The 7 Whitespaces for Future Growth
Are you interested in the future of your market? Where your future customers will come from? What kind of business will you be in 20 years time? And are you building the capabilities to succeed in the future? Fundamentally, are you out-thinking your existing and future competition?
5 factors that will define an ever more dramatic future are
- Speed – the rate of change, driven by technology and expectation
- Complexity – an avalanche of seemingly unrelated forces as they collide
- Risk – from crime and terror to economic and environmental
- Change – learning to adapt to ever more turbulence inside and out
- Surprise – more frequent, more dramatic, life is ever less predictable
So what are the big opportunities that will emerge out of these seismic shifts in our world? How can we adapt our existing businesses, or break out into completely new domains in order to exploit these opportunities?
There are many excellent sources of trends and patterns, specialist organisations such as Trendwatching which has a network of 5000 volunteer trendspotters all around the world, crunching it all together and articulating the emergent zeitgeist through evocative language – nowism, foreverism, (f)luxury, infolust, maturialism, sellsumers, generation g(enerosity), perkonomics, ecoiconic, crowdclout, trysumers … the list goes on …