Recently in Future of business Category

SmartCompany have just published an article based on an interview with me, titled What a Microsoft and Yahoo merger means for entrepreneurs.

The full article is worth a read – below are the direct quotes from me.

There will be fewer exits but more start ups for entrepreneurs in the digital world if the proposed Microsoft takeover of Yahoo goes ahead, says technology futurist Ross Dawson.

…

If the deal gets through the competition regulators, it could substantially change the acquisition landscape for technology entrepreneurs, says Dawson. “Yahoo has said that it intends to buy 50 companies a year; if Microsoft buys Yahoo, that will change.

“While Microsoft has been buying start-ups, [the deal] signals a shift in its strategy and it will focus on digestion of Yahoo.”
…

“While Microsoft is preoccupied, there could be increasing opportunities for start-ups to carve opportunities by being innovators – although it is hard to see how they might exit [at this stage],” says Dawson.

…

In my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote about the gradual shift to open accepted standards. Earlier this year, in the context of the social network battles, I wrote Is the trend to openness accelerating? Social networks as an inflection point.

I think we can now safely say that the trend to open business is inexorable, and that in hindsight, we are quite likely to point to 2007 as the turning point.

The latest is the extraordinary news that Verizon Wireless will introduce an “Any Apps, Any Device” option for its customers in 2008, allowing them to use any phone runnning any application. There are sceptics, but because there is the real potential to attract new customers and thsu create competitive advantage, this massive step is likely to create followers, shifting the industry.

Let’s review just a few of the other steps towards open business in the last six months:
May:
Facebook opens its developer platform
September:
New York Times online goes open
October:
Google launches Open Social
Path 101 established a ‘naked start-up’
November:
Google launches Open Handset Alliance
Murdoch says he will open up access to Wall Street Journal Online
Verizon Wireless announces open access

When you go to networking events in Silicon Valley and ask people what they’re doing, you’ve got around a 50-50 chance of a “we’re in stealth mode” reply. Lots of nascent start-ups, and all of them afraid that someone will steal their idea and get to market before them. It kind of makes sense, since ideas can be copied in a flash, and whoever gets there first has got a head start, however fleeting.

Turning that thinking on its head is Path 101, which is “live-blogging” the start-up from even before the company was incorporated. Full details of everything the start-up is doing, from its core positioning through to the memos of its Monday strategy meetings (complete with Digg this! buttons), are online. Sometimes what they write about makes obvious sense to post to the world, such as what they want from LinkedIn to be able to build a good complementary product. Other times, they write about details of their strategy and activities that go far beyond what most entrepreneurs would want to discuss.

The thinking behind this approach is that your lead before you are copied by others is evanescent anyway, whereas exposing what you are doing brings attention, useful feedback, relevant connections and more. What is truly differentiated these days is not so much ideas, as the ability to generate ideas. No doubt if someone tried to copy exactly what Path 101 is doing, they’d always be behind the new insights the founders were generating. The other truly differentiated foundation of the economy is relationships, and being open is one of the strongest relationship-generators there is. It builds exposure and trust.

[UPDATE]: This and other videos, with many other resources, are available at my newly launched speaker website: rossdawson.com.

Conference organizers and meeting planners always want to get a good idea of the style of the keynote speakers they’re considering booking for their events. I usually get booked through reputation, recommendations, or people who have seen me speak already, but to reach beyond that audience it’s essential to have a speaking video.

My new speaking video below is a sorely overdue update from the last one, which was created several years ago now. From now on I’ll keep the video updated with new footage and improved design as we go. We’re also shortly going to launch a new website for my speaking and strategy facilitation activities – details soon.

The eight-minute video contains a smorgasbord of interesting ideas, including snippets on the attention economy, forecasts for the next doubling of the global economy, the development of infinite content, sex and work in Second Life, outsourcing to India, and the role of energy in organizational networks.

Do you want to have your brain vigorously shaken? Those in search of serious provocation on what the future holds need look no further than Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, by the inimitable Richard Watson, Chief Futurist at Future Exploration Network. The book is not out until next week, so you’re privileged to get a sneak preview at the book website. Don’t miss the free download of Chapter 1 of the book.

The heart of the book is 11 chapters, each exploring the future of a key aspect of our lives and future.
1 Society and Culture: why we’ll take longer baths in the future
2 Government and Politics: us and them
3 Science and Technology: the rise of the machines
4 Media and Entertainment: have it your way
5 Money and Financial Services: everyone is a bank
6 Automotive and Transport: the end of the road as we know it
7 Food and Drink: faster and slower
8 Retail and Shopping: what we’ll buy when we’ve got it already
9 Healthcare and Medicine: older and wiser
10 Travel and Tourism: ‘Sorry, this country is full.’
11 Work and Business: the new right-brain economy

Each chapter is filled with startling facts from the present, from which Richard derives staggering insights about the future. As with much of Richard’s work, it shouldn’t all be taken overly seriously, but being prepared to make a few supersonic flights of logic is what helps take us into new ways of thinking about the future, and responding to it more effectively.

Richard Watson, our esteemed Chief Futurist at Future Exploration Network, is speaking at what looks like an extremely interesting innovation conference in Melbourne on August 28-29, called Innofuture 2007. It has a great cast of speakers, including Tom Kelley of IDEO and Frans Johanssen, author of The Medici Effect.

I am behind on my blogging, so I thought I’d make some very brief comments about a host of extremely interesting announcements that have come out this week.

Google acquires Feedburner.
Feedburner has been prominent in enabling the world of RSS. This acquisition, estimated to be worth $100 million, makes eminent sense for Google in being able to create more value for both publishers and advertisers. Feedburner’s analytics are a key part of that. This is a powerful combination.
Top references/ analysis:
Feedburner CEO comments
Reuters story

In the February issue of Voyeur, the inflight magazine of Virgin Blue, I was interviewed for an article about the major trends of 2007. The article is below - as usual allow for journalistic interpretation in the quotations...

FUTURE FOCUS
Ross Dawson is the founder and chairman of Future Exploration Network – an innovative company that helps multinational organisations understand the future technological and social changes that will affect the way they do business. Here Dawson lets us in on the top five trends that will shape our 2007.

1. Web 2.0 revolution
“What we’ve seen in the past five years is a whole new phase of the internet. One of the most important principles of this is participation – everyone can easily set up blogs, upload videos and create music and podcasts. For the first time we are not just consumers but are enabled to become creators, so we have this doubling of media space leading to a world of infinite content, of infinite entertainment.”

Given it’s festive season now, it’s probably time for a bit of fun. Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have collaborated in producing a map of major trends for 2007 and beyond, across ten segments: society & culture, government & politics, work & business, media & communications, science & technology, food & drink, medicine & well-being, financial services, retail & leisure, and transport & automotive. Click on the map below to get the full pdf.

Trend Blend 2007+ map

Inspired by the subway map for a well-known city, the map shows some of the major trends in each of these segments, as well as the key intersections between the trends. Have a browse through to see some of the more interesting trends in the landscape. And please don’t take it too seriously…

As with most of our content, this is released on a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license, so if you disagree with the trends we’ve chosen or think you can improve on the map, please take it and run with it!

Our clients will get a glossy pinup of the map, and if there’s enough demand we’ll release a T-shirt….

Fabulous festive season to all!

[UPDATE:] MindShare Asia's unofficial blog, The Big Swifch, has called this "The world's best trend map. Ever.", and relates it to Edward Tufte's work. Thanks James! He also says he's considering doing something similar for media/ marketing trends in Asia. Look forward to it!

Cameron Reilly of The Podcasting Network fame has just interviewed me for his podcast series G’Day World. The podcast is available here. Some of the things we talked about were:
* How senior executives think – or don’t think – about innovation.
* The balance of innovation across large organizations and start-ups.
* Open innovation approaches for large organizations.
* Where media will look like in 10 years, including the spectrum of media, massive fragmentation, and new funding models for content creation.
* Transcending the mouse and keyboard in user interfaces.

I've been under the gun with some intense client deadlines for a few months now, so I have a backlog of at least a dozen blog posts I want to do and have not managed to get done. One of these is a quick debrief from when Cameron and I caught up for coffee in Melbourne recently. Hopefully coming soon...

Just back home from a very intense couple of weeks of work and travel, and finally able to comment on the call to action by the world’s six largest audit firms on corporate reporting, released on 8 November. The starting point for their initiative is the belief, concisely articulated by KPMG Chairman Mike Rake, that “the current [financial reporting] model is broken.” Since a substantial part of my work history is in capital markets, a consistent theme for me as I’ve explored the global knowledge economy over the last decade is how investor reporting needs to shift. It is patently obvious that the current financial reporting system does not adequately serve investors or other corporate stakeholders. Investors are making decisions based on deeply inadequate and substantially historical information. The basis of a capitalist economy is that capital is allocated effectively. Since investors are in essence buying a pig in a poke when they buy shares in public companies, in the absence of effective reporting, the system is intrinsically broken.

The auditors’ report, titled Global Capital Markets and the Global Economy: A Vision from the CEOs of the International Audit Networks, provides a comprehensive yet compact view of the state of financial reporting, and where it needs to go. While the report covers issues such as harmonization, oversight, and liability, the real meat of the report – certainly in terms of the reaction it has received – is in its call for substantial disclosure of non-financial information, and a shift to real-time reporting on some issues. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first started to grapple with these issues, I came to the conclusion that while these shifts were inevitable, it would take well over a decade, and there were others who would be better equipped to drive those changes. A decade has passed, and while there has been much examination of the challenges of non-financial reporting, and some solutions (perhaps best articulated in the book Building Public Trust, by Samuel DiPiazza, CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Robert Eccles), there has been little change in corporate reporting practices, save at the edges. I have spoken about the potential shift to real-time reporting in a number of my keynotes over the last years to associations of corporate treasurers, CFOs, and investor relations executives, with a muted response. A commentary I made in 2002 on creating the transparent corporation, discussing the role of XBRL in reporting intangibles, is still completely current today.

There is no question that there are massive challenges in shifting to real-time reporting, including verification, restatement, and more. Yet in a world driven by information, in the long run a shift to real-time reporting in some form is inevitable. The report ends specifically with a call to lively conversation on the issues raised, and that has certainly been the case. Interesting commentary on the report has included Leon Gettler’s view that the auditors are trying to weasel out of risk, Dennis Howlett’s thoughts on the issues of bringing in intangible reporting, and Gartner's overview analysis to urge its clients "not to wait for regulators to issue new financial reporting rules before doing something about more frequent financial reporting". I believe that the issues raised in the report are deeply important, and that the report’s release is the most significant event within the last few years, in terms of accelerating the inevitable shift to a substantially different future for corporate reporting. These issues are now squarely on the agenda, and after progress on these vital issues languishing for years, there is now the potential for some real action.

I have been applying scenario planning with clients for the last decade across a variety of industries and environments, including the future of financial services, technology, capital markets, risk management, construction, Internet, Asia, and far more. As I wrote back in 1998 in an article on scenario planning in portfolio and risk management, “The greater the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability, the greater the value of using multiple scenarios rather than forecasts.”

Knowledge@Wharton has just published an interesting discussion on Will a New Theory Help Firms to Manage in a ‘Flat’ World? (registration required), which looks at how executives can make sense of the rapidly changing environment. Paul Kleindorfer, a Wharton professor of operations and information management, made this very interesting comment:

In the past six months, there has been an upsurge in the number of companies coming through INSEAD [the European institute for management education] looking for assistance in scenario planning and scanning, or determining the signposts that suggest which scenario or scenarios should be the focus. Some companies -- like Nestle, Unilever and Procter & Gamble -- have been doing some scenario planning, but it's been directed toward competition and technology. So these and other companies were completely blindsided by the recent increase in mineral oils -- which was spurred by a law in Germany requiring power plants there to burn 10% bio-fuel by 2010 --and its impact on the vegetable oils and other ingredients they purchase for their products.

These sorts of commodity risks have escaped the scrutiny of many companies. Now they see a single government make a decision and it throws the profitability of an important ingredient out the window. So scenario planning and scanning, together with strategic modeling, intelligence and other issues, are really beginning to take on a much larger significance than before. It used to be about markets, technology and competitors, but now there's a much richer texture.

Over the last decade I have certainly seen how the cycle of interest in scenario planning from major organizations has tracked the degree of perceived uncertainty in the business environment. The scope of the imponderable now, ranging from geopolitics to consumer behavior, overlaid on the necessity for long-term strategic thinking, means that scenario-based approaches are again on the rise. As suggested by Kleindorfer’s comments, I have seen many traditional consulting firms do scenario planning in such a reductionist manner that the scenarios cover only part of the scope of uncertainty, which entirely defeats the purpose. Today more than ever, there is massive value in engaging in scenario planning for long-term strategy development, in a way that really does uncover assumption and open out thinking across the organization.

This is fantastic. IBM has announced that it will voluntarily publish its patent filings on the Internet. The upside is that it is taking the lead in creating a clearer, less confused, higher quality patent landscape. The (potential) downside is that it exposes its technology directions and strategy to its competitors as they develop rather than once they're implemented. The great thing about this kind of leadership in creating openness and transparency in business is that it usually is a ratchet – once it becomes more open, it is very hard for it to go back. There are plenty of businesspeople who hate the idea of open business, and fight it in every aspect of how they do business. Too bad for them. We are shifting to a world of open business at a very tidy pace, and I for one think that’s a great thing. Embrace it, or have a tough and miserable time fighting the trend.

The latest issue of Business 2.0 has an interesting piece on how the Institute for the Future (IFTF), one of the oldest future-watching organizations, is creating “artifacts from the future” – physical manifestations of things that may come to pass – to help its clients understand the convergence of current trends and their impact. The article says that IFTF’s clients don’t have the time or mindspace to trawl through the annual 10 year forecasts that are its trademark, thus the creation of more tangible outputs. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang of IFTF believes its clients’ supposed lack of inclination to read reports is overblown, but there is no question that some of the IFTF’s outputs are pretty cognitively dense, and we can all see the attention span of senior executives whittling away year by year. Future Exploration Network will be applying a wide variety of ways of engaging our clients with new ideas. Richard and I, in a project last year helping a major bank develop long-term strategies, used newspapers mocked up with possible headlines for 5-10 years hence to stimulate discussions and new ideas. If we’d had the budget, we would have created one or more “bank branches of the future” that executives could experience for themselves. There is no question that rigor is needed in exploring fundamental trends and how they might play out, but time-impoverished executives often need a more direct approach to provoke them out of their everyday pressures.

IBM has recently released its second Global Innovation Outlook report. I referred to a related initiative – IBM’s Global Technology Outlook – in the second edition of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships as an example both of collaborative innovation, and how IBM provides customized and highly relevant insights to its clients. IBM brought together 250 thought leaders in five locations around the planet to think about innovation and the future. The insights are available in a publicly-available report, and also in customized interactive presentations for large clients. The report is excellent, not least because it hits on most of the themes of this blog :-) It points to innovation today being: Global, Multidisciplinary, and Collaborative and open. This ties in totally with the story I often tell, of how increasing depth of knowledge and specialization requires collaboration between disciplines, which must be global in scope, and requires new models to draw together disparate strands. In its examination of the Future of the Enterprise, the report focuses on networks, also touching on other key themes of strong interest to me, including “reputation capital” and how value is aggregated. Well worth a look.