Kevin Jae

QUANTUMRUN FORESIGHT PLATFORM

A Technology Review

By Kevin Jae

IN 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 platform, and how the futures studies community could benefit.

The first thing that I noticed about the platform was its user-friendliness and its well-designed, clean user interface. It is easy for new users to navigate and familiarize themselves with the platform.

After successfully purchasing a subscription and registering an account, users are prompted to choose a handful of topics that they are interested in. Trend and Insight articles around these topics are recommended to the user on the main page. (Note: Trends are curated articles from other 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 the Platform an ideal tool to help organizations and foresight professionals expand their horizon scanning and trend research capabilities. However, the Quantumrun Foresight Platform is not just a horizon scanning tool; it comes with additional functionalities that could help with scenario planning, business strategy, and ideation. This is the “Projects” functionality.

Users are able to bookmark Insights and Trends into customized Lists, which can then be turned into Projects that visualize the trend articles. There is currently one visualization functionality available on the platform right now, although two additional visualizations will soon be available, according to Quantumrun Foresight. The currently available visualization is the Strategy Planner project interface, which plots trends onto the graph by year of release or public availability, likelihood to become a reality, and the impact on the industry. This allows users to identify the trends that matter to them.

Quantumrun Foresight takes an interesting approach to determine a given trend’s year of availability, likelihood, and industry impact—it is the users who rank these elements of the trend alongside Quantumrun employees. The platform relies on the “wisdom of the crowd” to great effect and to overcome individual biases.

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.

MY GENERAL IMPRESSION:

The Quantumrun Foresight Platform offers a huge number of future trends and allows users to organize and visualize trend insights, all of which is useful for strategy development, scenario planning, and product ideation. I could definitely see it adding value and capacity for foresight professionals and organizations by automating away some of the more time-consuming aspects of foresight.