Established, contested, emerging: a filter for the pile of trend reports

The problem is not a lack of information

The same flood arrives at the end of every year. “The world in 2030”, “the trends that will define the next decade”, “the future of your industry”. Investment banks, consultancies, institutes. Each document is competent and each one points somewhere different.

The practical effect is the opposite of what was intended. Faced with forty plausible trends, leadership does not pick forty priorities. It picks none. It goes deeper into what was already on the agenda and files the rest away.

What is missing is not more reading. It is a filter applied before it.

Three blocks

A macro reading of some fifteen reports from the major houses, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS, BlackRock and the like, is already enough to classify what shows up. It is worth remembering that these institutions compete with one another and that each one carries the bias of its own investment thesis. That divergence, far from being a problem, is the raw material of the filter.

Block 1: established trends. They appear in almost every report and are already a condition for operating, not an advantage. The room to gain is small because everyone is heading there. The right action is pragmatic: find whoever does this well, hire them, make up the lost time and move on. This is not where you build a difference. It is where you avoid a penalty.

Block 2: contested trends. Several reports cover the subject but disagree about the impact, or suggest use cases that are incompatible with one another. This is the most valuable block and the most laborious. It requires listening to specialists, using your network for a sanity check (who is discussing this seriously, and do I trust those people’s judgment?) and only then forming your own view. It is where a company can be right while the market still hesitates.

Block 3: emerging trends. Few reports flag them, the potential is high and whether they materialize is uncertain. The question here is not “what do we do”, it is “what would the impact on my business be if this happened”. Tracking has to be frequent, because this kind of trend tends to materialize differently from the forecast. Proximity to universities and to companies with high patent output is worth more than any report, because that is where the signal is born.

The split separates three things that normally get confused: what you need in order to survive, what can create advantage and what can transform an entire market.

An example from the third block

Biomimicry has been discussed since the 1980s and appears only marginally in the reports. It is the kind of subject that deserves more attention than it gets.

The premise is that nature is regenerative and had millions of years to develop efficient combinations. The application happens at three levels. In form: the Japanese Shinkansen bullet train had its nose redesigned with inspiration from the beak of the kingfisher, which reduced the boom on exiting tunnels and improved energy efficiency. In process: polymer adhesives inspired by the mechanism the mussel uses to attach itself to submerged rock, non-toxic and more resistant than conventional adhesives, with applications in construction, medicine and manufacturing. In system: treatment plants that reproduce the filtration of wetlands.

The point is not to copy the appearance of an organism. It is to understand how the system works. And the room to gain, in materials, cost, design, agriculture, construction and engines, is still almost entirely open.

Where the reading tends to stall

Two subjects illustrate well why block 2 exists.

The first is the dispute between globalization and regionalization. There are houses arguing that the economy is regionalizing and houses holding that globalization remains predominant. Both have evidence. The answer probably varies by sector, and global companies will need to balance scale efficiency with local agility. While the debate runs, agreements such as the RCEP, a free trade zone bringing together fifteen Asia-Pacific countries including China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and the ten ASEAN members, keep reorganizing real trade flows under high geopolitical tension.

The second is central bank digital currencies. The potential to disrupt payment systems is acknowledged; implementation faces questions of privacy, sovereignty and international coordination that nobody has solved. Banks and fintechs will have to adapt to rules that do not yet exist.

Neither case is settled by reading one more report. Both are settled by deciding which side you think more likely and what you will do if you are wrong.

What to do with the filter

Two questions organize the exercise: what will the future of my segment be, and how do I prepare for it.

The practical answer is asymmetric. On established trends, act with conviction and speed, because delay is expensive and the advantage is small. On contested and emerging ones, keep flexibility, small bets and frequent review, because that is where the disproportionate return lives.

Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. For those not in a position to invent it, the second best is to get there before your customers do.

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