I spend quite a bit of time considering the future. This practice started in Indonesia where I had to consider the future in order to mitigate risk. Since Indonesia I have tried to predict the future in order to better understand technology. This thinking has led me as well to take a serious interest in the nature of the customer experience and how it will evolve. All of this thinking about the future hopefully also has some positive impact on my teaching of entrepreneurship.
Steve Jobs once asked his former boss, Nolan Bushnell, “How in the world do you figure out what the next big thing is?" Bushnell answered:
"You’ve got to figure out how to put yourself into the future and ask what you want your computers to be able to do"
I rarely think about the future of technology this way but the technique looks imminently reasonable after Bushnell points it out. Excellent advice for an aspiring entrepreneur.
Lately I have been reading Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark. While the book largely deals with cosmology, the origin and development of the universe, the part I find more fascinating is the scientific methods used by the scientists. Given that the universe began around 14 billion years ago, many of the problems are very complex. One technique is the reverse of Bushnell's approach. The scientists know the status of the universe today from observations. Therefore, they assume what had to happen 14 billion years ago according to quantum mechanics to explain today's universe. Then they look for empirical eveidence to support their assumptions about the start of the universe. A lot of math later, if the empirical observation matches the assumption about the beginning of the universe, then the assumption is correct. If the assumption is proven wrong, it may actually mean that the question asked in making the assumption was wrong. Another example of the importance of asking the right question.
Bushnell says to assume the future you want. The cosmologists assume the past to prove their theories. No guessing about the future or the past. Assume what you need and then develop it.