CHALLENGE

How much do signals from the present contribute in understanding future outcomes?

Human beings naturally turn their gaze toward the future because they are not satisfied with the present: there is a hunger for knowledge about what fate holds in store for us. To think, however, that such awareness of the future can reveal itself in our dreams or appear out of nowhere would be naive at best.

Actually, what we mean by “forecasting” (or as I call it, futurecasting) is nothing more than the ability to read signals in the present, connect the dots among different domains of knowledge and, on the basis of empirical and logical reasoning, arrive at potential conclusions about future paths.

SOLUTION

What role does knowledge play in transforming your business?

My path crossed with Siemens’ when they asked me to provide trainings on digital transformation for some of their employees. This activity turned out to be so successful that some of the management team decided to ask for a further collaboration — a research on defining the possible future scenarios of their industry, and in particular the ones of their strategic partners (distributors).

Results

How can we predict the future of a company’s offerings?

In order to conduct my futurecasting, I went through extensive OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) research to gather all related information about the industry, go to market strategy, general trends and competition.

Later on, I choose 10 benchmark technologies as potential drivers of additional growth; I predicted strong growth opportunities in an evolution of the distributors’ business model from simple resale to advanced consulting, servitization and integration with software platforms to create compelling proprietary solutions.

The results of my work were presented in a keynote speech on Courmayeur’s SkyWay on the summit of Mont Blanc, in front of an audience of selected strategic partners.

There, in a unique landscape between the clouds and glaciers, a scenario of an abundant future became suddenly much more closer.

impact
& key activities

• 20hours of training
  on digital transformation
  
  1futurecasting project to explore
  potential future scenarios

• 10cutting-edge technologies as
  potential drivers of additional sales
  
  40+hours of prep work
  using osint methods