“The Futurist” Sees a Booming Market in MINITRENDS

by Steve O'Keefe on October 6, 2010

One of the great things about being a futurist is that you learn how to see into the future. For example, even though it’s October, I know that the November-December issue of The Futurist, the journal of the World Future Society — “the world’s largest organization devoted to the future’s exploration” — will contain a review of MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, the new book by John and Carrie Vanston.

The World Future Society was founded in 1960 and is celebrating 41 years of uniting people who have an interest in predicting the future. Among the earliest supporters of the Society was Buckminster Fuller. Today, the Society boasts dozens of chapters throughout the U.S. and hosts an international conference, held in July this year in Vancouver, British Columbia. Among the notable resources available at the Society’s website are the interviews with leading technologists and a new collection of forecasts, “2020 Visionaries,” where 20 futurists are asked their predictions for this decade.

The review of MINITRENDS in next month’s issue of The Futurist will be written by contributing editor David Pearce Snyder. Snyder is partner with Dr. Gregg Edwards, Director of the Academy for Advanced and Strategic Studies, overseeing a virtual network of 30 trendspotters. In his review, Snyder will say:

While this book is specifically about a futures research methodology, it is also an unabashed business book. The authors’ expressed purpose in writing Minitrends was to enable entrepreneurs at every level of the workplace to take advantage of the foresight that they, themselves, can gather from the ‘infosphere.’

Snyder will write about the Minitrends “mindset” that results from reading the book. It’s like a spooky kind of vision that enables you to see Minitrends wherever you look. One of the things David Pearce Snyder sees in the future is a healthy, growing interest in Minitrends:

Because the early identification of emergent long-term trends poses such enormous marketplace value, it seems not improbable that traffic in minitrends will become a significant online phenomenon during the next two to five years. I am also prepared to believe that much of that traffic will be generated by freelance futurists who learned their trade by reading this book.

Thank you in advance, David Pearce Snyder and The Futurist, for the thoughtful book review you will be publishing in next month’s issue!

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “In Forecasting, Mini Is Big,” The Futurist, 11-12/10
Image of the The Futirist November-December 2010 issue cover is used under Fair Use: Reporting.

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