This article was taken from the June 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Spotting the future is an art. We asked eight of our favourite visionaries for their techniques.
Paul Saffo Saffo is a managing director at the Silicon Valley investment research firm Discern. Formerly the director of the Institute for the Future, he is also a consulting professor in Stanford University's engineering department.
I look for contradictions, inversions, oddities and coincidences. In 2007 stock prices and gold prices were both soaring. Usually you don't see those prices high at the same time.
Contradictions like that means change is ahead.
An inversion is something that's out of place. When the Mexican police captured the head of a drug cartel, in the photos the perpetrators were looking proudly at the camera -- the cops wore ski masks. It told me that Mexico was far from winning its drug war.
Then there are oddities. The Roomba robot vacuum got all the engineers I know very excited, and I don't recall them owning vacuums. I said, this is not about cleaning floors, this is about scratching some kind of itch. It's about something happening with robots.
Finally, coincidences: robots at the Darpa Grand Challenge in 2007 successfully drove in a simulated suburb. The same day, there was a 118-car pileup on a California highway. That said to me, really, people shouldn't drive.
Juan Enriquez Enriquez (Wired 10.11) is managing director at Excel Medical Ventures and chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a Boston investment firm. He is the author of As the Future Catches You.
A clear view of the future is often obstructed by taking too much for granted. Like: "We are the human species".
Really? When you consider Cro-Magnon, Australopithecus, etc, we've had 29 upgrades. So unless you believe that the purpose of all of this evolution was to create Rush Limbaugh and then flatline, you have to ask: Is it possible to have another upgrade? It's when we question our most cherished assumptions that it gets really interesting to play with this stuff.
Luis Cilimingras Cilimingras is business lead at IDEO London.
When designing for the future it's fascinating to analyse the gap between people's perceptions of their actions (what they say) and the data (what they do). The proliferation of data sources means we can explore people's behaviours in more ways than ever, often before they're even aware of it themselves. The opportunity is designing services that respond to this reality gap.
Esther Dyson Dyson is an angel investor in technology, healthcare and space-travel companies.
I spend a lot of time not just in New York but in Russia and in other far-off places. Any time you approach something as an outsider, you're able to see what people who are familiar with it can't. I love seeing how many different ways there are to do things. The other thing is to be curious. My parents are both scientists, so I learned to ask "Why, why, why?" I look at what I'm interested in, and that doesn't mean it's what the world will find interesting.
Christian Lindholm Lindholm is chief innovation officer at Fjord, a digital service design company headquartered in London.
I constantly observe people, particularly teenagers and late adopters; they help to build insight by following a juxtaposition. I combine this insight with gadget usage and interest in emerging technologies. Also, I follow markets for transformation and disruption opportunities.
What trumps all trends is "elegantly simple" solutions, things that get an "of course" reaction when users experience <span class="s1">them. Whenever I see an "of course" <span class="s2">innovation within a market ripe for disruption, that's the future. The world is full of clues.
Joi Ito Ito is director of the MIT Media Lab and the former CEO of Creative Commons.
I believe in serendipity, and in the strength of weak ties. Agility is essential. Your ability to respond to a suddenly emerging trend is most important. During the financial crisis, the companies that were successful were prepared for anything. Most of the people had prepared for the wrong things.
Instead of being a futurist, you want to be a nowist.
Vint Cerf Cerf is chief internet evangelist at Google.
I like Alan Kay's comment: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Sometimes spotting the future is really a question of realising what's now possible and actually trying it out. In my case, working with Bob Kahn
[co-inventor of TCP/IP], what became the internet was not possible until certain economic conditions were satisfied -- equipment had to be affordable, certain kinds of technology had to be available.
Some things get invented because it becomes possible to invent them.
Chris Sacca Sacca invests in early-stage startups through his firm, Lowercase Capital.
How do I spot the future? Two words: flux capacitor. We VCs get too much credit for predicting the future.
I invest in live URLs and apps that I can download. I search Twitter to see what actual users are saying about something I want to invest in: Is it buggy? Is it a pain in the ass? Are they evangelising it? After seeing hundreds of positive mentions of Heroku on Twitter, I was in. Salesforce ended up buying it for $225 million (£139 million).
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
