Trend-spotters and futurologists have become the evangelists of the modern business world. Spend more than 10 minutes listening to their breezy uplift about what is around the corner, however, and two questions begin to well up inside you - how come they know this stuff, and how does one go about separating the wheat from the chaff? Built into the discipline, after all, is a tendency to exaggerate the shock of the new: it helps to drum up business. And by the time their prognostications have failed to materialise, it is safe to predict that most of them will have scarpered.
No matter. The business of short-range futurology - that hybrid of science and intuition that reads the runes of business and consumer trends in an effort to predict what will whistle its way into the mainstream within the next 12 to 18 months - is now in high demand. So what do the crystal-ball gazers reckon will be the top 10 trends of 2008?
The rise of N11
If 2007 was the year in which chatter about the possibilities posed by China and India (bludgeoned into the portmanteau "Chindia" by one ambitious analyst) reached a crescendo, 2008 may be the year in which N11 arrives on the lips of the cognoscenti. The term N11 was coined in a recent report by Goldman Sachs, and refers to the up-and-coming "Next 11" countries who are snapping at the heels of India, China, Russia and Brazil as investment opportunities - Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. Over the past three years, economic growth across Goldman Sachs's N11 has averaged 5.9%, the strongest in 15 years and more than double the 2.3% average growth of Old Europe. Marian Salzman, an energetic New York trend-spotter at the ad agency JWT, who was one of the first to talk up "Chindia" in 2007, now says that she is "watching N11 with interest". And where the money goes, there is a good chance that cultural fascination will follow.
Peer-to-peer lending
Jeremy Gutsche, a Toronto-based trend-spotter who runs the website Trendhunter.com, is a good example of a new breed of trend-spotter who collects insights by cultivating an online community of trend-watchers around the world. In keeping with the egalitarian ethos of the web, Gutsche argues that one of the key financial trends of 2008 will be the growth of person-to-person lending exchanges in which borrowers and lenders come together directly on the web and cut out the banks. Some of these lending operations use an eBay-like auction in which the lender who is willing to provide the lowest interest rate gets the borrower's loan; others are for people who already know one another but who want someone to help formalise the loan arrangement. A good example of the latter is CircleLending, an American firm in which Richard Branson's Virgin USA recently acquired a majority stake. Much the same model of "peer-to-peer" lending is slowly working its way into the charitable sector. Outfits such as Kiva.org, for example, put potential "social investors" together with small businesses in the developing world, who promise to send back regular email updates on how the business is doing.
Social networking grows up
Next year will see online social networking cease to be the preserve of the young. According to data recently released by the European Interactive Advertising Association, 18% of European over-55s now visit a social networking site at least once a month, not far behind the "digital generation" of 16- to 34-year-olds, where 28% access such sites. The past year has seen a 12% jump in these so-called silver surfers, and new social networking forums such as MyChumsClub and Saga Zone are appearing to accommodate older users.
Online social networking is maturing in other ways, too. Following concerns that office-bound staff were spending too much of their day on social networking sites such as Facebook - a recent survey concluded that office workers in the UK spend company time worth £130m each day browsing online - many British firms are now mounting crackdowns against their use. As people get used to juggling a multiplicity of new roles and new rules, says London-based trend-spotter Tamar Kasriel, the result will be to fuel confusion about how personal the personal computer is when it's at work. Twitchiness among employers, says Kasriel, is largely responsible for the latest internet abbreviation, NSFW, or "not suitable for work", which bored office workers are increasingly using to preface any material they forward to their friends.
Reverse knowledge migration
Another solid basis for futurological speculation is to follow the flow of people. Paul Saffo, a respected California-based forecaster, argues that the next few years will see the beginnings of a "reverse knowledge migration" in which, as well as bright and well-educated workers coming from the developing world to the west, people will start to move in the opposite direction. This new global class of "cyber-gypsies", says Saffo, will not only include American and European Asians returning "home", but also highly educated, non-Asian Americans and Europeans going off to make their fortunes in places such as China. The trend, he argues, will soon move from a source of sociological curiosity to a source of alarm for governments and businesses. Companies, universities and thinktanks in Europe and America, he warns, who often smugly assumed that they would be a magnet for the world's talent, are going to discover that this is no longer the case.
Handmade on the net
For some years now, one staple of futurological speculation has been the quest for authenticity in what seems like an anonymous and artificial world. Witness, for example, the young fashionistas who self-consciously reclaim dreary leisure activities - everything from bingo to choir practice, from quiz nights to knitting - that would have bored even their parents rigid. A new twist on all this, says Reinier Evers of the Amsterdam firm Trendwatching.com, is the sprouting of internet-based ventures that purvey handmade and highly traditional fare. In Switzerland, for example, Netgranny (netgranny.ch) is a collective comprised of 15 cheerful-looking grannies who knit socks on demand and sell them online. Customers can choose their favourite granny by picture, pick the colour of their socks, or opt for a granny "surprise" design. It takes two weeks for a granny to knit a pair of socks; at €26 (£19) apiece, including delivery, they make an excellent idea for a Christmas gift.
Something very similar is being touted by the Danish company Mormor.nu, which sells traditional handmade baby and children's wear online. Mormor.nu is Danish for "Grandma.now". All its products are handmade from pure wool, alpaca or cotton. Old knitting and crochet techniques and patterns have been revived, while the colours and materials have been updated. For a dash of extra authenticity, the company's workers are as steeped in tradition as its products; the youngest member of staff is 68. Likewise, Etsy (etsy.com) is an online marketplace for handmade goods that features more than 26,000 vendors from across the world and sells everything from scented soy candles to a tennis-ball chair. It is only two years old, but so far more than 1m items have been sold and 300,000 people have joined as members.
Clubbing together
If at first his or her predictions don't come to pass, the seasoned futurologist can simply hunker down and wait. Nearly a decade ago, for example, the American futurologist Jeremy Rifkin argued that we were all moving into "the age of access" - from an economy in which it was good to own stuff into one in which people would prefer to rent it. Nothing much happened, and people quickly moved on, but just recently the idea is beginning to look more plausible. For those who want to take out a time-share in a dog, for example, 2007 saw the launch in California of a "shared pet ownership" company, FlexPetz; the firm is fast expanding, and is now opening a branch in London. Meanwhile, a new Germany company called Lütte-Leihen is renting out baby clothes to parents of fast-growing young children; several companies, such as Bag, Borrow or Steal in America and Be a Fashionista in the UK, are renting out designer handbags; and the Dutch company Rent-a-Garden is leasing out sculptures and potted plants to those who want to give their back gardens a much needed summertime makeover.
Sharing the costs, Salzman points out, is becoming increasingly popular in many different retail sectors. The inexorable rise of "fractional luxury", for example, is giving not-quite-wealthy-enough people the opportunity to buy a time-share in anything from a racehorse to a jumbo jet. Outfits such as PartialOwner.com and Fractionallife.com are extending the partial-ownership model to everything from homes to luxury cars and restaurants. Art lovers, too, can now buy into syndicates to purchase artwork. ARTvest in Glasgow, for example, was set up last year to enable people to pool their funds and get a foothold in the expensive market for contemporary art. Sharing the costs can be fun, too. Young women in Argentina and elsewhere, Salzman says, are holding clothes-swapping parties in order to share out the costs of getting hold of the latest fashion gear.
The new vicarious consumption
Ambitious futurologists need credible buzzwords, but good ones are in perilously short supply. One option is to take an old trend off the peg, dust it down a bit and give it a whole new twist. The idea of "vicarious consumption" was first coined 100 years ago by the economist Thorstein Veblen to describe the thrill rich people get when they buy their butler a lovely new uniform. Nowadays, reckons Evers, it is making a comeback in a whole new form. Just as book reviews have become a substitute among many of us for reading books, Evers says, our enthusiasm for endless product reviews is becoming a way through which we can vicariously experience almost anything through the eyes (and sometimes ears) of people who have already been there. Sites dedicated to reading reviews on other people's experiences, such as iliketotallyloveit.com and ballofdirt.com, offer a heady mixture of entertainment, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and are already quietly attracting millions on the web.
DIY education
The rise of blogging and self-broadcasting sites such as YouTube as an alternative to TV, says Gutsche, has brought with it a burgeoning demand among people to learn new skills, not from professional educators but from their peers. A good example, he says, is the proliferation of virtual cooking classes on YouTube, in which people persuade each other to experiment with their favourite recipes. Then there are the home videos that take people through the easiest way to unlock or otherwise manipulate their iPhones or other gadgets. The "education" on offer at such sites does not have to be improving. Willitblend.comb, for example, spoofs the growth of DIY education videos by showing viewers how to granulate their iPhones or iPods in a blender. Then there is the popularity of bizarre videos demonstrating that if, for example, you shove a packet of Mentos mints into a bottle of Diet Coke, the whole thing explodes - the YouTube equivalent, it would appear, of the school chemistry experiment.
Digital housecleaning
One consequence of the matrix of social networking sites such as Facebook and Second Life that are colonising the web is that our private selves are soon going to be on display as never before. In an age of "digital individualism", in which many of us work so hard to create and customise our identities on the net, it is ironic that all this information ends up stored on an anonymous bank of computer servers, to be cooled by some bored warehouse caretaker. While there is a much greater acceptance among young people of living life in the glare of the net, says Salzman, the lust for digital exhibitionism will soon wither when they come to start looking for a job. With admissions offices and human resources departments increasingly using the web to vet prospective candidates - two-thirds of companies readily admit to keeping tabs on employees by checking social networking sites, according to the British recruitment agency Poolio - a good chunk of the incriminating material whirling around the cybersphere will somehow have to be expunged. MySpace pages will be cleaned up and mass "Facebook suicides" will soon become the norm as young people try to agree a bond of forgetting by deactivating their profiles in unison. Companies will spring up like Reputation Defender, an American firm that promises to search out and destroy all inaccurate, inappropriate, hurtful and slanderous information that exists on its clients.
Virtual identity managers
Another consequence of the public display of ourselves on the net is that many of us are going to end up hiring professional stand-ins. By 2011, reckon the researchers at technology advice firm Gartner, 80% of internet users and major companies will have avatars, or digital replicas of themselves, for online work and play. Kasriel predicts that this will give rise to a new cadre of independent advisers - what she calls "holistic identity managers" - whose job it will be to garden the internet profiles of business people and keep them on the straight and narrow. Very soon, she believes, it will come as no surprise at all when we learn that high-ranking executives are not writing and updating their own profiles but paying someone else to do it for them. Already, sites such as FakeWebcam.com allow paying people to pre-record videos of themselves and play them on a loop as if they were visible on their webcam. The aesthetically challenged might even think about hiring more attractive stand-ins as well as scriptwriters. For those who can afford it, smile - it's not you on candid camera.
· James Harkin's book Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking will be published in February by Atlantic Books.
Source - The Guardian
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