Why were the futurist tomes of the 1950s filled with pictures of cities under glass domes, anti-gravity cars, nuclear trains and conveyer belt footpaths, but missing men carrying babies, women with briefcases, children with pierced eyebrows and people of Asian or African heritage? It was the future predicted through the prism of The Donna Reed Show.
Futurists can get it so wrong when they do their job. Former Wesfarmers chief executive officer Michael Chaney says that in the 1980s, he used to collect forecasts from reputable organisations over a 10-year period and compared them with the outcomes. The result: some forecasters got it right half the time, but because one could never know which half, every forecast was useless. Moving forward, he said, was a matter of risk management.
How then should companies anticipate the unknown? One of the most interesting trends now is the way nations and cities are turning to science and industrial parks. But these are deep inside cities where companies and universities can work together to anticipate trends and create the future. As detailed here in BusinessWeek, it’s happening all over the world.
“The scale of some of these urban schemes is jaw-dropping. Spain’s 22@Barcelona (the name comes from an industrial zoning designation) involves transforming 115 blocks of the city to house more than 1,000 international media, IT, and medical technology companies that are expected to employ 150,000 in 15 years. Singapore is spending some $10 billion on futurist architecture for a megadevelopment called One North, which integrates new research and development complexes and “living laboratories” for biotech, advanced materials, and medical services. Seoul hopes Digital Media City, which is rising near an old railroad depot and dump, will have 120,000 workers and 2,000 companies by 2015.
Some older U.S. tech clusters are trying to adapt. Industrial parks set up in the 1960s outside San Jose to cater to the then-nascent electronics industry are adding amenities including housing, shops, and bike and hiking trails to turn them into fuller communities. Research Triangle Park is dolling itself up, too … Midsize industrial cities see downtown parks as redevelopment tools. Winston-Salem, N.C., hit hard by the decline of the tobacco, textile, and furniture industries, has converted a building once owned by R.J. Reynolds into the headquarters of a research park specializing in biomedicine. Meantime, Sheffield, England, a cradle of the Industrial Revolution, is launching an ambitious redevelopment to position itself as a hub for advanced manufacturing, design, and new media.
One of the most striking examples of that is in Taiwan which has become the world’s top manufacturer of semiconductors, notebook computers, and flat-panel screens, as well as the planet’s No. 2 chip designer. As detailed in this report, it’s very much industrial parks like the Industrial Technology Research Institute, or ITRI which licenses its patents to tech companies, saving them a bundle compared to doing the R&D themselves and which also has a large intellectual property rights team, lawyers, business-development team, and a team for marketing.
While these parks will not anticipate all the imponderables, they do businesses in a position where they can collaborate as clusters, think ahead and create their own futures.
