THE IDENTIFY RESOURCE GUIDE

RESOURCE GUIDE

What your personal interests are will largely determine areas that you would like to research or know more about, but here are a few resources and techniques I use to open my thinking and seeing. What is important with these early stages of innovation is that you go broad, as well as deep. This will help your brain to make lateral connections between different things, which is often where the source of ideas springs from.

Here are some things to help you:

• Read the magazines Fast Company and Wired www.fastcompany.com and www.wired.com. Sign up for their newsletters, too; they are full of great ideas and stories of new things that are emerging.
• Can’t go out and be a trend-spotter yourself? Use Springwise www.springwise.com – the world’s largest idea-spotting network – to navigate the emerging world of new opportunities and ideas.
• How to People Watch – you can find a great guide on how and where to start on wikiHow: www.wikihow.com/Begin-People-Watching. Improving your skills as an observer is critical in being able to identify opportunities for innovation. This is where the curious mindset comes in -- to be like an anthropologist seeing and observing what is happening around you.
• Want to rub shoulders with others who are thinking big about the future? Join the World Future Society www.wfs.org. It is a community of individuals and organisations connected across the globe using a futurist mindset to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.
• Every year, I commit some time and money to learning something new. I have joined raw food cooking courses in Bali, learnt about emerging psychologies in Australia, attended a novel-writing retreat in the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, to name a few. On my list is to attend The Singularity University, an organisation with a ‘mission to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges’. Can’t attend in person? They have a range of resources on their website to inspire you (https://singularityu.org).

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