Opportunities · Strategic foresight
We help governments and organisations plan for the futures they face. The projects below are the ones we most want to do next: each is a question we have already worked on, generalised so that it can start anywhere.
Exploration · Digital sovereignty
A diagnostic for the firms a government supports: where each one's data sits, which cloud and chips it depends on, who owns its intellectual property, where its talent comes from, and its legal and economic exposure. Firm by firm, then a city picture of where the digital economy is resilient and where it needs investment.
Design · Accountable AI
When a company lets an AI agent book, approve or pay, three design choices decide whether customers, partners and regulators trust it: a record of what it did and with whose data, the points where a person must approve, and a way to put errors right. We build these into a cohort of companies' agents and write them up as a playbook; the tools that playbook calls for become a market of their own.
Exploration · Collaborative digital resources
The health data a city generates belongs to the city and its residents as a whole. Research environments where the question travels to the data, member-owned data cooperatives, federated commons: a study of which model fits, and of how its value is measured.
Envisioning · Modelling
An agent-based model in which founders, investors, banks, regulators, support programmes, talent and competing hubs each have their interests and likely moves. Played forward thousands of times, it shows which conditions open the path and which close it, so support packages can be tested before they are committed to.
Design · Digital infrastructure
As a government unifies its services: shared, open, reusable components that it owns, and a route by which a start-up moves from a successful pilot to a contract. The components let small firms plug in; the route is how they get paid.
Foundation · Data sovereignty
A governed scheme that lets licensed start-ups work with selected non-public government data. Access is logged, the data stays in the jurisdiction, and improvements and value flow back on agreed terms.
Foundation · Collaborative digital resources
Fishermen and farmers, or hotels and tour operators, pool the data their own work generates, govern how it is reused and gain bargaining power with buyers and platforms. The legal route, the cooperative's design and the value case first, then a pilot in one sector.
Foundation · Universities
A new university hosts standing partnerships of academia, digital firms and government, each formed around one shared digital resource, with terms written in from the start so that contributors keep what they bring and share in what it produces. The engine finds the partners, designs the relations and spawns the next network.
Six questions our foresight research set out to answer. Open one to read the write-up.
Projections for 2050 show that the world might have a 60% calorie deficit if it has to feed 9 billion people. Furthermore, the link with water, an already stressed and scarce commodity that is needed for food production, creates an amplified crisis.
As we move towards brighter and desired futures, the questions we have to ask are:
We live in a world where governments, corporations and even individuals are reaching for the moon, the stars and beyond. Space is now crowded — in terms of opportunity, in terms of concepts and physically, with all manner of satellites and debris whizzing by each other. There is no space race anymore, because the new objectives and the landscape of players have expanded almost exponentially.
Looking forward, what might meaningful space ambitions resemble?
By 2050, the world might have over 2 billion people aged 60+. Historically, senior citizens control a significant majority (over 80%) of the world's wealth. Contrary to conventional wisdom, entrepreneurial activity is the highest in the 55-64 age group. Globally, senior citizens will continue to be an important vote bank and consumer of services.
But as millennials and future generations turn 60:
Nature's capital is defined as the stock of renewable and non-renewable natural resources (e.g. plants, animals, air, water, soils, minerals) that combine to provide benefits to humanity. Natural capital has long been considered “free”, which allows us to take it for granted, but when climate change or pollution affects nature, economies are threatened too. The wealth of a nation or a business is more than just what people and machines can produce.
This research theme investigates what a reconfigured world would look like when nature's capital is taken into account:
Your devices and wearables are collecting data on your organ functions. Implants have helped patients with paralysis to make things move, and will soon be able to control more bodily functions. Tech companies are actively (and successfully) working on reading your mind, and we have no control over the extent of the technologies' abilities.
'Mind-mining' will happen very soon, and many questions abound:
Cancer is one of the world's biggest killers, accounting for 9.6 million deaths in 2018. However, just calling it a 'disease' doesn't do cancer justice. We all produce cancerous cells in our body everyday — but our immune system manages these. Cancer is better thought of as a condition where abnormal cells grow uncontrollably. It can happen anywhere in the body, and there are more than 200 types and sub-types. A future without cancer therefore might not necessarily mean eradication, but revisiting concepts such as incidence, mortality rates, prevention measures and access (to knowledge and care), in order to better understand success.
In 2050:
The work behind this practice: case studies in strategic foresight