< PreviousDECODING THE EXPONENTIAL FUTURET RYING TO decode the future often feels like trying to decrypt some confounding puzzle. There are billions of different possible combinations and outcomes, and trying to use brute force is just a hiding to nothing. However, with access to the right breadth and depth of insights putting the big picture together and forecasting what the future could look like and, perhaps more importantly, when and how it’s going to arrive - the What, How, and When of futures forecasting - although difficult certainly isn’t impossible. After all, as they say: The future is often hidden in plain sight. You just have to know where to look. In order to forecast the future as accurately as is practically possible I do my best to work with what I call full network insights. That is to say I work with the academics, entrepreneurs, governments, inventors, investors, multi- nationals, and regulators who are all in one way or another adopting, building, combining, developing, scaling, testing, or regulating tomorrow’s exponential technologies, products, and services, or concepts as I’ll call them from here on in. It’s this rich tapestry of contacts, that cuts across every geography and industry, combined with a deep understanding of how hundreds of exponential technologies can be combined together to solve challenging yet valuable problems that, in part at least, helps me to piece together our puzzle with a high level of accuracy and detail. But, as mentioned previously, and to re-iterate the point - it’s no easy feat. In order to decode the future you must look at many different things and connect many different “dots,” so it’s important to remember that while all the technologies in this codex play a vital role in helping shape the future, and it’s important you know and understand them, they’re only part of our puzzle. Inevitably, as I discuss in more detail later in this codex in the chapter Building Exponential Enterprises and in the separate How To Build Exponential Enterprises Codex - accurately decoding the exponential future relies on your ability to discover valuable problems worth solving, identifying the technology combinations that could be used to innovate solutions to them, and then tracking a host of market forces and metrics that, if they align, could make those concepts mainstream. Fail to track all of these and forecast out their future and not only will your forecasts be inaccurate but you could 61311institute.commiss by miles, and your concepts - if you’re building any - could quickly turn into expensive failures whose potential is never realised. BACK TO TECHNOLOGY Switching back to technology, since that’s what we’re focusing on in this particular codex, with so many different emerging technologies it’s inevitable that some of them will compliment each other and that some won’t. It’ll also be inevitable that some will be more impactful and world changing than others. Furthermore, when these new technologies do finally emerge from the R&D labs then it’s down to you and I, and increasingly our capable synthetic counterparts, the Creative Machines - which I also discuss later - to combine them to create tomorrow’s must have concepts. One of the greatest challenges for analysts, foresight teams, futurists, industry watchers, and investors alike however is the fact that all our dots can be combined in billions of new, unique, and exciting ways to create a limitless number of new concepts, and that seeing through the fog to pinpoint the most likely winners - the ones to bet on and watch closely - can be challenging. Furthermore, as the number of new technologies and dots increase over time this task only gets more complicated. Personally, and it’s more through experience than by design, I’ve found that if we are using a tech-first approach then the best way to cut through this fog is to divide the universe in twain. On the one hand we have the promising, individual emerging technologies, and on the other we have the problems they could be used to solve, the new concepts they could be used to create, and the markets. Evaluating the technologies comes first because unless a specific technology can be bought to market affordably and in the timeline we care about then it follows that it won’t get the opportunity to be used to create a concept. In which case we can rule it in or out of our foresight exercise. Then, once we’ve filtered them it’s a fairly straight forward process of ideating all of the different ways in which they can be combined together to create new concepts which can then be evaluated on their own merits and used to inform our future views. As you’ll see from this codex I’ve tried Notes: 62311institute.comNotes: 63311institute.com to make it easy for you, as easy as it can be under the circumstances, to quickly evaluate the maturity, merits, and status of the hundreds of the exponential technologies I track, after which you should then be able to categorise the ones that you feel are the most relevant to your industry or market, explore them in more detail, and develop a base you can work from as you progress through your forecasting program. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, as the borders between industries continues to erode, and as science fiction increasingly becomes science fact, the future will belong to those individuals and organisations that have the foresight to see change coming, and who are agile and strong enough to adapt to it, shape it, and lead it.DECODING EXPONENTIAL DISRUPTIONI F YOU step back a decade or so ago the word on everyone’s lips was innovation and, frankly, if you didn’t have it thrust into your face at least thirty times a day by every executive or ad man or woman you met then it’s likely because you were in a coma. Or dead. Or both. Fast forward to today and now they have a new buzz word - Disruption. But is disruption today as commonplace and accelerating as quickly as people will have us believe, or is it just hype and a word that executives and eager Silicon Valley startups throw around with impunity in the vain hope of convincing people that they’re innovating at the bleeding edge and pushing boundaries? Well my friend, let’s take a journey together. Let’s cut through the marketing fog, summit the hype cycle, and crack open an genetically modified beer while we raise cynical eyebrows and take a deeper look at the world that’s unfurling around us. 65311institute.comYOU ARE THE MOST POWERFUL YOU HAVE EVER BEEN The emergence of increasingly powerful exponential technologies that are increasingly decentralised, democratised and demonetised, now means that individuals have more power than ever before to create exponential products that change the world at an increasingly furious rate.cheaper and simpler to access and use, we are also seeing the power that individuals have to transform the world become magnified as well. The result of all this is that today, and then even more so tomorrow, that not only will the rate of change continue to accelerate, in old fashioned cyclical terms, but that the impact of those individual changes will continue to be magnified as well. The combination of these two factors, especially as they continue to be further amplified and magnified over time, will then have titanic consequences on our society, for better and worse - consequences that, arguably, we’re not prepared for. A POWERFULLY HEALTHY EXAMPLE In order to demonstrate this point, that individuals can increasingly change industries at global scale for increasingly paltry sums of money, let’s run through an example, just one of possible millions. Traditionally if you’d wanted to give the billions of people on the planet who don’t have access to primary or secondary healthcare access to potentially life saving services you would have had to have built out expensive infrastructure and hired professional staff at the cost of many billions of dollars. Today, however, suitably skilled students can access one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms for free, develop an algorithmic model in just a few weeks, integrate it with the camera and sensors on an internet connected smartphone, and now, all of a sudden, you have a smart device that can diagnose everything from ADHD, cancers, and disease, as well as the onset of dementia, diabetes, heart disease, and PTSD for free with above a 90 percent accuracy. That’s revolutionary, and now just think of the impact of that - access to free healthcare, albeit in particular niches for now, anywhere on Earth on tap. And that is just one of the millions examples of how today individuals, not just corporations, are changing the world we live in for the better by using increasingly powerful technologies and tools. YOUR POWER AND POTENTIAL . MAGNIFIED. D ISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES are nothing new. After all, the wheel was disruptive, and even the humble screwdriver was disruptive in its own right, let alone the myriad of other technologies we could spend a lifetime discussing. But when it comes to discussing the speed and impact that new digital and physical products can have on the world at large today it’s very different from the times of old. Today, for example, it is easier than ever before for a single individual to find problems to solve and innovate, produce, and distribute their products at global scale at a speed that would have been unimaginable even just a decade ago, and in doing so have an out sized impact on the future. However, this is all just the beginning, especially when you then consider that the products themselves are infinitely more capable and powerful than ever as well. As a consequence of all these factors as all these powerful innovations and technologies become increasingly democratised, decentralised, digitised, and demonetised, in short become 67311institute.comTECHNOLOGY FUELLED DISRUPTION IS ACCELERATING As increasingly powerful exponential technologies emerge and are democratised, with computing power being just one example, and as the world becomes increasingly digital and connected industry disruption times plummet.Just like their forbears though today’s entrepreneurs still have to be skilled enough to discover customer frictions and valuable problems worth solving, but unlike their forbears they now have access to technologies, tools, resources and finally markets that are a match for their lofty ambitions. As a consequence it is now easier than ever before for one individual to disrupt the status quo faster than ever before, and as more of the world’s population goes online, and as technologies and tools become even more powerful, this is a trend that is only going to accelerate which is why, over the past century the average time that it takes to disrupt a global industry has fallen from 90 years to just a few years. However, as we’ll see in the next section, soon disrupting a global industry within just a few years will seem slow ... THE ACCELERATING RATE OF DISRUPTION . T HE CORRELATION is obvious, but it’s worth discussing nevertheless. If you want to disrupt the status quo, or an individual organisation or industry, it’s not just good enough to have the technologies, tools, and resources that you need to bring your idea to life, but you also need to be able to get it into the hands of as many consumers as possible as fast as possible. Historically when products were predominantly physical, not digital, and the only markets that entrepreneurs had easy access to were local ones, trying to disrupt anything at speed and scale, let alone a global industry, was not only an immense challenge but it also took an inordinately long time and cost a staggering amount of money to achieve. The consequence of this was that ultimately the rate of disruption was quite slow. Today, however, increasingly digitised products and an increasingly connected society now means it’s easier than ever before for entrepreneurs and organisations alike to take their idea global - in the blink of a digital eye. 69311institute.com FREE DOWNLOAD THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY CREATE . BUILD . LAUNCH CODEXNext >