THE INDUSTRY STANDARD SOURCE FOR TREND AND SCENARIO ANALYSES
CREATED BY PROFESSIONAL FUTURISTS
A TEAM OF PROFESSIONAL FUTURISTS WORKING FOR YOU
WE WORK 24/7 ON UPDATING AND ADDING NEW CONTENT
At the heart of our solution is an exceptionally rich collection of in-depth analyses of future phenomena, all available to you as our platform subscriber. Our in-house team of 10+ futurists work relentlessly on adding new high-quality pieces of content and keeping existing ones up to date.
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Futures Platform offers the world’s largest repository of in-depth analyses of future phenomena. Each trend analysis is published in an easy-to-digest article format, including an introductory video, additional readings and AI-generated feed of related news & signals. You may also create your own phenomena as you like.
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Our rigorous analysis process draws from the methodology of future studies, and includes approaches like horizon scanning, driver mapping and scenario analysis. Each phenomenon is peer reviewed before publication.
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Every card on Futures Platform’s foresight database is assigned a type according to its anticipated future development path. We normally categorise future phenomena into four general types - Strengthening, Weakening, Wild Card and Weak Signal.
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We ensure a rich coverage of topics by applying a 32-domain taxonomy of the world, including domains such as energy, values and ethics, food, public governance, and climate change. Each of these domains are continuously being monitored for potential new phenomena to be analyzed further.
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For each of the 32 domains, our futurists have created a foresight radar, giving a handy way to start exploring and understanding related phenomena. You may create & edit your own radars with or without the existing templates.
MEET A FEW OF OUR FUTURISTS
Dr. Tuomo Kuosa, Director of Futures Research
Associate Professor, Strategic Foresight
Max Stucki, Futurist
Content Analysis Manager
Shiori Ota, Futurist
Senior Foresight Analyst
LEARN MORE ABOUT TREND ANALYSIS BY FUTURISTS
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Recently published trend analyses
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What's included in a trend analysis
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Foresight radars created by futurists
RECENTLY PUBLISHED TREND ANALYSES
Each analysis is run through a systematic research process conducted by professionally trained futurists. For each analysis, we identify, among others, key drivers, potential paths of events, key scenarios, and main implications. Each analysis is peer reviewed before adding onto the platform. Read more about the typical contents of a trend analysis further below.
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January 20th, 2026
Weak signal. Space farming, or space agriculture, refers to technologies and techniques that enable self-sustaining crop production in the confined spaces of spacecraft, space stations, and off-world habitats, reducing dependence on Earth.
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January 13th, 2026
Weak signal. Microreactors are ultra-small, portable nuclear reactors that generate 50 megawatts (MW) or less, compared with about 1 gigawatt produced by conventional full-scale nuclear plants. They could provide reliable nuclear power for remote areas, military bases, disaster recovery efforts, AI data centres, ships and even bases on the Moon.
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January 5th, 2026
Strengthening Trend. The Intention Economy refers to a potential future economic model in which AI tools capture, interpret, and potentially manipulate human intentions. It is likely to emerge as a lucrative parallel market and an evolution of the currently dominant attention economy, which focuses on capturing and monetising our limited attention.
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December 30th, 2025
Wild card.
Helium production is concentrated in only a handful of countries and fewer than 15 companies globally. Helium is essential for all kinds of technologies, including MRI scanners, quantum computers, semiconductors, and some fusion reactors. As helium cannot be artificially manufactured with today’s technology, and alternatives to helium remain limited, ensuring the sustainable management of this finite resource will become increasingly crucial for medical, scientific, and high-tech industries.
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December 23th, 2025
Weak signal. DNA search engines aim to make vast public sequencing archives quickly searchable. Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed MetaGraph. Similar to a traditional internet search engine, MetaGraph searches the raw data of all DNA and RNA sequences in the repositories, enabling scientists to do rapid, full-text-style searches that so far required massive computing power.
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December 16th, 2025
Wild card. New technologies now allow us to drill deliberately into volcanoes, as shown by the forthcoming KMT project in Iceland. This project will bore into a magma chamber to gain scientific insights and attempt to reach the extreme heat found there, which could be used to produce geothermal energy far more powerful than conventional options. In the future, the insights gained from this work could transform eruption forecasting and energy markets.
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December 11th, 2025
Weakening Trend. Freedom of religion and conscience, a fundamental human right, is under growing threat worldwide, with 5.4 billion people in 62 countries facing severe restrictions and persecution mainly by authoritarian states like China and North Korea, alongside extremist groups and ethno-religious nationalists. Recent years have also seen rising hate crimes and legal pressures on faith institutions in Western countries.
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December 2nd, 2025
Weak signal. A team of scientists in China claims to have identified a cobalt-based quantum magnetic material called “supersolid” that could one day replace helium in achieving ultra-low temperatures vital for high-tech applications like quantum computing. Helium plays a critical role in advanced cooling systems that allow quantum computers to operate at near absolute zero temperatures.
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November 25th, 2025
Strengthening Trend. Businesses are increasingly using artificial intelligence to analyse consumers’ data and set individualised prices for the same products and services. The approach has become common across sectors such as finance, retail and air transport. This AI-powered strategy is helping companies to optimise profits and maximise customer experience and satisfaction.
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November 20th, 2025
Strengthening Trend. Cognitive warfare seeks to influence the minds of the target population by disseminating harmful information. By exploiting biases and sowing division, its objective is to destabilise society and shape public opinion. Over time, sustained cognitive warfare operations may seriously erode critical thinking and trust in public institutions.
TREND AND SCENARIO ANALYSES
The Futures Platform solution is built on a vast repository of comprehensive analyses and descriptions of future phenomena, created and curated by our in-house team of professional futurists. Here is a brief overview of what each of our 1000+ phenomenon cards contains, all available to you as a subscriber.
Type & Timing
What and when?
Each phenomenon card begins with a title that explains the core of the phenomenon in a few words. Along with the title, the theme tags help users to understand the scope of the trend at a glance. Each phenomenon is assigned into one of four types - Strengthening, Weakening, Wild Card and Weak Signal. Except for weak signals, all trends on our foresight database have an expert-assessed time frame within which the phenomenon is anticipated to either accelerate or decline.
Summary & background
What is it about?
Each trend description has a summary section which explains the key idea of the trend, the current situation, and the most likely future development paths and impacts, all in one paragraph. Following the summary, there's a video by an external party to supplement our analysis and to provide a relevant explanatory overview of the phenomenon in question.
Drivers & scenarios
How it could unfold and why?
A trend analysis card also contains an assessment of key drivers – the underlying key driving forces behind the trend as identified by our futurists. These drivers are also the building blocks of the scenario analysis presented in several of our phenomena. Each such card contains two in-depth scenario narratives that reflect our futurists’ assessment of the two likeliest directions the given trend may take in the future.
Impact assessment
What are the implications?
The scenario descriptions are followed up by a development path section, which lists three to four steps and timelines that could plausibly happen to move us closer to the given scenario. The purpose of this section is to give readers a list of signs and indicators to look out for when monitoring the future development of the trend.
Additional information
Where to learn more from?
Last but not least, each trend descripition also gives the reader a rich and relevant set of directions to go deeper and further in the analysis. Importantly, we provide a list of related other phenomena on our platform. We also provide a list of links to relevant additional indormation and readings, as well as an auto-crawled feed of relevant news and signals, powered by our strong semantic analysis algorithm.
FORESIGHT RADARS CREATED BY FUTURISTS
Once you have identified a number of relevant phenomena, it’s time to start organising and seeing the forest from the trees. For this, the platform offers a versatile foresight radar tool.
All your radars are fully customisable, and you may build one easily from scratch even if you are not that familiar with horizon scanning methodology. We also offer 40+ pre-filled radar templates that our futurists keep constantly up to date.
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Get a thorough understanding of what is likely to be ahead in your future operational environments. With the radar tool and pre-existing content you can start forming a comprehensive control room for the future.
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Once you’ve collected relevant future phenomena on a radar, you enter a collaborative phase of organising and structuring your future outlook by time horizon, likelihood and relevance.
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Scenario planning is about understanding key drivers and events, and organising these into plausible sequences, that is, scenarios. Our platform helps this process and provides pre-existing scenarios created by our futurists.
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Naturally, all of these phases may involve several people, even multiple teams. Such co-creative work has been made easy with the versatile collaboration and sharing features on the platform.
Example radar: Global impacts of the Ukraine war
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SUPPORT AND SERVICES
WE ARE WITH YOU AT EVERY STAGE OF YOUR JOURNEY
Along with the platform and the unique content on it, we offer a rich array of guidance and services along your journey, and towards the next level in your organization’s foresight capability.
ONBOARDING AND SUPPORT
With each new subscription we assign a dedicated foresight specialist from our customer success team. We are dedicated to making sure all relevant people from your organisation get a kickstart in working with the platform. This is topped with an annual development plan tailor-made for each customer.
CONSULTING SERVICES
To help you dive even deeper into foresight analysis, we’ve developed an array of additional services, and offer the expertise of our futurists and consulting team for you. Our services range from custom trend packages and foresight workshops to large-scale foresight capability development projects.
HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?
Submit your question or enquiry below, and our foresight specialist will get back to you with more specific details.
WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS SAY
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Comprehensive.
“In todays connected and fast paced world, there is a lot to track as a Foresight team – and we do. Futures Platform’s combination of artificial and human intelligence helps us to overlook as little as possible.“
— Thomas Boermans,
Head of Foresight, E.On -
Very usable.
“Futures Platform's radars and phenomena are very usable as a tool for horizon scanning and can assist the work of the policy analyst. They can be particularly valuable for the two purposes of horizon scanning: long-term planning and policy analysis.”
— European Parliamentary Research Service,
Scientific Foresight Unit (STOA)
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A CONCRETE LIVE EXPERIENCE TO SUPPORT YOUR DECISION-MAKING
As a prospective customer, we are happy to take you and your team through a live demo session where our foresight experts demonstrate the key elements, use cases and value of our solution.
This way, you will be able to get a first-hand experience of the powerful features and rich foresight database that Futures Platform offers.
After submitting this form, one of our experienced foresight experts will get back to you to set up an online demo session.