QUANTUMRUN FORESIGHT PLATFORM A Technology Review
By Kevin Jae
I
N the past few months, I used the Quantumrun Foresight Platform for some of my projects and have found it a useful tool. This review describes
how the platform works, my impressions on the
Users are able to bookmark Insights and Trends into customized Lists,
platform, and how the futures studies community
which can then be turned into Projects that visualize the trend articles. There
could benefit.
is currently one visualization functionality available on the platform right
The first thing that I noticed about the platform
now, although two additional visualizations will soon be available, according
was its user-friendliness and its well-designed, clean
to Quantumrun Foresight. The currently available visualization is the Strategy
user interface. It is easy for new users to navigate and
Planner project interface, which plots trends onto the graph by year of release or
familiarize themselves with the platform.
public availability, likelihood to become a reality, and the impact on the industry.
After successfully purchasing a subscription and registering an account, users are prompted to
This allows users to identify the trends that matter to them. Quantumrun Foresight takes an interesting approach to determine a given
choose a handful of topics that they are interested
trend’s year of availability, likelihood, and industry impact—it is the users who
in. Trend and Insight articles around these topics
rank these elements of the trend alongside Quantumrun employees. The
are recommended to the user on the main page.
platform relies on the “wisdom of the crowd” to great effect and to overcome
(Note: Trends are curated articles f rom other
individual biases.
websites, and Insight articles are written by Quantumrun Foresight’s in-house team and contain additional analysis.) The recommendations are extremely useful because of the sheer number of Trends and Insight articles available on the platform—you can find materials on everything from the hospitality industry to climate mitigation technology to projections on the global population. The large number of Trends and Insights makes
Just to summarize and conclude, based on my impressions of the platform, I think that the platform offers three major value-adds for users: 1. The platform is user-friendly; and it handles trend research, trend curation, and trend analysis; which will make it useful for organizations that do not have too much foresight capacity 2. This also frees up foresight professionals to focus less on basic research and more on activities like scenario planning 3. The project visualizations help automate and accelerate insight analysis, and I can see it being useful for spurring conversations during meetings and workshops.
the Platform an ideal tool to help organizations and foresight professionals expand their horizon
MY GENERAL IMPRESSION:
scanning and trend research capabilities.
The Quantumrun Foresight Platform offers a huge number of future trends
However, the Quantumrun Foresight Platform is
and allows users to organize and visualize trend insights, all of which is
not just a horizon scanning tool; it comes with
useful for strategy development, scenario planning, and product ideation. I
additional functionalities that could help with
could definitely see it adding value and capacity for foresight professionals
scenario planning, business strategy, and ideation.
and organizations by automating away some of the more time-consuming
This is the “Projects” functionality.
aspects of foresight.
HUMAN FUTURES
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