“Speculating about the future, even if it is far-fetched, can help people and institutions cope with what comes next”
Alex Henke of The Economist
Futures Thinking & Foresight
Futures Thinking is a multidisciplinary method for informed reflection on possible major changes that will occur in the next few years or decades, in the way we live, consume and aspire. While the future cannot be predicted reliably, one can foresee a range of possible futures, and ask which are the most desirable for particular groups and societies. A variety of methods - qualitative, quantitative, normative, and exploratory - help illuminate possibilities, outline policy choices and assess alternatives.
Services we offer:
FUTURE STRATEGY ENVISIONING WORKSHOPS (MEGATRENDS/SCENARIO BASED)
FUTURE SCENARIO VISUALIZATION
CMF/STYLE FORECASTS FOR CONSUMER PRODUCTS
FUTURE THINKING CAPABILITY BUILDING
Why Futures Thinking?
Futures Thinking looks beyond immediate constraints, quarterly or yearly returns and simple extrapolation of past data. Futures Thinking creates an environment for deeply informed decision-making with a sustainable balance between short- and long-term policy goals, smoothing the transition toward a positive future.
Turian Labs uses different methodologies to discern the future and map the emerging landscape, including scenario planning, megatrend studies, and other techniques under our umbrella of Kedging methods. Scenarios are compelling, plausible narratives on potential futures, helping and guiding leaders and teams to plan for the future. Scenarios are usually used to project the future beyond 5-10 years. Megatrends and trends are used for shorter timelines of up to 10 years. We have built a significant original body of work on Indian and International megatrends since 2006.
What are Megatrends?
Megatrends are substantial and transformative powers that define the future by having an expansive effect on business, economies, society and people, and help organizations understand emergent changes in people’s opinions about a product, brand, personality or a policy.
Megatrends mapping is an important tool to decipher the immediate future of experiences, product, brands, opinions and policies. Megatrends are the paradigm shifts happening at the intersection of cultural, social, economic, political, technological, regulatory and market forces. Megatrends can help businesses, governments and individuals prepare for an unpredictable future through the shared understanding of potential scenarios.
Leading organizations around the world use megatrends to design organizational growth and chart out the future.
“Megatrends are the probable future – or express what we know with great confidence about the future. Megatrends are certainties.”
Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies
How do Megatrends help?
1. IDENTIFY EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES
As competition in current business grows, what are the starting points to bring differentiated offerings?
2. IDENTIFY FUTURE CUSTOMERS
As you read this, customers are changing. Traditional market research methods are not able to keep pace with these changes. Megatrends can help you profile these new consumers.
3. IDENTIFY EMERGING BUSINESS UNIVERSE
As your industry changes, so will the others. Megatrends help identify and understand new and emerging business models driven by cross-sector synergetic implications and opportunities.
4. CREATE REFRESHING PRODUCT LANGUAGE
Megatrends help find the new ‘wardrobe’ for your products. Traditionally also known as CMFS, (Color, Material, Finish and Shapes for physical products), they can rejuvenate existing product platforms. For digital products, megatrends make it possible to take UX leaps.
Discovering Megatrends
‘Trend’ has a specific meaning which relates to new events or happenings at the fringes of society, technology and governance. A new trend can be spotted at the intersection of latest product launches, new businesses, new social norms, the changing messages in media and policy shifts. These shifts are called indicators. Multiple indicators make a trend; multiple trends make a megatrend.
Megatrends for business strategy ideation
Turian Labs organizes and facilitates business strategy ideation sessions to co-create a shared vision of the future using megatrends. These sessions are customized for specific sectors and applications, and are usually targeted at CXOs. One of the USPs of these sessions is their highly interactive nature, where we gamify the entire programme. From the ideas triggered during these sessions, Turian Labs can then further run and facilitate expert-led project sprints. These sprints usually lead into the formulation of a new business idea, new customer experience or a shift in policy.
Turian Labs facilitated a megatrends led business strategy session for senior leadership for an Indian conglomerate.
Gamification of megatrends using ‘trend wheel’
Gamification of megatrends using ‘trend cards’
A session on Megatrends and Future Strategy by Manoj Kothari at MeltingPot2020, an innovation conference in Bengaluru.
Manoj introduced one of the Megatrends from our 2020 trends report at one of the D’IVE sessions.
Megatrends at Turian Labs
KEDGING:
Turian Labs follows our proprietary KEDGING technique to map new emerging possibilities in the home interior and residential window segment. This will guide you to find potential directions as anchors for product innovation for the next 5-10 years, and pull the organisation and resources towards it.
Our KEDGING technique works best for organisations that deal with almost commoditized product or service offerings, and who have not been able to get results with the usual 'market research' strategic thinking methods.
GAMIFICATION
Our methods for KEDGING are highly collaborative and gamified, ensuring complete buy-in from participating senior management, which is the most important part of any strategic initiative.
Our work with Government of Finland
Business Finland is the Finnish organization focused on innovation funding, trade, investment, and travel promotion, headquartered in Helsinki. Business Finland is fully owned by the Finnish Government, and runs a foresight process globally called the Future Watch - India series’ report. The series identifies key sectoral trends which help Business Finland, including their stakeholders and Finnish businesses, better understand the Indian context and what opportunities lie ahead. Turian Labs have been working with Business Finland (Tekes) since 2013, through several megatrend-led opportunity mapping studies and workshops focused on India.
Here are some glimpses of our work with Business Finland on strategic futures insights for India.
SCENARIO MAPPING 2035
What is the future of large cities in India and how will it affect not just the cities’ dynamics but also India’s growth in future?
With the amount of turbulence and unpredictable macro shifts happening around us, the future remains a puzzle to unfold. Scenario mapping can be used to understand and create goals, resilient to external macro drivers. To map the emerging scenarios for future of metro cities in India, the team at Turian Labs conducted a co-creation workshop, backed by our understanding of global megatrends since 2006. Key driving forces were bucketed using the STEEP framework (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic and Political). Some of the driving forces were the rise of 5G/6G, resource stress in cities, etc. Our team then identified critical uncertainties by evaluating each factor based on the impact and certainty. The two forces with the highest impact on the future of cities were ‘reverse migration’ and ‘rise of India as global power.’ Here is a full report.
IndiaNXT
IndiaNXT is our annual flagship event assimilating India megatrends. At this cross-industry roundtable, participants have been business owners, business strategists, digital transformation strategists, startup founders, product planners, designer thinking practitioners, design researchers, brand leaders, political think-tanks and academics.
In the past, participants have come from wide-ranging industries and institutions, including Volkswagen, Samsung, LG, Hitachi, Decathlon, Maruti-Suzuki, Tata Motors, Eicher, Tanishq, Symrise, Steelcase, Future Group, Godrej, Titan Watches, VIP Luggage, TI Cycles, Unilever, ITC LifeStyle, P&G, L’Oreal, Reckitt & Benckiser, Nokia, Reliance Communications, JK Group, Financial Express, WeSchool, NID-Ahmedabad, IDC-IIT Mumbai, NIFT Delhi, Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies & HPCL.