Throughout history, humans have sought to unravel the mysteries of tomorrow, turning to everything from tea leaves and fortune tellers to complex statistical models and stock market derivatives. The aim has always been the same: to relieve our anxiety; and protect ourselves from uncertainty. In business, the ability to anticipate what’s next isn’t just about satisfying curiosity; it’s about survival.
Methods of peering into the unknown
Several traditional techniques are used to forecast future trends, from scenario planning to roadmapping. However, each approach has limitations:
- Scenario Planning: This method explores multiple extreme versions of the future, but it doesn’t indicate which scenario is more likely or even if any will happen.
- Quantitative Forecasting: This relies on past trends to predict the future, assuming that historical data can be extended. However, the fidelity of these models diminishes over time, as they often ignore uncertainty and overlook disruptive innovations
- Roadmapping and Backcasting: These techniques start with a desired future state and work backward to identify steps needed to achieve that goal. While useful, they can overlook unexpected events or disruptive innovations.
The challenge of applying these techniques to science-driven innovation is that unpredictability can be extreme. Nothing happens – until it does. Innovation moves in fits and starts, where long periods of stagnation are followed by sudden, massive leaps forward. Adding to the complexity, product development cycles have accelerated, while the sources of innovation have diversified. More technologies are emerging from more sources at a faster pace. As a result, forecasting errors can multiply exponentially.
"To gain a competitive edge, we want to look past the obvious tech trends. Many things we see are too early. Investing too late is costly."
— Tech Strategy & Origination team, European Defence Prime
A new model for seeing over the horizon
In today’s cluttered innovation landscape, a more reliable foresight model is essential. The ability to sift through noise, isolate meaningful signals, and spot emerging trends gives businesses the foresight they need to capture early competitive advantage.
At Outsmart Insight, we specialise in distilling vast amounts of emerging technology signals into trends. By analysing signals from startup companies, universities, research institutions, patents and industry trends, we separate the critical developments from an ocean of noise. Domain-specific expertise using large teams of scientists and engineers plays a vital role in identifying which signals are meaningful, assessing their significance, and linking them to similar endeavours to identify trends.
Our foresight model charts how technology evolves over horizons: Business; Engineering; and Scientific.
- Business Horizon: Current-generation technology, already on the market and commercially available.
- Engineering Horizon: Next-generation technology, currently in field testing with a clear path to market.
- Scientific Horizon: Generation-after-next technology, still in early-stage prototyping and laboratory development.
The business horizon comprises current- generation technologies that are ready to use today, or will be widely available within the next five years.
In the future, these will be replaced by technologies currently being developed in the engineering horizon. These are typically progressing through corporate or startup research and development; undergoing field trials, have commercial, government, or venture backing; and can demonstrate a clear path to market.
The scientific horizon is characterised by science experiments and proofs of concept taking place in university laboratories. In time, some of these ‘weak signals’ may replace what is currently in the engineering horizon – although longer term forecasting inevitably comes with greater uncertainty.
In this model, current-generation is replaced by next-generation, which is in turn superseded by generation-after-next technology.
Our approach combines human expertise with a proprietary crowdsourcing platform, bringing together many thousands of scientists and engineers across various disciplines. The result is a comprehensive view of potential technological breakthroughs, informed by both quantitative research and qualitative insights from leading innovators.
Deploying the Three Horizons Framework
The Three Horizons framework has been used to help clients chart the future of a wide range of deep tech areas. Some of these include:
- Plasmonics for active camouflage
- Active ergonomic exosuits to enhance human movement
- Over the horizon technologies for C4ISR in 2045
- Underwater robotics for deep ocean exploration
- Quantum gravity sensors aboard space-based satellites
- Programmable textiles to sense and process data
- Embedded energy harvesting for high sensor density
- Synthetic biological intelligence applied to machine learning
- Next-gen computing to reduce data centre emissions
- Future supply chains for rare-earth elements and minerals
- Direct Air Capture for offsetting carbon emissions
- Robotics and cobotics for automated manufacturing
- 3D bioprinted organs using ink made of living cells
- Synthetic fuels to power future military platforms
- Creating digital 3D objects from images
- In-space manufacturing of materials for use on Earth
- Extracting insight from multimodal data sources
- Reservoir computing requiring 1000x less training data
- Sustainable, waste-integrating bio-derived concrete
- Long term space habitation by the mid-21st Century
- Future aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul
- Cell senescence to extend military personnel’s healthspan
- Gen-after-next hardware: Biological Artificial Intelligence
Trend Foresight reports are bespoke, high-impact resources designed to give corporate R&D teams a clear strategic edge in emerging technologies. Tailored to each client’s specific needs, these reports are crafted collaboratively to deliver exactly the right focus – whether it’s a wide array of concise trend analyses or an in-depth focus on a single, transformative technology.
Each report goes beyond trend mapping over three horizons and addressing pressing R&D questions:
- What are the critical technology development pathways, and how are they organised?
- Who are the key players and field leaders – from university labs to startups to major enterprises?
- What momentum and drivers are accelerating advancements, and which sectors are fuelling demand?
- What engineering bottlenecks need to be solved, and which future industrial use cases will these unlock?
- Which business models will be transformed, who stands to win or lose, and where are the opportunities to gain competitive advantage?
Trend Foresight for your organisation
Outsmart Insight’s Trend Foresight offers a unique advantage by providing early sight of approaching inflection points in the development of emerging technology, helping organisations to make timely decisions. This approach is tailored to each client.
Key benefits include:
- Improved decision-making: By acting on foresight, organisations can stay ahead of fast moving topics
- Reduced risk: Identifying shifting trends reduces the risk of investing in dead-end technologies
- Cost efficiency: Early visibility improves the cost-effectiveness of internal R&D and innovation efforts
