Winning in a Downturn - Using Future Insights to Succeed in Turbulent Times We have entered an age of turbulence where the certainties of the past decade will be 'unsystematically' overturned. Old assumptions about how to govern, educate, lead and succeed in business are being challenged and abandoned. In the search for new solutions, businesses an…

Islamic Banking and Islamic Investment In the midst of the current financial crisis, Islamic banking & finance stands at a crossroad. After at least a couple of decades of its close association with the Western capitalist institutions, Islamic financial thinkers are questioning close cooperation between Western investment banks and Islamic financia…

Touchstones: Conceptual Products for Sustainable Futures ImaginationLancaster is a new creative research lab at Lancaster University that explores futures for people, products, places and systems. Stuart will introduce this initiative and present recent work in which he combines theoretical critique with speculative objects to probe the meanings an…

Future of Lifestyles The Philips Design probe programme is a far future research initiative attempting to develop lifestyle scenarios 10 - 20 years ahead. Design "provocations" are created with the purpose of stimulating debate and critique from which they work backwards to materialize nearer term scenarios. Clive will talk about emotional sensing,…

Desert Tech. Clean Power from the Sahara for Europe The DESERTEC-project offers the opportunity to exploit the inexhaustible clean solar energy from deserts mainly by proven solar-thermal technologies. Only 1,7 % of all desert areas around the world is needed to cover the overall energy demand of humankind. Thus, we have an viable option for climat…

The Futures of Technologies and the Technologies of the Futures Change is not constant, in fact, change is accelerating very fast. Some technologies are radically changing humanity, in general, and also changing human beings, in particular. Many experts now talk about the four sciences and technologies of the future: NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno). Fur…

Turning to the Future after the Age of Easy Growth The need for transformation beyond the turmoil is particularly acute in the „new“ member-states of the European Union, which have been hit the most in the current crisis. For several past years, it used to be that growth came easy and future was wide open. Even if not much effort was put into think…

The Transformation of Europe: Future challenges of the Union and the States Although deeper than many before, the current crisis may be seen as just another cycle of capitalism. The author believes, however, that its roots are deeper and very much related to the challenges the world and Europe are facing at the beginning of the millennium. The resp…

Is it really good to know the Future? How expectation, chance and error make the world go round Why we can predict more and more things - new developments in probability sciences and data management The future of Futurists: How we can survive and thrive in the ever growing market of predictionsDi European Futurists Conference Lucerne

Eckard Foltin - Head Creative Center, Bayer MaterialScience AG From Visions to Products - Future Living 2020 Bayer MaterialScience defines a strategy and taps into new business, both in existing and completely new markets. The objective is to be the solution supplier of choice around the globe with raw materials and technologies for key industries …

Ciaran McGinley, Project Initiator EPO Scenarios for the Future, European Patent Office Open Innovation - Do we still need Patents? In a world where knowledge is increasingly shared and innovation becomes a collaborative process, are traditional forms of intellectual property protection still appropriate? This presentation explores how the paradigm…

Dr. Ulrich Reinhardt (Stiftung für Zukunfsfragen) Europe 2030: What Europeans Expect from the Future More than 11.000 Europeans from nine countries were asked about their views of the future in eight different fields (from future of work or integration up to future of consumption or education). The results prove that people have many fears – e.g. o…

Dr. Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey Methuselah Foundation A True Cure for Human Aging It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The fi…

Prof. Dr. Konstantinos Boulouchos Chairman of the Board of Energy Science Center of ETH Zurich A long-term vision for a sustainable energy system needs to address a multitude of challenges. Policy and socioeconomic aspects are crucial but the contribution of science and technology will be of paramount importance as well. The talk will present and d…

Anders Berntell (Anders Berntell, Executive Director Stockholm International Water Institute) - The Water Crisis The UN, World Bank and world leaders have warned that the lack of water resources will lead to global crisis this century. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon called securing safe and plentiful water for all "one of the most daunting challe…

A new class of global actors is playing an increasingly important role in globalization: smugglers, warlords, guerrillas, terrorists, gangs, and bandits of all stripes. Since the end of the Cold War, the global illicit economy has consistently grown at twice the rate of the licit global economy. Increasingly, illicit actors will represent not just …

Life After Wall Street – Indicates the finance crisis the end of globalizations? Recent turmoil in the global financial markets has often been described in the media as a tectonic shift in the global financial system. Prof. John L. Casti, a former researcher at RAND Corporation and member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute suggests t…

The 32 nodes of the Millennium Project around the world have invited voluntary participation of over 2500 futurists, business planners, policy analysts, and scholars who have participated in the production and updating of 15 global challenges over the past 12 years. These provide a framework for understanding the global strategic landscape and focu…

Ian Pearson, BT - The Future of Life on Earth Life on earth is all still based on the same shared biological life processes. This will change dramatically over the next century, as humans discover how life works at the most basic levels, how to replicate and manipulate it, and how to create new life forms from scratch. New life is not necessarily r…

Dr. Peter Maskus, Acabion TM Visionary Motion and MIKOVA Systems Consulting Mobility of the 21st Century History of mobility is easily narrated: 1800 came with the railroads. 1900 came with cars. The 21st century will come with another fundamental innovation. Even though almost no one knows today, how the longterm future of earthbound global traffi…

Innovation occurs at the intersection of invention and insight. With the example of IBM, the presentation will describe how ICT has fundamentally changed IBM's innovation process, how it has enabled massive and global collaboration around new ideas on a scale impossible before. It will then describe some exemplary innovation projects that are of im…

Random mutation and hoping for a success: that is generally believed to be quite ineffective. Experiments in the laboratory, however, show that artificial evolution becomes a sophisticated optimization technique, if the genetic rules of biological evolution are modelled correctly. This a simple example of how biological paradigms will influence the…

In the current global condition of complexity and uncertainty where asymmetric threats prevail, Singapore has responded to the challenges by sustaining innovation on both governance and technological fronts through the Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS) programme. As a system, RAHS combines cutting-edge concepts, methodologies and technolo…

Europe is facing some rapid changes in the 21. century. How does the population see these changes, what are citizens afraid of and how do they want to live in the future? The CEO of the BAT Future Foundation will present first results of a study that will be published in 2008. Dr. Ulrich Reinhardt is the CEO of the „Foundation of futurology” of Bri…

The architecture of global statistics has not yet provided the data access needed for optimal development of information technology. The animation technology developed for computer games is many years ahead of the technology used to convert time series statistics into easy understandable graphics. The main trends in global health, economy and demog…

Food for Brain Health: The Vision of NestléWhether it is performing in school or maintaining a healthy mental state, brain health is a concern applicable all the way from the very young to the very old. Our vision is to go beyond the prevention of deficiencies and to provide products that will maximize cognitive processes, mood and brain performan…

The Future of Brain, the Brain of the FutIs human nature about to change forever? Can we envisage a world where everything we take for granted about ourselves - imagination, free will, love, learning, memory, - becomes obsolete? At the beginning of the 21st Century, we are standing on the brink of a mind makeover more cataclysmic than anything in o…