Future Agenda

PDF of Book now available

Book off to printers so in meantime here is pdf of whole book. This summarises the outputs of the multiple discussions from the past 12 months and hopefully provides a unique view of the next 10 years for you to use.

Future of Cities and Transport

Very good Future Agenda breakfast event this morning in Brussels on the Future of Cities and Transport. 20 plus experts from across many related domains from trains, cars and bikes through to planners, architects and policy makers were excellently brought together by Paul Adamson and team at The Centre. Different views from others we have heard and a great centre of focus. Tonight we have another session over dinner looking more at how Europe can best make use of programmes like the Future Agenda: Should be an interesting debate!

Brussels for a day or two

Heading of to Brussels for a couple of days for two breakfast workshops and a dinner. Good to be tapping into the EU expertise etc as well and connecting with some more multinational organisations. First event is on future of cities and transport. Second is on future of waste and water - great to have Nicky Chambers from Best Foot Forward (and co-founder of Water Strategies) along for that one.

India Dates

India workshops now all getting rescheduled after the February passport glitch. Full week from 7th to 12 June with events in Delhi and Mumbai in planning. One of the Delhi ones will be at ICRIER and involve Rajiv Kumar who authored the original future of currency perspective. Although later than originally planned, great to have these in the diary and adding extra views into the mix in time for inclusion in the book and new website

Website Development

Another good session at CITIN with John Cass and the team this morning discussing potential to collaborate on the new website development. Aim is to have a common platform that allows people to have a really good navigation experience while also getting access to all the key insights and relationships. More to be discussed but looks good at outline stage

Energy, Water and Waste

Another good workshop this lunchtime at the British Council in London. Covered energy, water and waste and looked at them all in the light of climate change and likely impacts. Great contribution from David Viner who was until recently at UEA focused on climate change.

RCA Project all going ahead

Brilliant news just in: The IDE dept of the RCA are going to be using insights from the Future Agenda programme as stimulus for new design concepts.

Should be a great opportunity to see how future leading edge designers react to the debate as they create new concepts to address some of the challenges and opportunities being covered.

Z_Punkt Participation

Leading German foresight company Z_punkt is also joining in the Future Agenda programme in the New Year. Cornelia Daheim, Managing Director of Z-punkt, is now part of the core team bringing together the key insights and Z-punkt will be involved in a number of workshops over the next couple of months.

Warwick Business School - Connections

Morning trip with Vodafone to Warwick Business School to discuss Future Agenda programme and interest etc. Small world x 3 experience as Deputy Dean is now Simon Collinson who I met at 1992 R&D Management Conference in Pisa, David Elmes is leading the Global Energy MBA - and I worked with David at Gemini and thirdly, collaboration taking place with Julian Birkinshaw and Gary Hamel at LBS, who I know as Strategos, which he founded, and Innovaro, which I started, are now the same firm. Anyhow, once got those connections made - as well as the relationship with Warwick Manufacturing Group and the International Digital Lab and Lucy Hooberman who have known from when she was at the BBC.... then great chat about possibilities - looks like lots of reasons to collaborate!

Future of Authenticity Workshop

First of a host of cross-organisation workshops took place this morning at the Covent Garden Hotel in London. Great mix of really insightful people from academia, industry and NGOs addressing the future of authenticity topic. The output and key insights will be shared as 'workshop feedback' over the weekend, but, for me, just after the event, the discussion was notable for three things:

• Although we started with authenticity, it was apparent that authentication, identity, networks and the whole issue of fake are going to take different courses as we go forward. As Diane Coyle's starting point of view suggested, many facets of life can be authentic or not.
• Secondly, although we kept pushing the 2020 agenda, many views on these topics are still very much grounded in the here and now - references to the Obama campaign, Twitter and facebook etc. This topic is one where future projection may well come less easily than others where there are clearly internal and external changes on the horizon.
• Thirdly, the topic of 'trust' came very quickly to the fore. Maybe this was due to the think tank / government examples debated? When originally designing the overall programme we had 'trust' as a candidate topic but then dropped it in favour of authenticity as being something more concrete that people could talk to and take a view on the future of. The expectation being that issues like trust, sustainability, democracy would be ones that cut across the 16 vertical debates. Will be worth watching how these come to surface in next few sessions.

Anyhow, watch the main site for the key insights from the workshop - coming soon!

For a view from one of the participants from this morning, Charlie Beckett from the LSE and Director of POLIS, see this post on his blog