If you get startled by the future, it means you’re not paying attention.

Innovators are not forecasters or are out to predict the future

Innovators are people who are aware of things that are already fundamentally changing, and who understand the revolutionary portent in those things. Revolutionary strategies often harness some deep, systemic change force. For example it might be digitization (google news) or globalization (internationalization of MTV). The goal of the innovator is to surf on of these tides to exploit some trend that is gathering force. They look for discontinuities.

So what exactly is a discontinuity?

A discontinuity is a convergence or pattern of trends; a combination of several seemingly unrelated developments in technology, demographics, lifestyle, regulation, geopolitics that together create a potential for industry change. It is these cluster of trends that have the power to change the competitive rules or the structure of an industry.

To get started spotting trends let’s focus on identifying changes in the external environment that competitors have either underestimated or ignored and then try to understand how the momentum of these changes can be influenced or amplified to shape the future.

Your goal is to recognize patterns of changes that could alter the rules of competition and could potentially create new opportunities if you act on them before others do.

Identifying discontinuities.

Here are some guidelines to get you started in identifying discontinuities.

1. Look where your competitors are not.

Where is the bleeding edge? Where is the fringe? Where could you go to the first hand experience of what’s changing? The only way to get insights that trigger innovative ideas is by personally experiencing new things in out of the ordinary places.

2. Amplify weak signals to anticipate their second and third consequence.

Consider unrelated trends and take these weak signals you’ve identified and project then into the future. Imagine what would happen if a particular trend grew and became important. What kind of difference would it make? Who would be affected? The point is to identify developments at the nascent stage before they undermine your business.

3. Try to understand trends in their historical context.

The world is a system, one change here and it will affect something over there. Yet most people stop on with first order effects since they don’t think through the knock on effects. When you see something changing work through the chain on consequences, ask a series of “and then what” question and as you learn to do this the future will become less of a surprise to you.

4. Look for interactions between trends.

After making your trend list from different categories your next task is to imagine how these trends might interact and reinforce each other and figure out whether certain trends fit together in a certain way. To do this look for the intersections (interactions between all facts and trends) and look for emerging patterns. Then ask yourself, when this group of trends is put together what is the bigger story that emerges?

These aren’t the only things you can do to spot trends but it’s a start, look at trendwatching’s guide to spotting and implementing trends for more jewels.

By the way Trendwatching just published their November trends report entitled Top 15 trend questions and answers, they know a lot of trend spotting.

Here are a few questions you can apply to the above guidelines:

• What trends are affecting ?
• How do I know a trend isn’t just a fad?
• When is the right time to act on a trend?
• What are the trends in ?
• How do I become a (better) trend watcher?
• How is the financial crisis going to impact my business?

Let me know if you find this post helpful and also let me know in what other ways do you spot trends.

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