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From an institutional standpoint, business is simply not the same thing that it was just a few decades ago. Yet, the concepts and language at the foundation of tomorrow's businesses have not generally been updated to adequately reflect these changes. As part of its core mission, the Trend Center seeks to gather and contribute provocative ideas about the future of work and business.
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Graduate educational institutions are poised to face a number of new challenges over the next few years as competitive technologies begin to mature. Within the next five years, many universities will find themselves forced to answer fundamental questions about their role in society and how they operate. This project seeks to more fully analyze this area of substantial uncertainty.
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Change often overtakes the business environment, not gradually, but in punctuated periods of creative destruction. This project investigates the underlying nature of this process. By gathering and comparing relevant examples from a number of diverse fields, the trends center seeks to distill general principles about the process of creative destruction and insights into the overall process of change itself.
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Since the industrial revolution, productive human activity has largely been centered on physical "workplaces." Within the next few years, however, telepresence technologies will allow large segments of the working population to coordinate their activities in virtual environments. This project seeks to investigate and define opportunities and possible approaches within this uncharted environment.
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Energy and environmental considerations are at the core of next-generation business initiatives. While these areas have long been seen as threatening, there is now an emerging consenus that the development of genuinely green business initiatives also represents a monumental opportunity. This project is an effort to collect and contribute to the thinking in this area.
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Until recently, the global business environment had been defined by the ideas that "the world was flat" and even that we had reached "the end of history." However, it is increasingly apparent that globalized business is coming into contact with previously uncharted issues and organizing principles behind many of our economic institutions have come into question. This project seeks to define and reconceptualize the principles that underlie the changing business climate of the new century. (For more information on this project, contact Devin Fidler directly at devin@trendscenter.org)
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