With support from The Rockefeller Foundation, Foresight Alliance recently completed an 18-month research project on the global future of work and workers. Our report,The Futures of Work, is intended to help the philanthropic and development communities understand and address the challenges that poor and vulnerable workers may meet going forward. But the changing nature of work…
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We’ve spent much of the last year looking at the future of work. For me that study raises a further question: What’s the future of the meaning of work? Turns out that the TED Radio Hour recently did a series of presentations on The Meaning of Work. Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College,…
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Lately I’ve been wondering if the future of work in the developed world and the future of work in the developing world are converging in some important ways. Let me explain by introducing a fascinating scenario for the future of innovation in Africa. In 2013 the Open A.I.R. project (Open African Innovation, Research, and Training)…
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I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since a trip to the wonderful Aquarium du Québec in Quebec City last summer. There I saw, among many other interesting things, a poster comparing the odds of being attacked by a shark to the odds of experiencing various other traumatic events. Unfortunately I’ve lost my photo…
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Foresight is all about the present. Sounds paradoxical, but I firmly believe it. Let me explain. What started me on this train of thought is a passage in The Screwtape Letters, 20th century scholar C. S. Lewis’ droll version of advice offered to a junior devil by his more experienced uncle Screwtape. In one of…
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Back in April I had a chance to visit MetroCrops, an urban high-density indoor farm started by two of my friends here in Connecticut. Steve and Nancy Domyan and a small staff grow lettuce in 2,200 square feet of converted factory space in Bridgeport. Hydroponics, LED lights, and a controlled climate allow them to produce…
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Personalization has been on everyone’s list of important trends for more than a decade. But in high-volume consumer goods it’s hard to execute in a cost-effective way. Here are two prominent examples I ran into during travels last fall. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, including printed bottles with first names, debuted in Australia in 2012…
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tcawireless .com/blog/ In March 2014 in London, in a closing keynote address to the Wearable Technology Conference, Cisco chief futurist David Evans forecast that the ongoing miniaturization of technology would lead to its installation inside the human body. “If you do the math and fast forward a little bit, in about two and half decades…
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Three recent scan hits show how work, workers, and even innovative offerings are shifting away from the traditional corporate setting. 1.Work is moving away from the office. A recent New York Times article on telecommuting noted that a 2013 survey for the Society for Human Resource Management found “a greater increase in the number of…
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An overly optimistic view of the future can be a precursor to negative outcomes, according to a recent study in Psychological Science. The authors found that during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis positive statements about the future on the economy page of USA Today correlated with declines in the Dow Jones Industrial average in…
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