So how can businesses benefit from trends and futures research?
All business decision makers can benefit from trends and futures research, particularly from the ability to create better-informed briefs for design, as they relate to future market segmentation and differentiated market positioning for the planned product and/or service. Some of the more specific benefits, however, are:
- Anticipating and, better still, initiating trends in the production, distribution, delivery, purchasing and/or use that surrounds particular designs
- A consciousness of new media for communications and transactions
- A consciousness of emerging rivals
- More accurate business plans in relation to likely costs, rates of take-up, revenues, etc
What can we learn?
The opportunity to anticipate and initiate trends in:
- Installation and training
- Documentation
- Maintenance
- Repair
- After-sales service
- Recycling and disposal
Who would benefit?
Like marketing people, R&D managers should be interested in each of these benefits. Operations, facilities, finance and HR managers can use trends and futures research to stay ahead in the design of the services that nowadays tend to accompany products once they are sold.
What are the challenges?
Manufacturers of business and consumer products face the special challenge of having to incorporate accurate forecasts early on into the design of production and product.
At the start of a project, it's hard to know exactly what new product should be made for the future, how it should be made, and what similar-but-different products commercial rivals may have in mind. The challenge is always urgent because changes to forecasts and thus to design briefs have a more and more expensive effect on tooling, production and product costs the later they are made. The challenge is always difficult because the 'front end' of new product development is 'fuzzy'.
Different factions within a company will have different views of the constraints and opportunities surrounding future designs. This will apply specially to charged issues such as the growing legal obligations that now surround products – whether they relate to safety, reliability, cost of ownership or environmental impact.
What can we learn?
Trends and futures research can help by creating the opportunity to anticipate and initiate trends in:
- Staff education
- Channel design
- Information and user experience design
- Recovery from service error
Who would benefit?
Since services are, ultimately, a people business, HR managers are likely to benefit as much as marketing managers from the trends and futures research that should attend new service designs.
What are the challenges?
Providers of business and consumer services, as well as much of the public sector, face the special challenge of getting the staff responsible for the delivery of the newly designed service to accept the forecasts of favourable customer reaction that inform the design.
As Cassandra, the prophetess of Greek antiquity, found out, it is one thing to be right in one's predictions; it is quite another to be believed. In this sense, forecasting in the realm of services has to be able, within its general purview, to predict the future of human resources. The success of a new service design will depend not just on the precision of the forecasts that back it, but also on the enthusiasm with which staff greet it – and not just at the time of market launch, but every subsequent day. Among consumers, the popular ‘buy-in’ to design has grown in recent years. But for the same effect to emerge among employees, trends research must have an eye to labour markets, the legitimacy enjoyed (or not enjoyed) by management, and the dynamics of power and authority in tomorrow’s workplace.
What can we learn?
The benefits of trends and futures research to the whole public sector include:
- The refinement and focusing of existing services in terms of future patterns of demand on the part of business investors, voters and their families, and tourists.
- Better-informed policy for the design of new services
- Better design for the employees delivering services, whether existing or new
- Better information and user experience design
- Better recovery from service error
- Better use of the public sector's purchasing power
- A consciousness of new media for communications and transactions
- Better integration of the public sector with the private one
- More accurate budgets in relation to likely costs, rates of take-up, revenues, etc.
Who would benefit?
Everyone in the public sector, from central and local government to educators and health professionals.
What are the challenges?
Government and educators face the special challenge that the best forecasts, recommendations and design briefs, like the best-laid plans, policies and performance targets, often suffer from unintended consequences. The users of a new design have a tendency to adapt it to their own ends: ‘To discover the uses of things’, wrote the German philosopher Hegel, ‘is the work of History’.
In the built environment and in communications, Government and educational measures always run the risk of producing the opposite effect to that which was intended. That is just one reason why government attempts to change people’s behaviour by design, or empower localities through design, often don’t just condescend, but also set people against them.