Special 75th Anniversary Project - IRI 2038 Futures Study
Launch Date: May 2012
Expected Wrap-up Date: 2013
As part of IRI’s 75th Anniversary Celebration (2013) IRI commissioned the IRI2038 project, a futures initiative designed to answer the following two questions:
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How will possible future developments and events impact the art and science of research and technology management over the next 25 years?
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How can IRI best serve its membership in these possible futures?
IRI2038 is currently completing the Integration phase. This phase has included the following activities:
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Systems Workshops: IRI2038 facilitated workshops at the 2013 ROR Winter Meeting to initiate development of inductive scenarios that will be used to explore the management of R&D and the role of IRI. Teams reviewed potential impacts of 2-3 major trends (from the Futures Audit) and weak signals (from the Weak Signals Environmental Scan) and clustered them based on possible interactions and affinity. The teams used these to build influence diagrams connecting the most important cluster elements. We would like to extend sincere thanks to Wendy Shultz, Infinite Futures in Oxford, England and Emily Empel, Disney, Orlando for serving as workshop facilitators.
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Inductive Scenario Development: The IRI2038 team has taken the results of the February workshops and created four provocative, yet plausible, views of the future in which we may be managing research and technology. High level descriptions of each scenario are:
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Africa Leapfrogs Developed Countries - An inability to build new capacity in the developed world due to increasing environmental regulations creates a new flexible and localized manufacturing process. This process churns out the highly customized products consumers demand at an ever-faster pace. With less of an installed asset base and the ability to better leverage its natural resources, Africa jumps ahead of the developed world in growth and economic dynamism.
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Everything’s In Beta - The collapse of the complex global manufacturing ecosystem leads to a bifurcated economy underpinned by local manufacturing. At the low end there is massive churn of new products that are introduced as beta products with little market research. On the other stand premium products that are socially reputable and deploy R&D resources towards tackling the big challenges of the 21st century.
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Three Roads To Innovation - In an era of virtual work and prize driven motivation, society creates three paths toward innovation. Many choose to directly connect their brains together in a community in which the network runs project management. Another path is to intentionally form insular communities that work in secrecy. With the entire workforce now freelance, many corporations adopt a model similar to Hollywood movie studios, where a small production team manages a large pool of freelance talent.
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Death Of Distance vs. Megacities - Cities become the major political force in countries due to their embrace of smart technologies to manage transportation, energy, and waste. They grab natural resources through giant public/private partnerships and grow into city-states. Technology and connectivity make distance irrelevant at last, restoring some balance to individuals and enabling scientists to do and teach at the level of entire corporations or universities of the past.
At the 75th Anniversary Jubilee meeting in May, eight Incasting workshops were conducted to explore how participants would manage R&D to be successful in each scenario. Many thanks to our facilitators: Marsha Rhea from Signature I, LLC, John Mahaffie from Leading Futurists and Bill Croasmun from Foresight Alliance.
A final report comprising scenario details, systems maps and results from the incasting workshops will be published in June and be available on this website. This report will complete the integration phase of IRI2038.
The upcoming Planning Phase comprises two activities which will complete the IRI2038 project:
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A global online game is planned for early September in which participants will explore solution strategies for a number of future situations based on the four inductive scenarios.
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Backcasting workshops will be conducted as part of the IRI Futures Summit in San Jose, CA in November. These will explore the following question: If we know what to do in 2038 to succeed each of the four 25 year scenarios, what do we need to be doing 20, 15, 10 and 5 years from now to prepare?
Prior to the current Integration phase IRI2038 had already completed two phases - Discovery and Extrapolation. The Discovery Phase included the following activities:
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The IRI Futures Audit establishes a consensus view of the future that will serve as the baseline for this project. To accomplish this, the IRI2038 team interviewed 38 R&D leaders around the world to understand what they believe will be the key drivers of change in R&D management over the next 25 years. The IRI2038 Futures Audit Report identifies what IRI members and others in the research and technology management arena believe will be the expected future.
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Twenty-five Year Retrospective - an exercise identifying major events and developments that impacted how R&D management has evolved over the past 25 year. Examples could include: universities adopt the Bayh-Dole amendment for intellectual property, end of the cold war, the internet, etc. This helps set expectations for magnitude of changes in next 25 years. Activities will include posing in the IRI Community Forum and a review of 25 years of the RTM journal and ROR projects to identify key themes over time.
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Environmental Scan – exploration of early signals of future trends and events outside the consensus views expressed in the Futures Audit. The IRI2038 Weak Signals Report uncovers emerging patterns of change that are on the fringe of awareness, but have the potential to alter the expected future of R&D as described in the Futures Audit Report. The Report provides overviews of weak signals and questions for R&D leaders to explore the potential implications.
The Extrapolation Phase included:
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Futures Wheels: The trends and weak signals identified in Discovery were projected into the future using futures wheels. (Futures Wheel example) Workshops were conducted at the IRI Member Summit to engage IRI members in developing futures wheels for four signals/trends: augmented humans, the demise of IP, crowdsourced science and the future of computing. The IRI2038 team leveraged several resources to complete these including: IRI members, online tools, students in the University of Houston’s futures program and other futurists. The results will inform the development of scenarios in the next project phase.
Watch for IRI2038 updates and opportunities to engage in the project.
The initiative is led by Ted Farrington (PepsiCo) and Christian Crews (AndSpace Consulting), co-authors of the March 2012 RTM article on Research Foresights and a 2011 Member Summit presentation. The project will engage IRI members and thought leaders in the exploration and development of provocative yet plausible views of events, developments and change forces impacting R&D Management.
IRI2038 project is made possible by member donations to the IRI Diamond Anniversary Campaign.