What trends and signals are relevant to my product?

To maintain your right to exist as an organization, you must look and respond to the times to come. But how do you do that? To better understand the future and how it is affected by a variety of factors, we cut it into three different levels.

• Mega-trends or sturctures
• Trends
• Signals

Mega-trends or structures

Mega-trends represent the lowest, most basic level. These are changes that you can see coming long in advance and are relatively easy to predict. Examples of mega-trends are: aging, running out of fossil fuels, digitalization and automation.

These are developments you can take into account fairly early on. There are also few things that have an impact on this, so this development is a totally different direction. Aging, for example, can only be countered by a huge baby boom. So that there are not only more and more elderly people, but on the other hand children are born. Only that is not such a likely development.

Mega-trends are important to keep an eye on. Because they have a big impact on what you do as a business. But because they have a pretty long run-up, you have a pretty long time to anticipate them. Besides, we often know them, we see them, know they are there, they are not surprises.

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Trends

On top of mega-trends, you have trends. These are a little less robust. These trends move more easily in multiple directions. It's a subset in a society that shapes a trend, starts it, expands more broadly and more people catch on. Electric cars are one such trend.

On the one hand, you see in the mega-structure the depletion of fossil fuels. And also increasing air pollution. One of the answers is electric cars. This trend is an answer to a mega-trend. But it is not the only one, nor perhaps the ultimate solution.

A trend can be finite, which is why it is not a mega-trend. Suppose we do find out that hydrogen is 10x better, or we get another form of transportation, then this trend is gone.

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Signals

On top of trends, you have at the micro level, signals. Signals are also called "early warnings" of change. They are small changes on a personal, small level, different from what we have seen. Usually you can recognize them as things that surprise or amaze you. 'I never looked at it that way before. Why is that suddenly happening?'

In the beer shelf in supermarkets, you see something like this happening now. The design of a beer bottle and label is pretty much the same for every brand. All beer brands have a label around the bottle with their brand on it.

And then suddenly there is BrewDog. This Scottish beer brand suddenly does something completely different from all those other products. They come out with a super-flashy design. At first you think, "Hey, what's that?", then other brands pick up on it. You see that slowly grow. But so the first signal is a few who do that.

(By the way, it can also happen that it stays with that few and no one catches on.) But if that few are successful, others will always follow.

These are opinions or behaviors that deviate from the status quo (e.g. Many people are active during the day and rest at night (status quo). We picked up signals in various places within our community that people are increasingly tired during the day and restless at night and too busy in their heads, so they cannot sleep at night. In such a case, there are indications in several places that a change is coming. It may be the emergence of a short-lived hype, or it may be the harbinger of a trend.

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