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Futures Digital Platform To Catalyze Sustainable Innovation Globally

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A new digital platform – the Futures Centre – has been developed by global sustainability non-profit Forum for the Future (Forum) as a powerful tool for decision makers to track trends, share resources and spot opportunities for sustainable innovation and collaboration. Forum has nearly twenty years’ experience using futures techniques, such as trends, scenarios and horizon scanning, to help business leaders move beyond day-to-day priorities and consider the potential business impacts of longer-term trends, such as climate change and resource scarcity. Pepsico, HP, Levi’s, Sony and US retail giant Target have all worked successfully with Forum using futures techniques. The Futures Centre, which was unveiled recently in Singapore, aims to make Forum’s futures knowledge and expertise more accessible to a much wider audience of businesses, governments, social enterprises and other organisations, and to increase the non-profit’s impact in sustainability on the global stage.

The platform works by allowing users to tap into a vast online bank of futures knowledge and monitor change in dynamic fields, such as land-use, manufacturing, ecosystem health and social demographics, so that they can better understand the challenges they face in today’s changing world and more easily identify windows of opportunity to accelerate positive change. In practice, this may mean a company developing insight into how to improve its business model in the face of water scarcity, or an individual using the platform to connect with others and build a powerful coalition to tackle the problem across an entire sector. Over the next year, the Futures Centre will bring together some of the world’s leading experts to explore a number of critical issues in more detail through “topic hubs”. The first of these is due to go live in April and will be looking at the future of shipping, although other potential issues to go under the spotlight could be diverse as climate finance to bio-technology.

The Futures Centre will be run from Singapore and is supported by the Singaporean government’s Economic Development Board (EDB). Its opening coincides with the Singapore Exchange’s move to make the publishing of sustainability reports mandatory for all listed companies by 2017 or 2018, signaling the growing importance of sustainability and corporate responsibility in Asia. Although managed in South East Asia, the platform and its content will be relevant to all business, regardless of location, and include trends and topics that affect people and organisations across the world.

Sally Uren, CEO, Forum for the Future, said: “Futures techniques enable leaders to look beyond the here and now and see how their organisations might fare in a radically different world. For nearly two decades we have been working with our partners to help them understand just how different that world could be, giving them the insights and confidence they need to help prepare for different scenarios.” Kelvin Wong, Assistant Managing Director, Singapore Economic Development Board, said: “We are pleased to support Forum for the Future’s establishment of the Futures Centre. The capabilities that the centre brings in future analysis and system innovation will establish win-win partnerships between corporates, non-profits and public sector to create sustainable growth.”

Forum for the Future is an independent non-profit that works globally with business, government and others to solve complex sustainability challenges. In 2014, Forum released the Retail Horizons toolkit to help US retailers safeguard the future of their own businesses in an environmentally sustainable and socially just way in a rapidly changing marketplace.

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