What is “Futuristic” anyways?

Last week I twittered my thoughts on Amazon’s futuristic Kindle product. I got a response from an old friend of mine wondering why I thought it was futuristic as eBooks and ePaper was invented quite a few years ago. His response made me realize that people often have a different opinion on what futuristic is. So I am dedicating this blog post to share my views and opinions about futuristic.

Let’s get straight to the point. Futurism or futuristic has, in my opinion, nothing to do with a product itself. Instead it is all about a future where a product or a technology has a vital role. Implementing such a technology requires a controlled expansion of our social, cultural, and/or business framework that will lead to a mature and sustainable marketplace for the “futuristic” technology or product.

Building a technology doesn’t move it out of the futuristic category. eBooks has been around for a long time. In fact my senior project in college in 1996 was an eBook that connected to a computer that held a digital library. I have even bought eBooks online and read them on my Nokia 3250 beginning of this decade. However, I’m a geek and love new toys. I’ve read more eBooks than I have read real books.

In the real world, however, geeks like myself only account for a tiny fraction of the population. Not enough to create and sustain a major marketplace. What Amazon and other players in the eBook/ePaper industry need to accomplish is to make such a technology socially acceptable, integrate it into our culture, and create acceptance in the business world. Only then will eBooks become an everyday technology and I will be able to stop calling it futuristic.

PS. As a side note I wanted to mention a few other futuristic technologies/services/products

1. Flying cars – Invented but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
2. Space tourism – Happened but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
3. Mobile Payment – Exists but still missing a sustainable marketplace.
4. Smart Homes – Exists but still missing a sustainable marketplace.

Rapid Futurism: Changing the world by design

After years of research on human vs business vs technology relationship one fact stands out; very rarely do I come across a futuristic vision that can’t be implemented on a smaller scale today. Too often do I meet “futurists” or “visionaries” with great visions of the future but with an attitude that we (mankind) are not ready for their vision, mostly because it is too futuristic.

Creating the technologies that is going to drive the marketplaces of tomorrow can be done by design even for a pre-funded startup. Sure, resources, like funds and skilled staff, will get you to the future faster. Yet, it is the small startups that have the ideas of tomorrow, though they lack the fundamental understanding of the relationship between humans, society, culture, and technology to be able to realize the technologies of tomorrow.

Rapid Futurism goes beyond technology.Rapid Futurism is the theory on how to envision, design, build, position, introduce, market, and grow your futuristic technology to achieve highest chance of success.

Creating the technologies of tomorrow requires leadership. I often like to think about it as two planets; present day Earth and tomorrow’s Earth. You’re job is to build a bridge between the two worlds and lead the market across your bridge. The catch: There’s hundreds of competing bridges.  So leadership is a must.

Your first thought might be to pour resources and money into marketing. Marketing, however, is a brute force attack on the market with no guarantee of success. Rapid Futurism instead focuses on how to position your technology in the present day market with minimal, but strategic, marketing and help you move the market towards your tomorrow.

I will release a whitepaper within 30-45 days that lays out the details of Rapid Futurism. Unfortunately this blog post would get too long.