing jobs that won’t go to China, we need to specialize, we need to upgrade skills,” Carroll said.
“There is no easy answer and no easy solution other than a community saying it’s not gong to continue sliding back, but it will have the spirit and momentum that will move it forward.”
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