Forecast assessment - using the foresight of experts for your business

Quality foresight depends on expert opinion built on hard data.

The fourth step in our unique Future Intelligence methodology is forecast assessment, a crucial practice to be combined with rigorous trend research. In addition to looking at general trends, Competitive Futures seeks out the best forecasts from expert sources to improve our clients' foresight.

Why go to world experts for forecasts, and why assess them? More importantly, can't those experts just tell us everything we need to know about the future?

A few observations based on our years of looking at highly technical forecasts:

If you need to know about the future of a branch of technology, for example, there is no subsitute for actually going to the people researching the generation of that technology to understand what is coming next, and in what timeframe. Let's say you want to know about the future of biotechnology. Sure, you can wait for a Popular Mechanics special issue, a white paper from the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences, or even a nice series from the New York Times Sunday Paper; all of these will give you a general view of what's next. Competitive Futures will actually contact the scientists working on the creation of the next generation of gene sequencers, as well as those who made the last three generations of the same. Often, the number of people with world-class insight into the future of a branch of technology is a fairly manageable number, and they will tell you about when they expect certain discoveries. So if they say they "likely" expect $100 human gene sequences to be possible by 2020, you can then revisit those forecasts to ask what this will mean for pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, grocery stores, pharmacists, hospitals, etc.

But why not just wait for those luminaries to put out their own intellectual work showing the future implications of what they do?

In our experience, that's simply not what most experts do. With the exception of certain visionaries who understand the engineering and its implications (Andy Grove, Bill Gates, the late Richard Smalley) experts are usually focused on their actual work and its impact on directly associated scientific and economic activity. It is up to futurists and strategists at the client level to consider the broader implications of the work, which is coincidentally the next step in the Future Intelligence process.