Author: matt-ranen

Winner Take All Platforms Won’t Necessarily Win

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How blockchain, backlash, and breaches may challenge conventional wisdom and reshape your industry


The Official Future Hits Some Speed Bumps

Ask anyone in any major sector of the economy about the future of their industry and the majority will say something like the following:

  • Our industry will be transformed by platforms
  • These platforms will extract the most value from our industry and determine the winners and losers
  • The most likely platform overlords will be the native digital tech giants: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple (or Alibaba and Tencent depending on where you live)

Essentially, what people are saying is that the notion of digital platform dominance is inevitable. In an Accenture survey in 2016, 81 percent of executives said platform based business will be core to their growth strategy within three years. As such, to understand where platforms are going is to understand the future of your industry itself. Either you will be that player (hard for most) or need to find a place to play and win within their ecosystem.

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We’ve Not Thought Through the Legal and Ethical Disruption of Augmented Reality

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Let’s not repeat the mistakes we made with social media

Yelp Monocle, an early hint of change to come. (image)

With recent product and SDK announcements by Apple and Facebook, we have officially entered the 2017 edition of the Augmented Reality hype cycle. Event news sites like the New York Times and Quartz have gotten into the game with their own apps.

As a futurist and scenario planner, helping organizations understand the long-term social, economic, and political impacts that accompany disruptive technology, I feel the timing is right for all types of stakeholders in this technology — policy makers, technology producers, consumers and even just the average citizen who might be in the way of the emerging applications — to understand and get ahead of the types of ethical, legal and regulatory issues that will accompany AR applications.

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Three Questions To Ask In an Uncertain Business Climate

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Imagine you run a global business, but you have no idea if one of your largest markets — say China or Mexico — might shut down due to a trade war. Or watching your once-powerful brand suddenly become the target of a boycott, simply because you allow Muslim employees to wear hijabs at the office. With Donald Trump in the Oval Office, once-implausible scenarios like these have become real possibilities.

For many people, a Trump presidency was the first surprise. It soon became clear that no one actually knew how his term in office would play out — not even Trump himself. As Trump proposes an array of initiatives ranging from healthcare repeal to tariffs on our second-largest trading partner, the long-term agenda has become even more opaque and uncertain. In the face of such confusion and impulsivity, many people and organizations have had tremendous difficulty planning their own strategies and actions for 2017 and beyond.

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