Articles

The following articles provide a range of information to improve your foresight capability.

Consumer Perceptions: An Essential Source of Foresight

Identifying future innovation opportunities can be achieved by anticipating the emergence of different consumer values and perceptions.

Consumer behaviour is an outcome of consumer perception. And the most effective way to foresee future consumer behaviour is to understand how these perceptions change over time.

Fresh perceptions - new types of thinking - inevitably lead to new behaviours, and the emergence of different consumer wants and needs.

Successful organisations foresee how consumer values and perceptions might change, and get to this fertile innovation territory ahead of their competitors.

This comprehensive article makes clear the vast potential for consumer perceptions as a source of foresight and innovation by outlining the following:

 

  1. The hierarchy of values and perceptions that individuals and societies move through over time
  2. The conditions that facilitate the movement of individuals and societies along this hierarchy
  3. The themes and behaviours that individuals and societies are attracted to at each level of this hierarchy

 

Key Themes:

Consumer Foresight, Consumer Behaviour, Consumer Needs, Innovation, Social Change, Emerging Trends, Materialism, Post Materialism, Resource Awareness, Decline of Want, Paradigm Shifts

Article Length:

41 Pages

Strategic Foresight: The next business frontier

Explains what strategic foresight is, its purpose in business, its benefits over traditional planning, and its approach to understanding the future.

In particular it covers the following:

- Strategic foresight puts the future first - Since all planning and innovation is targeted at the future, strategic foresight is the study of the future for the purpose of improving decision making.

- Strategic foresight improves decision making - The purpose is not to get the future right, but to make better decisions.

- Strategic foresight delivers competitive advantage - In working back from the future, as opposed to projecting forward from the present, companies are able to foresee unique developments in their industry’s future.

- Strategic foresight de-mystifies the future - Rather than focusing on the uncertainty of the future, strategic foresight provides a logical framework for understanding social change and planning for the future.

1200 Words

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Time to reclaim what we have lost

Explores society’s perception of time as an enemy, and how constant activity has come to be seen as a sign of status.

Rather than time-saving, most innovations are merely multi-task enabling, allowing us to do more work.

So how might the future be different?

Perhaps society will become more focused on time savouring as opposed to time saving.

And the ultimate form of status will be to have the most time.

900 Words

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Is our love affair with consumption over?

Explores the subtle, yet profound shift in consumer thinking that poses the greatest threat to our current economic performance.

As perceptions of natural resources shift from abundance to limited, Australians are being shocked from their position of mindless consumption to a position of awareness - and the goalposts of what constitutes status are also shifting.

In a post materialistic world, rather than being celebrated or seen as a symbol of status, excessive consumption is likely to be perceived as a form of ignorant behaviour.

Forget the proposed carbon tax, or even the loss to internet sales; this new consumer paradigm represents the greatest challenge to existing business models going forward.

800 Words

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