Back to the Future

Some of us get so caught up in the present, that we forget to look ahead and prepare for the future – with dramatic effects. Neil Scaife questions David Smith on the changing shape of the consumer model and discovers why it is important to take a long-term view.
What is the futurist’s community all about?
It’s a very diverse community made up of professionals and amateurs who seek to understand what the future might be like, in the short and longer term. There are academics undertaking very interesting research in our Universities and Business Schools and there are analysts, who in their own speciality are thinking about the future, often on shorter timescales. There is a final group, the business community, who seek to imagine what the future might be like for their own organizations. Futurists are fascinating people because they are generally very focused on a specific geography or on a particular element of life in the future, such as people, ecology, political, economic, life science, climate, technology etc.
How does the Global Future Forum fit within this community?
Unisys funded the creation of the Global Future Forum which today comprises a network of over two thousand future thinkers.
Today, the GFF is a future looking organisation that consolidates and originates future thinking in different market sectors and forms global views of some of the most important drivers of change affecting business in the near future.
Our passion has been and remains to create a network of future thinkers comprising; futurists, academics and business people from across the world to help business better prepare for the future.