Entrepreneurs often struggle to capture lightning in a bottle by trying to create a product today that anticipates tomorrow’s trends. But are the bulk of these entrepreneurs not looking far enough ahead?
Early this month, The New York Times ran a fascinating article that talked a little about the recently deceased futurist Alfred Toffler’s work (Future Shock) and the demise of the idea most associated with him, futurism:
"In many large ways, it’s almost as if we have collectively stopped planning for the future. Instead, we all just sort of bounce along in the present, caught in the headlights of a tomorrow pushed by a few large corporations and shaped by the inescapable logic of hyper-efficiency — a future heading straight for us. It’s not just future shock; we now have future blindness.
Farhad Manjoo, who wrote the Times piece, argues that many technological changes are happening so quickly that global crises are occurring as a result. The thrust of this piece is that our governments should really take a closer look at the academic study of futurism and try to determine how to better and more smoothly integrate technology in order to prepare for the future.
Webb explains that too often, a company or app takes off, and people assume that it represents a trend worth investing in.
“When in reality, that underlying technology may be something that’s useful in this moment, but it will eventually become something else without paying attention to meaningful trends,” she says, using beepers as an example. For a brief moment in history, many people were interested in investing in beepers without being able to see that beepers weren’t the trend, mobile communication was. “True trends signify the leverage of a modern behavior more than a shining object,” says Webb, who will be publishing a book.The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, later this year. “If you’re not serious about tracing trends, as an entrepreneur you are being irresponsible.”
Source: Forbes
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