Introducing the One-Person Business Empire: An Option Most VCs want you to Overlook What are the odd of you ending up age 65-70 and having regretted your entire life? As people edge towards retirement, reflective moments like this can be a gut wrenching experience. If...
Micro Credits: A Tool for Self-Organizing the Complex World of Education A recent TEDx talk about solving traffic jams started by asking the simple question, “Who is in charge of the daily bread supply for the city of London?” Food supply chains have become enormously...
What, in your mind, will be the most powerful entity in the world 100 years from now? As we look around us today, it’s easy to point to a single nation as being the most powerful. But will that still be true 100 years from now? The most powerful entities in the future...
Tax Code 2.0: Is Extreme Complexity the New Simplicity? When was the last time you used Google’s search engine? Were the results more or less relevant than the searches you did a year ago? Early on, after Google had developed its breakthrough search algorithms, they...
When Prisons Become Illegal The first time I watched Star Trek and heard Captain Kirk utter the phrase – “Set your phasers to stun!” – it occurred to me that these future weapons featured a number of different settings. While most people assumed a simple...
Entering the Era of Global Mandates The year is 2018 and the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the organization charged with selecting the winner of the famous Nobel Peace Prize, has changed their process. They’ve decided to host a global election to allow the people of the...
Four Unexpected Macro Trends for 2013 and Beyond There is great value in theunknown. My good friend Jeff Samson put it this way. “If I am ignorant of something and it is suddenly presented to me, I may find it innovative. The other option is that I will be annoyed by...
Eight Shocking Quotes from 2012 that will Redefine Our Future When is the last time you heard a statement that caused you to stop dead in your tracks? It doesn’t happen very often, but for each of us, there are a few unusual sound bites that will permeate our senses...
Moving from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time Living How many extra shavers, bars of soap, or cans of soup do you currently have on your shelves at home? How much money do you currently have tied up in “inventory” of typical household items? What if you could get by...
Will Big Data Destroy the Stock Market? When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true...
The Future of the Visual Arts On Nov 26-28th, I will be speaking at the Creative Innovations 2012 event in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the conference will be “Wicked Problems, Great Opportunities! Leadership and courage for volatile times.” With over 50 key...
Creating a Global Language Archive For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct? According to Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, one of the world’s languages dies every 14...
Entering the Legal Marijuana Era – Finding the Pitfalls and Profits in the Years Ahead It may sound silly to walk into a bar and order up a beer with a weed chaser or to open a late night box of cereal called “Weedies” to help you sleep, but that is exactly the...
Replacing Our Physical Infrastructure with Digital Infrastructure In the 1980s, as a young human factors engineer at IBM, I spent much of my time working with anthropometric tables, a compilation of statistical data about the human body used for designing a...
Will Future Mobility Lead to Future Instability? In 2008, I was asked to speak at the Leaders in Dubai Conference along with several world famous speakers like former NYC Mayor Rudy Giulliani, Tom Peters, and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn. Attending the...
Making the Post Office Invisible In July 2011, as a cost cutting measure, the U.S. Postal Service put together a list of 3,700 post offices that it wanted to close. Like most organizations that have faced a full frontal assault by online automation and technology, the...
Inventing the Future When Charles Corry walked onto the stage of the Shark Tank-like Piranha Pit at Saturday’s DaVinci Inventor Showcase, his iExpander product was still $6,000 away from making the goal of $125,000 on Kickstarter. As of this morning, he has not only...
Inventing the 3D Pill Printer The next big innovation in healthcare may very well be a printer. But this is no ordinary printer. Professor Lee Cronin heads up a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University in Scotland. His team has figured out how to turn...
Empowering “Things” for Our Internet of Things In much the same way that we now expect every child’s toy to talk, in the future, we will expect virtually everything we own to be connected to the Internet. Our mushrooming “Internet of Things” is growing exponentially,...
In Search of the Next Great Addiction Is the cool glow of a smartphone the sure sign of an addict? “What exactly do you do here, I’ve been meaning to ask. Because I’m the producer, right? I cook. But from what I can tell, you are just a drug addict! You...
Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on your television and it instantly knew what show you wanted to watch? We all dream of an easier life, so what if we got into our car and it knew where we wanted to go, or turned on a radio and it played the perfect music, or...
Driverless Highways: Creating Cars that Talk to the Roads Yesterday I had the privilege of speaking at a conference on the “Future of Mobility” in Shanghai, China. The event was produced by the very forward thinking people at Lanxess, a German-based chemical company...
Creating the ‘Builders’ of Our Future As something of a grand finale to their 11-week, full-immersion Ruby on Rails class, our first graduating class of DaVinci Coders took the stage on Demo Day to talk about the projects they worked on. To me it was quite remarkable...
Competing with Robots During the late 1990s business and industry began to panic over the issues surrounding Y2K, which later turned out to be mostly manufactured fear. In the chaotic world around us, it has become increasingly difficult to separate genuine problems...
Building Remarkable Communities of the Future In the late 1980s I was still working at IBM, but had taken on a number of side projects to expand my horizons. One of those projects was working with the City of Denver on the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport. At the...
Four Key Trends Driving the Future of Patents In July, David Kappos, Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, announced expansion plans for the USPTO that would involve opening satellite offices in Denver, Dallas, and San Francisco. These coupled with the...
False Wisdom of Crowds If you had a choice of flying from Boston to San Diego in a plane piloted by a single machine or the combined intelligence of 3,000 people, which would you choose? Perhaps you would want more information before making that decision. If the...
The Threat of a Jobless World People are seriously worried. I’ve been in a number of conversations recently where people are very worried about our coming era of automation where fewer and fewer jobs will be left for people to do. A few months ago I predicted that...
Peter Thiel’s Quest for Creating a Viable Global Currency In 2003 the DaVinci Institute produced a landmark event called “The Future of Money Summit” which took place at the Omni Hotel in Broomfield, CO. One of the featured speakers was Bernard Lietaer, chief...
Workerless Businesses: An Explosive New Trend The world was suddenly awakened to the potential for niche markets that appeal to an increasingly diverse consumer marketplace. In business terms, it gave rise to the notion of online businesses selling relatively small...
Over the 4th of July, I attended a theatrical production of the history of my hometown of Mobridge, SD. The actors and actresses did a terrific job of illustrating the tough times of the early pioneers trying to forge a new life along the Missouri River in barren...
Turmoil Ahead for the Automotive Industry In 1954, Brook Stevens, a well-known industrial designer gave a keynote speech at an advertising conference titled “Planned Obsolescence.” By his definition, planned obsolescence was “instilling in the buyer the desire to own...
In 1997 Reed Hasting returned his copy of “Apollo 13” to the video store and was hit with a late fee so big that he was embarrassed to tell his wife about it. Out of this moment of humiliation the idea for Netflix was born, a business that would eventually take down...
The Curse of Infrastructure Every time I drive to the office there are 11 separate stoplights along my route. Based on some cosmic luck-of-the-draw, two thirds of the stoplights will either be red or green, and the time it takes me will vary from 12 to 22 minutes....
56 Future Accomplishments: Waiting for Someone to go First On May 24th, Gary Connery, a 42 year old stuntman from Oxfordshire, England jumped from a helicopter hovering over one mile in the air over southern England, and glided to the earth using a specially designed...
When Countries Go Bankrupt In December 2006, Britain made its final payment of $84 million on a $4.34 billion loan from the U.S. that was made all the way back in 1945. Germany wasn’t the only country to go bankrupt after WWII. This money allowed Britain to stave off...
Transforming the Future of the Insurance Industry The insurance industry exists as a tool for mitigating the costs and damage associated with a single incident occurring for an individual or organization. But this is nothing new. The Babylonians developed an early...
Inventing Our Next Great Scarcities Scarcity is defined as an economic condition that arises when people have far greater wants than the available resources. Most often we think about the limited supplies of natural resources, but it includes far more than that. As an...
The Rise of the SuperProfessor For colleges and universities, the great age of experimentation is now upon us. Last week, Harvard and MIT announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities. The Minerva Project...
Eight Critical Value Points of a Futurist As a Futurist, people often ask me how many of my predictions have come true. I find this to be a rather uncomfortable question. It’s uncomfortable, not because my track record hasn’t been up to par (actually, a high...
Pre-Testing Your Right to Vote Every couple years, as the November election draws near, my wife Deb and I receive our ballots in the mail. Both of us spend considerable time studying the issues and candidates before making our final decisions. As with most couples, we...
Teacherless Education and the Competition that will Change Everything Over the past couple months I’ve become enamored with watching my two-year-old nephew Mikaia learn the letters of the alphabet, colors, and numbers. Even though he doesn’t have them all perfect,...
Creating a ‘Ripple in the Force’ of the Power Industry Working with many early stage inventors, I often have the privilege of seeing some truly remarkable inventions and innovations. A few days ago I was shown a technology that snugly fits into that remarkable...
Printable Houses and the Massive Wave of Opportunity it will bring to Our Future All the way back in March of 2004, working in his laboratory at the University of Southern California in San Diego, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, was working with a new process he had invented...
14 Global Projects that could Make You the World’s Next Billionaire The super-connected nature of the Internet is giving us a far different “opportunity landscape” than ever before in history. Unlike the painstakingly slow 400-year period between DaVinci’s...
The Coming Coder Wars In the late 1980s, I spent some time as a mainframe programmer at IBM. Conversations around the water cooler often had to do with some of the cryptic code written 2-3 decades earlier, buried deep within the system, that was incomprehensible to...
When Death Becomes Optional The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can either keep repairing your current body or move into a new one. The growing of “blank” bodies has become all the rage, and by...
Future Libraries and 17 Forms of Information Replacing Books Question: As physical books go away, and computers and smart devices take their place, at what point does a library stop being a library, and start becoming something else? Somewhere in the middle of this...
The 5-Year Pipeline Five years ago was the beginning of 2007. George Bush was President, Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, Barack Obama wasn’t very well known, and Saddam Hussein had just been executed in Iraq. Five years ago the Dow Jones was on a...
Rethinking Retail and 18 Examples of Change What music comes to mind when you try on your new pair of jeans? Does that “music in your head” somehow change when you try on a different brand? The next time you try on a piece of jewelry, pay very close attention to the...
Dismantling of our Power Industry Infrastructure On Wednesday I was invited to speak on a panel at the 2012 National Electricity Forum, an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, in Washington DC. In the audience were a thousand power industry executives,...
2 Billion Jobs to Disappear by 2030 A picture of me speaking at yesterday’s TEDxReset in Istanbul. Yesterday I was honored to be one of the featured speakers at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul, Turkey where I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will...
Crowdfunding: 23 Unusual Ways it May be Applied November 2009 was when Michael Migliozzi and Brian Flatow started a website called BuyaBeerCompany.com who’s lofty goal was to buy the ailing century old Pabst Blue Ribbon beer company. In less than two years,...
Driverless Cars: A Driving Force Coming to a Future Near You If you were traveling between Boston and Washington, DC, and had the choice of either flying or riding in a driverless car, which would you choose? Under good conditions this is an 8.5-hour drive vs. 4-5...
25 Technologies I Didn’t See at CES After spending the past three days scouring the showroom floors at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, watching people become overwhelmed by what they saw, I tended to be more underwhelmed by what I didn’t see....
Power to the People: The Great Consumer Backlash On December 29th, Verizon announced it would begin charging a $2 “convenience fee” for any customers paying monthly bills with a credit or debit card via the Internet or telephone. Within 24 hours, online...
Year in Review: Top 10 Articles on FuturistSpeaker.com The sixth law of the future states, “The “unknowability” of the future is what gives us our drive and motivation.” The fact that the future is unknowable is a good thing. Our involvement in the game of...
Flooring the Customer: Retail 2.0, The Rebirth is Coming “High expectations are the key to everything” – – Sam Walton On a recent shopping trip, I went to three separate stores and had difficulty finding what I was looking for. On each of these occasions I...
28 Major Trends for 2012 and Beyond – Part 2 Understanding trends is more of an art form than an exact science. But for those who can read the tealeaves, and make bold moves, leveraging trends can give them a serious competitive advantage. As an example, LinkedIn just...
28 Major Trends for 2012 and Beyond – Part 1 We are in for a very exciting year ahead. 2012 is a year where many competing trends will collide, and through those collisions we will see new pathways emerge. At the same time, many new trends are forming, some with...
Are Floating Incubators a Precursor to Floating Countries? Between 1990 and 2005, immigrants created 25% of all the publicly traded companies in the U.S. These included some of our best-known businesses such as Intel, Sun, eBay, Yahoo, and Google. This same group of...
Eight Colliding Forces of 2012 If you listen closely you can almost hear the armaments of battle being rolled into place. The stage is set with warring parties getting organized and the frontlines prepared. 2012 is destined to become the most turbulent year on record,...
The Coming Collapse of Bitcoin? In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away...
Could Warren Buffett Buy Italy? Warren Buffett owns many things, but so far owning his own country is not one of them. In 2008 I gave a talk to an audience of 1,200 at the “Leaders in Dubai Business Forum” along with a dozen other global thought leaders that included...
55 Future Jobs of the Future “There is no future in any job. The future lies in the person who holds the job.” – George W. Crane One of my primary complaints with higher education is that they tend to prepare students for jobs of the past. The way a Midwesterner...
The Enormous Power of the Slow Link Anyone driving down a typical stretch of highway in the U.S. will encounter an endless barrage of traffic signs designed to dampen our aggressiveness, forcing drivers to drive slower. At the time, our speeds in the digital world are...
Accomplishment-Based Education Today, our best and brightest are drawn to elite colleges like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and Yale. As they attend these institutions they are surrounded by some of the most talented people in the world. Yet, despite having all...
Invasion of the Digital Body Cloud Imagine walking up to a building and having it recognize you. Not only does it recognize you, but it also makes changes in temperature, lighting, and music to make you feel like you’re at home. Maybe it’s not a building, but a car, a...
The Coming Food Printer Revolution Would you buy a product that was advertised as “Naturally grown, completely organic, printed food?” Anyone who has an apple tree growing in their yard knows how difficult it is to grow one that is worthy of eating straight off the...
Tapping into the Secret Language of Plants Over that past week I’ve had the great honor of working with both the good people at the North Dakota Bankers Association in Bismarck, ND and the good people at Rabobank in Napa, CA on the rapidly evolving topic of the future...
Why Industries Collapse It was roughly two years ago, October 15, 2009, when I got a call from a desperate lady, panicking, as she asked for my help. Being a futurist, I don’t get many calls from people who urgently need my help. Futurists are rarely first responders....
Introducing the Perpetual Self-Updating Book As I’m writing this column, there are currently 466,302 mobile apps available for the iPhone and 512,542 mobile apps available to download on an Android phone. Combined with all of the apps for Blackberries, Windows 7...
Four Fundamental Myths Derailing Academic Change When we think about Benjamin Franklin, we instantly think of the author, scientist, inventor, diplomat who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and has his face on the one-hundred dollar bill. Ben Franklin was a...
The Great Information Wall of China Over the past couple years, internet-fueled uprisings in Egypt, Lybia, Syria, and other parts of the world have made Chinese officials very nervous. They have exerted a firm hand in controlling any communications deemed detrimental...
Eight False Promises of the Internet In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA. At the time we were interested in hiring him to be the keynote speaker at our upcoming Future of Money Summit, an event that would take place in...
Visionaries Wanted – No Need to Apply, Just Do It If Steve Jobs had never lived, would we still have the iPhone and iPad today? Similarly, if Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Pete Diamandis had all taken jobs on Wall Street instead of living their lives as true...
Tracking Trends in VideoCam Technology Many dental offices today use a device called an intraoral camera to show patients why they need a root canal. With little more than a camera on the end of a lighted wand, the technology gives people a new insider perspective...
Living in an Age of Hyper-Awareness It’s amazing how a single newscast can set the world on fire. The very second Standard & Poor’s announced they had downgraded the U.S. Credit rating, communications systems around the world began to boil. Reaction time was...
Rethinking the Court of Public Opinion American TV personality Ryan Seacrest has a grim look on his face as he walks briskly across the stage. Turning to the camera, he pauses briefly before saying, “You have heard the arguments, listened to the experts, and seen the...
Hoping the Crime Rate Goes Up Driving across America we find ourselves constantly driving through invisible barriers where new laws come into play and old ones fade away. We have no clue as to what laws they are, or even how many, but these laws have the potential to...
Reinventing Monopolies In 1936 Edwin Howard Armstrong unveiled an improvement in radio that would later become known as FM radio. Working out of an office on the 82nd floor of the Empire State Building, an office provided by RCA, Armstrong was on the verge of...
Introducing: Eight Grand Challenges for Humanity On Sunday I gave the closing keynote at the World Future Society’s “WorldFuture 2011″ event in Vancouver, BC. It was an energized crowd of inspired thinkers from around the globe, and I felt quite honored to be part of...
Micro-jobs and the emerging underground economy For them, it becomes painfully obvious that their lackluster effort to find a job, which often involves playing video games and watching TV interspersed with sending an occasional resume or phone call, has left them with...
Global System Architects – Tomorrow’s New Power Brokers I often describe the future with human-like characteristics. By doing so, it helps me think through our relationship with the future in novel ways. So here is an example of this: The future hates...
Building a Rapid Job-Creation Engine Two hundred years ago, the most stable jobs involved the needs of a community and the work of a skilled craftsman to meet those needs. People holding jobs such as cobblers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and butchers found themselves in...
The Rise of the Cause-Architect In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the famous Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that granted some freedom to slaves. But true freedom was still a century away for those who lived in the black vs. white world leading up...
When Wikipedia No Longer Matters When the disruptors become the disrupted At what point will Wikipedia no longer matter? I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I predict a competitor will emerge to steal the majority of both mindshare and eyeballs from Wikipedia...
Inventing the Rocking Chair Tree On Tuesday evening we had a packed audience at the DaVinci Institute to discuss the future of micro farming. Admittedly, we weren’t terribly well organized and the range of topics we touched on were far more than most of us could...
Education as an App In March of 2007 I posted my original paper on the Future of Education where I talked about a system based on an iTunes-like approach where experts around the world could use a “rapid courseware-builder” to produce bite-sized courses, send them to...
TEDxUChicago 2011 – Communicating with the Future Futurist Thomas Frey at the TEDx University of Chicago event We are a very backward looking society. We’re very backward looking in that we’ve all personally experienced the past. As we look around, we see...
Direct to the People – Bypassing the Brokers It has always seemed outrageous to me that in a world where so many people are dying of obesity, that we can still have an equally unacceptable number of people dying of starvation. Approximately 25% of the world’s...
Signaling the Rebirth of Turkish Education This was a photo I took of the audience from stage On April 30th I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote to a group of over 1,200 VIPs at the International Education Forum II: “Innovation in...
Prize Competition #2: Viewing the Past Do we even know what time is? Yes, we see the seconds clicking away on clocks, sunrise followed by sunset, tides coming in and going out, seasons changing from one to another, and little trees growing into big trees. These are...
The Grand Experiment – Micro Agronomy On Sunday, April 17th I had the privilege of being the opening speaker at the TEDx event at the University of Chicago. The lineup of speakers was quite impressive and I felt honored to be presenting on the same stage with...
Next Generation Home Ownership Most young people today are asking the very simple question, “Why should I buy a home?” In the past answers were always framed around phrases like “rapid appreciation,” “good tax write-off,” “long-term investment,” and “building equity.”...
Eight Critical Skills for the Future On Monday evening I presented my thoughts on the “Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals” at our monthly Night with a Futurist event. My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion with three of the industry’s brightest...
Rethinking the Future of Health Care It wasn’t what I had planned on a 70 degree day last week when “springtime in the Rockies” was in full bloom. But I was on my way to the hospital, and over the next 24 hours I would learn much about a healthcare industry that is...
Nano-Fabrics and Nano-Coatings in the Future Nano-Netting – Super strong nano fibers so small they are invisible to the human eye, giving the illusion of being suspended in air Imagine walking into a store in the future, a store whose business is comprised solely of...
Creating Holes in the Fabric of the Future I often get asked the question, “How do you become a futurist?” When I get this question, I know that the person asking is secretly thinking that being a futurist is one of the coolest professions of all times, which it is....
The Day of the Drone is Upon Us Sometime over the coming months you can expect to see a version of the following help wanted ad: “Help Wanted: Full-time aerial drone drivers needed to help manager our growing fleet of surveillance, delivery, and communication drones....
