From ee publishers, May 2009
Hans van de Groenendaal, EngineerIT converses with Wolfgang Grulke of FutureWorld.
"It is no longer possible to learn just from experience - in this warp-speed world, it has become essential to learn from the future!"
These words were written over 10 years ago when futurist Wolfgang Grulke published his "way ahead of the time" book Lessons from the Future. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Wolfgang, now living in the UK, via Skype.
As a former IBM executive, Wolfgang worked internationally with IBM for more than 25 years and was awarded the prestigious IBM Outstanding Innovation Award. He started FutureWorld as an informal business network in 1987. Since then FutureWorld has been instrumental in helping major corporations and venture capital firms position themselves for the new world economy. His best-selling books Ten Lessons from the Future and Lessons in Radical Innovation: Out-of-the-box straight to the bottom line are published worldwide by Financial Times/Prentice Hall.
"The technology trends I wrote about in Lessons from the Future have seen the light of day and are today driving our everyday lives. If you think about telecommunication and hardware, this industry has become totally commoditised. Cloud computing is the final death of differentiation for this industry. It says the computing power is out there somewhere. I don't actually care where it is, in Russia or Peru? I just want to get access to it. It turns out that computing hardware as about as interesting to the end user as an Eskom power station."
Do you then still care about the technology?
"The infrastructure, whether telecommunications or computing, just disappears, like the air we breathe, it just is there! The only time you notice it is when it is not available, like the electricity in South Africa! It is then that we worry about it.
"In the next few years we will still see a lot of 'stuff' around technology at user interface level but soon that will also be commoditised and users will just expect to use the technology with little or no thought about the technology itself. The technology that underpins user experiences will disappear into the background.
"The explosion in mobile phones will create another wave of new user experiences. Statistics tell us that 61% of the world's population now uses a mobile phone. It's likely that in another five years 100% of the world's population will be connected by mobile phones. Governments will realise that to deliver services they will have to provide mobile phones to the poorest of people to give them access to e-government."
On the question why e-commerce, i.e. ordering online, has not taken off in South Africa, Wolfgang says it has little to do with telecoms infrastructure or access to broadband. "Technology may be more challenging in South Africa than in the UK or the USA but the real obstruction is the lack of delivery logistics, i.e. next day delivery. In the UK I can order almost anything online today and have it delivered to my doorstep by the next morning."
The biggest business opportunity in South Africa is to put a reliable and efficient delivery infrastructure in place to offer next-day delivery to your doorstop, at the affordable rates that people in Europe and the USA are enjoying. "With that in place people will start using the internet to make their purchases."
Wolfgang sees a major change in the way retail will develop. Shopping centres will become showrooms where people will visit to look at items they wish to purchase. They will go home and browse the online stores and find the item which they have seen in the showroom, check the various online malls for the best price, some 20 to 30% less than in the showroom, make their purchase online and have it delivered to their doorstep the next day.
"Shopping malls of the future will take on a different form; they will become showrooms for the digital online malls. They could become more like entertainment centres and even charge an entrance fee! Shopping mall property owners will have a real problem on their hands and will have to become creative in their thinking of how to put their assets to profitable use."
"It is interesting that the brightest young people coming out of university a year ago would have wanted to work for an investment bank. Today they don't want to be near a bank. They don't want to work for large corporates; many would rather start their own businesses. I see major changes in the work style of engineers. They think big, they want to develop another type of Google and do crazy new things. They are looking for innovation, new ideas and big leverage, and will form small interest groups to develop ideas on how the world will work tomorrow."
Is Wolfgang planning another book about his concept of "Lessons from the Future"? Yes, he is working on taking the concept to a current and more practical level, for everyone to benefit. Another book in the pipeline is about building "quantum relationships", something the engineers of tomorrow have to work on a lot more than in the past. And then he keeps busy with many other projects - keeping the world on its toes on the FutureWorld web sites
www.mindbullets.net and www.FutureWorld.org.
Can we learn lessons from the future? Talking with Wolfgang Grulke I am convinced we can.
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