Professional Futurist / Strategist
One Final Night Launch… Last week I fulfilled a lifelong dream of seeing the Space Shuttle liftoff- in what will likely be the last night launch of the NASA Shuttle Program. Now that the International Space Station is nearing completion NASA will retire the reusable Shuttle fleet in September, and move towards lower cost expendable rockets that might [...]
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Forget about trying to displace oil, the target for disruption is the internal combustion engine! If you want a sneak peak at the most revolutionary ideas in how we design, build and experience cars visit: Local Motors, River Simple, Commn, and Trexa (Image). These companies are rethinking platform-based vehicle design to support manufacturing and business model innovations that [...]
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Forecast & Outlook: Electric vehicles (EVs) powered by the integration of batteries, hydrogen fuel cells and capacitors, represent an enormous opportunity for re-tooling America’s manufacturing base. The high end of the value chain in automobiles is no longer based on combustion engines or mechanical systems, and has shifted towards electric propulsion, composite materials, energy storage/conversion, [...]
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Forecast & Outlook: The principles of ‘situational awareness’ based on perception, comprehensive and projection might soon support a wide range of applications that reach far beyond military operations and crisis response. It is a user and outcomes-centric systems approach that could integrate anticipated advances in mobility, ‘smart’ infrastructure, learning systems, policy-making and business intelligence. [...]
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Forecast & Outlook: The global conversation about the future of transportation will soon shift from a narrow focus on incrementally improving ‘miles per gallon’- to a more substantive and fundamental rethinking of vehicle design and manufacturing based on an era of ‘drive by wire’ control systems, wheel-based electric motors and the integration of batteries, hydrogen fuel cells [...]
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Forecast & Outlook: Our evolving knowledge base and capacity to design molecular manufacturing systems will be a primary driver of social and economic change in the decades ahead. Bioindustrialism and the Nanoscale design of carbon-based structures are two ‘game-changing’ ideas ripe for capital investment and commercial applications. Properly harnessed, carbon bonds are our best eco-friendly [...]
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Forecast & Outlook: The future of unconventional natural gas is the buzz topic within the world of energy forecasting. Natural gas is a clean, versatile fuel that could eventually expand beyond centralized utility power plants into markets for smaller scale Distributed Power systems, as a cleaner transportation fuel in the ‘Electric-H2 Age’, and if all [...]
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Warren Buffett seems to be be tapping his inner Futurist and raising the bar for applying strategic foresight in the world of finance and business. The decision by Berkshire Hathaway‘s CEO to buy Fort Worth Texas-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe demonstrates his understanding of deep structural changes in the world economy and the strong defensive position (and flexibility) [...]
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Carbon-based nano-materials are on track to becoming a foundation for economic growth for the 21st century. And the United States could be in the driver’s seat of this age of Carbon Capitalism and rethinking of carbon-based Industrialism! Manufacturing Eras: Silicon to Carbon If the 20th century economic revolution of computer-based information technologies was shaped by [...]
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I was recently asked to join the hosts of The Takeaway in a conversation [Listen] on the ‘game-changing’ relevance of GM’s claim that its soon to be released Chevy Volt can achieve a 230 mpg efficiency in urban-suburban commuting based on driving less than 50 miles per day. (Tricky math?) Is the Chevy Volt a [...]
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