Mike O’Donnell discusses business and technological trends on day two of the three-day ForesightNZ workshop in Wellington on 27–29 April.
You can watch the video of his presentation on the McGuinness Institute’s YouTube channel, or view it below.
Mike O’Donnell outlines eight themes participants can use ‘to make sense of a world gone mad’:
- The disruptive innovation model: Explaining the different between sustaining and disruptive innovations and who wins consumer demand.
- Disintermediation: The internet destroyed intermediaries between producer and consumer. For example the traditional industry model was manufacturer to wholesalers to distributors to retailers to consumers, compared with current consumer abilities to purchase products direct from the manufacturer via the internet.
- Aggregate: The ability created by the internet to not own or create anything but be a success business. Mike illustrates this using the examples of Alibaba (no inventory), Uber (no car fleet), Airbnb (No real estate) and Facebook (creates no content). These businesses aggregate existing information/resources for consumer.
- On Demand: Discussing how the growing on demand market place is empowering consumers. For example Uber and heal (US-based app that brings a doctor to you wherever you are).
- Mobile confluence: Allowing everyone to create, consume and share content. The growing capability of smart phones to integrate voice, location, image recognition and payment is further empowering consumers.
- Moore’s Law: Showing that the number of transistors you can fit onto a silicon chip is exponential.
- Mobile first: The shifting trend of creating websites for mobile users, before creating desktop sites, shows the dominance of mobile use.
- Big Data: Algorithms embedded in your web browser that analyse content and display ads for you, based on that data.
Mike closed his talk by reinforcing the idea that we do not know where the web is going to take us: ‘The web is now your computer. We have all moved into the cloud.’
ForesightNZ playing cards
Mike’s presentation led to the development of the ForesightNZ Trend Card: Surveillance in NZ. This card is one out of a pack of 64 that was developed at the ForesightNZ workshop. Participants created a robust foresight tool in the form of a pack of cards based on the events and trends that they believe could significantly shape New Zealand’s long-term future. They then designed three different games to play with the pack. The games aim to develop a deeper understanding of the possible futures that might occur if a small number of those cards played out in real life. The pack of cards are in the final stage of production and will soon be made available to download, print and cut your own – keep an eye out on the website. They are also available to purchase from our online store. The accompanying booklet is now published on the website and available to purchase here.
About the ForesightNZ workshop
Project: ForesightNZ aims to build public policy capability in New Zealand by encouraging long-term, agile thinking around our uncertain future. Initiated in 2008, ForesightNZ is about conceptualising the broad range of possible futures for New Zealand through up-to-date tools and conceptual approaches used in the field of futures studies. The primary focus of the ForesightNZ: Untangling New Zealand’s long-term future workshop was to develop a way to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty in the world around us. This workshop was a collaboration between the New Zealand Treasury and the McGuinness Institute. To watch other speaker presentation videos from the ForesightNZ workshop, head to the McGuinness Institute’s YouTube Channel.