NEXTCONF

Web3 Is Coming – What Does It Mean for Brands? Named one of “The World's Most Influential CMOs” by Forbes Magazine, Ana Andjelic recently left her marketing post at Banana Republic to launch an exciting new venture. In Show 3, Ana talks to NEXT about Web3 and what it means for brands. How will consumers stand out from the crowd and display their status? Because in the modern “Aspiration Economy” consumers yearn for cultural, social, and environmental recognition. As Ana points out, it's not just business experience, but also social urgency that brands need to trade in tomorrow's Aspiration Economy.

In the first episode of our new NEXT Show Season, trend expert Chris Böhnke talks about new forms of creative work and surprising collaborations. And of course, Metaverse can't be missing in the trends forecast for 2022. In conversation with our NEXT Programme Director Monique van Dusseldorp: Chris will share his views on the recently released Fjord Trends report, which sees the need for vast changes in our relationships with people, business and the planet. Importantly, the report spells out these shifts in different areas: - Work and the workplace - Supply chains, sustainability and the return of scarcity - The metaverse as the next frontier - Trust, truth, and values - Care beyond the health industry

Right after taking the stage at our NEXT Conference Limited Edition in September 2021, Dr Parag Khanna sat down with our conference curator Monique van Dusseldorp to follow up on the important points he made regarding the political issue of mass migration and how this will influence the years to come. Parag also revealed his special connection to Hamburg and gave us a little insight into his growing up, being a son of a migrant family himself.

In 2021, everyone is talking about the metaverse. But what does the emergence of these worlds mean for our shared future? And what opportunities does it present? In this fast-paced talk, leading trend watcher David Mattin takes you on a tour of the virtual and simulated worlds to come, and how they'll supercharge the eternal human quests for connection, status, and meaning. Also check out the live blog to this keynote and discover more videos here.

Imagine this…It is the near future. A team of 1,000 specially selected people will travel far beyond the solar system to the planet N.EXT.1. There, they will establish a permanent base. A new society. A new home for human beings. Many of our guest have undertaken this journey with us on the digital show WHAT'S NEXT during the pandemic. At NEXT21, we watched them board the space shuttle and asked our audience to join us by answering five questions…

Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China changes everything from one direction and regulation comes from the other. Benedict Evans gives an update on the macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.

As climate change tips towards a full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize and technology disrupts, we're also entering a new age of mass migration. What is the next phase of human civilization? What are the future behavioural changes in global mobility? Leading global strategy advisor and best-selling author Parag Khanna shares his answers.

Nils Wollny shares the story of holoride – a spin-out from Audi that focuses on the next generation of in-car entertainment. How can we take everyday journeys and transforms them into hyper-immersive experiences? Explore holorides vision for the future of mobility.

If the last century was the Mass Century – mass production, mass marketing, mass media and the rise of mass politics – this one is the Personalised Century. We buy products that express who we are, we see adverts targeted to our individual tastes and habits. Each of us has our own individual media channel for news and entertainment, edited by our own choices, our network of friends and contacts – and of course the algorithms that predict what we want to see next. Even politics is shifting its focus, from mass movements for universal rights to individual issues of respect for our diverse identities. Technology has made this personalised world possible, but it is not the sole driving force. We are more free than our grandparents from the limits of economic scarcity and social expectation, but we are also more isolated. We turn to technology to connect us, to reflect ourselves back from the lonely darkness of the screen, to reassure us that we are recognised. But this automated recognition never quite satisfies our human needs for purpose, for intimacy, and for social solidarity. Covid-19 accelerated our slide into atomisation, millions of individuals digitally connected but socially isolated. How can we retain the freedom and self-determination promised by the Personalised Century, but rebuild the community and solidarity we lost when we escaped from mass society?

Francesca Bria is an innovation economist and digital policy expert, working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, economics and society. At NEXT21 we discussed: Can Europe navigate a path between the digital giants of the US and the state control of China, to build a digital utopia from our current dystopia?

Today, consumers demand sustainability. People are starting to understand that more consumption is bad. But they are still existing in the dichotomy of more versus less, instead of more versus better. The big question is: how can we create innovative experiences that drive better, not more, consumption? We spent a long time expecting consumers to demand change from enterprises. But real pressure on companies now comes from other quarters. This likely means that enterprises will be driving consumer behaviour change, much more than the other way round. This is a unique opportunity for enterprises today to drive change, and to convert new consumer intentions into new consumer behaviours, by creating Sustainable Experiences. The tension between convenience and sustainability can only be dealt with by making the shift from user-centric design to life-centric design. Also check out the liveblog to this keynote and. discover more videos here.

Our NEXT Conference finally went live again – both IRL and via livestream. And it couldn't have been more exciting! An action-packed day filled with brilliant keynotes, inspiring panels, music, networking, boat cruises and a well-deserved bit of partying. We have so many people to thank for making this year's event so special: First and foremost, we would like to thank you - our NEXT crowd - because without you, none of this would have been possible. Then of course we want to thank our partners, the City of Hamburg, next.Media, t3n and our streaming partner TwentyThree, who helped make the event happen. And of course we want to thank all those behind the scenes, from the fantastic speakers and their teams, the refreshment servers and location crews right through to all the helping hands at Accenture Interactive and Faktor 3. For those unfortunate to have missed NEXT21: We documented the entire day in photos, our dear friend Adam did a superb job live blogging all the amazing keynotes, and very soon keynote videos and interviews with some of our speakers will be uploaded.

In the seventh episode of season two of WHAT'S NEXT, Kristina Bonitz (Managing Director, SinnerSchrader) explored how to find and develop creativity and innovation in life, business and the pandemic age. Kristina is an innovation consultant, business designer and strategist working in the intersection of business, design, culture, technology and human realities. She strives to inspire organisations to imagine and design better futures for people, society, and the planet.

Azeem Azhar is the writer behind Exponential View which explains how society and the political economy are changing under the force of technology. He brings a unique background to explain the intersection of breakthrough technologies and the economies and societies in which we live. In the fifth episode of season two of What's NEXT, he explored the two key technologies likely to reshape the way we live, and the mindset shift we'll need to make the most of them.

During the second episode of the second season of WHAT'S NEXT, Fjord's Managing Director Thomas Müller explored the four mega-crises that face us, and how the combination of design and foresight can help navigate us through them into a better future.

Team Human: Is this Game Over? Have we passed the tipping point? How do we live, work, educate, and find meaning when we suspect the world itself is ending – at least the civilisation we know? In episode 6 of 'What's NEXT' author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explained that the current crisis offers an opportunity for us to rethink everything from capitalism through media to education. It also offers multiple opportunities to re-engineer how we live to make it more profoundly human.

In episode 8 of 'What's NEXT', Payal Arora explored the emerging narratives around rethinking global value chains – and some of the problematic assumptions built into them. Born in India, Payal Arora moved to the US where she studied technology and development at Harvard and Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning books "Leisure Commons" and more recently "The Next Billion Users" (Harvard Press), which won the 2019 PROSE award by the American Publishers Association under the Business category. Here you can find the links to Monique's and David's picks of the week: / Stan activism: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/st... https://www.theguardian.com/commentis... / If you missed the BTS concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPFnY... https://nextconf.eu/2020/06/how-the-b... / You probably saw the WWDC 2020 Special Event Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZhD...

Mark Adams believes that by watching the networks you can spot the tsunamis of cultural change coming your way and adapt before they hit. In the ninth episode of What's NEXT, he explored how a brand's values allow it to spread rapidly through networks of passion and interest, and to keep growing as a result. Mark Adams is the Chief Innovation Officer at VICE. Before that, Mark was the co-founder of The Audience, which raised $40 million in funding to become a digital creative agency for the world's most iconic celebrities.

‘What's NEXT' is the new show to shift your perspective on digital business: 45 minutes of news and insights with international experts and an audience from around the globe. At this moment, we all sense that so many old assumptions are being tested. Amid the daily news updates, a single, powerful question is becoming clear: is this a Great Reset, or simply a pause? Are we about to make far-reaching changes to the way we live, work, travel, and do business? Or will we fall back into the same old patterns? In the very first episode of ‘What's NEXT' content curator Monique van Dusseldorp, trend watcher David Mattin and NEXT Chief Editor Ina Feistritzer discuss the NEXT theme of Halt and Catch Fire.

Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist. He is a Professor at Tamkang University and Associate, Melbourne Business School. In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, and he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Future Studies. In our fifth episode of What's NEXT, he explored how changing your narrative of the present opens the door to a series of alternative futures, giving you the opportunity to choose the ones you want – and work towards it.

In the final episode of What's NEXT's first season, Efosa Ojomo explored how a framework for exploring innovation can help you make the right choices to grow your business. Efosa Ojomo leads the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley. In January 2019, Ojomo and late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty.

Mark Adams believes that by watching the networks you can spot the tsunamis of cultural change coming your way and adapt before they hit. In the ninth episode of What's NEXT, he explored how a brand's values allow it to spread rapidly through networks of passion and interest, and to keep growing as a result. Mark Adams is the Chief Innovation Officer at VICE. Before that, Mark was the co-founder of The Audience, which raised $40 million in funding to become a digital creative agency for the world's most iconic celebrities.

In episode 8 of 'What's NEXT', Payal Arora explored the emerging narratives around rethinking global value chains – and some of the problematic assumptions built into them. Born in India, Payal Arora moved to the US where she studied technology and development at Harvard and Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning books "Leisure Commons" and more recently "The Next Billion Users" (Harvard Press), which won the 2019 PROSE award by the American Publishers Association under the Business category.

Ben Sauer is a product design leader, formerly employed by Babylon Health and Clearleft. He's currently writing a book, titled Secret Design Skills. In Episode 7 of 'What's NEXT' Ben Sauer argued that we need frameworks to navigate times of crisis. However, the metaphors we choose can have a profound effect on the solutions we create. Ben explained how to avoid being shackled by the concepts of the past.

Team Human: Is this Game Over? Have we passed the tipping point? How do we live, work, educate, and find meaning when we suspect the world itself is ending – at least the civilisation we know? In episode 6 of 'What's NEXT' author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explained that the current crisis offers an opportunity for us to rethink everything from capitalism through media to education. It also offers multiple opportunities to re-engineer how we live to make it more profoundly human.

Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist. He is a Professor at Tamkang University and Associate, Melbourne Business School. In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, and he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Future Studies. In our fifth episode of What's NEXT, he explored how changing your narrative of the present opens the door to a series of alternative futures, giving you the opportunity to choose the ones you want - and work towards it.

Lockdown and physical distancing are playing havoc with our emotions. So, how can emotional technology help us navigate stormy pandemic seas and set course towards a new normal? For episode 4 of 'What's NEXT' we welcomed Pamela Pavliscak to our digital stage. She explored our relationships with tech and how machines read our emotions.

Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. He spends most of his life building big things, hacking things, and talking about doing both of those things. As CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, Harper was the first to bring the tech mentality to a political level. He believes the talent of a great bunch of humans can transform an organization like nothing else and uses that belief to strengthen, deploy, and inspire every team he works with. Harper also believes his incredible luck has led him to achieve wonderful things like pioneering crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, founding Modest Inc, and guiding the software team at PayPal. You can find Harper hacking on personal projects and enjoying life in Chicago with his partner, Hiromi and their beautiful and bizarre poodle, Lulu. How can we use and channel our pandemic-driven anxiety levels for the common good? And what's the role of technology in all this? We touched upon these and further questions in this week's episode of 'What's NEXT'. Harper Reed proved that he's able to juggle many things at the same time (including knives). He talked about the importance of the community and why some companies should become states.

Where next? As each week passes it looks less and less likely that we'll emerge out of lockdown into the world we left behind. What will be our New Normal? In Episode 2, independent analyst Benedict Evans took viewers of 'What's NEXT' through a tour of where we are, and where we're likely going, as we emerge from the shock of being locked down.

‘What's NEXT' is the new show to shift your perspective on digital business: 45 minutes of news and insights. Trend researcher David Mattin, our very own curator Monique van Dusseldorp and NEXT Chief Editor Ina Feistritzer addressed this year's theme of 'Halt and Catch Fire'.

During his talks, Webb often highlights, how a lack of understanding of the technology around us leads to an underappreciation of it. By breaking down techniques and theories of technology, Webb highlights in his keynotes the art involved in technological processes, carefully constructed code holding the same potential beauty as a typical piece of art. Webb today continues to champion this thinking through his artwork, using the same techniques to create thought-provoking artwork.In this keynote for NEXT19 he will talk about the next 5 years of society and how the face filter has changed everything – using real-time data and his theory of art to make the magic happen.

Organisations have become obsessed with speed in software production. Methods like Lean and Agile have been adopted dogmatically: efficiency is the rule, and business leaders are lapping it up. By pushing teams to release early and measure things, we've become over-reliant on shallow evidence for progress. Got a number to show off? You're all set. Good reasoning has taken a back-seat to scientism.What we may have forgotten, is that many of the innovations we rely on every single day weren't created this way. In this talk, Ben will examine the problems of the modern production process, recap how some of our most important innovations really happened, and propose a way forward.

After immersing herself in factory towns, slums, townships, and favelas, Payal Arora assesses real patterns of internet usage in India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance policies appear to care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geotagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend ‘foreign' strangers on Facebook and give ‘missed calls' to people? Arora reveals habits of use, bound to intrigue everyone from casual internet users to developers of global digital platforms to organisations seeking to reach the next billion internet users. She pushes us to look beyond the framing of users as data producers and markets and instead as new global publics shaping the future of the internet.

While Africa is often portrayed as the ‘hopeless continent' in the West, the reality on the ground couldn't be more different. In every corner of the continent, entrepreneurs are creating ecosystems (hubs, accelerators etc.) to enable a grassroots entrepreneurship movement that is enabling more and more entrepreneurs to leverage technology to create innovations to solve local problems of global significance. Based on my experience from working in the startup ecosystem across 20 African countries over the past 5 years, this talk will take you on a tour of the buzzing entrepreneurship scene across the continent and highlight incredible innovations that are fundamentally transforming the reality on the ground. The tour will expose you to a new world of innovation that is already contributing to further accelerating the ongoing transformation, development and growth of economies and societies across the African continent.

The word innovation has become ubiquitous, but it often means different things depending on who you're talking to. In this talk, Efosa Ojomo, co-author of the groundbreaking book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, will provide a clear categorization which explains the three different types of innovation. He'll explain that innovation is not necessarily something that is high-tech, overly advanced, or even entirely new, and is therefore different from invention. From an economic development standpoint, innovations can be categorized as being market-creating, sustaining, or improving efficiency.His talk will focus on the power of market-creating innovation – innovations which transform complicated and expensive products into products that are simple and affordable – and how they have potential to transform organisations and economies. Market-creating innovations have been the foundation upon which corporations and countries have built new growth engines that have triggered economic prosperity. By leveraging digital technology, some market-creating innovations can scale more quickly today than ever before.

The fabric of the universe is made of quantum information. Hacking reality might sound like science fiction, real progress is being made in quantum computing that will lead to world changing breakthroughs. From advancing artificial intelligence, to driving breakthroughs in molecular modeling, to creating next-gen cryptography, quantum computing will have an impact. Come discover where the quantum power comes from, where it will take us, and why it is important to you.

As we move deeper into the 21st-century, the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution are reshaping our world. Leading technologists forecast a world in which facial recognition watches us at every corner, and in which algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.In this talk TrendWatching's Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin conjures a vision of a very different future. A future in which we ensure that technologies are there to serve humans, and not vice versa. In which new human capabilities and ways of life are set free. And in which we understand that human beings – and the human spirit – will always be more than any algorithm. Innovators, unite: we have nothing to lose but our chains!

Prof. Olinga Taeed is Council Member and Expert Advisor to the ‘China E-Commerce Blockchain Committee' (CECBC) responsible for targeting growth to US$ 100 trillion.In this interview he will outline some of the main strategies of the Chinese government and their effects on the world markets.

Gaming has become a mainstream leisure activity with people now playing on a variety of devices and throughout their day. What many may not realise, however, is there has also been a profound revolution in media as all that play has started to be shared online. While most are probably familiar with recorded game videos on YouTube, real-time broadcasting has risen in the last five years to be a site of profound creative activity.This talk will take a closer look at this new form of entertainment, the work that is happening behind the scenes to make it possible, and what we might learn about the future of fandom and spectatorship from it. The talk will pay particular attention to models of audience and engagement, important challenges in this domain, and how co-creative culture is the driving ethos for this new space.

How do you enable a rising generation to be futurists? How do you build the future while leading in the present? Head of Changeist, foresight expert Scott Smith, will share the challenges and opportunities of equipping young leaders in a unique and turbulent part of the world—the Gulf—to use experiential futures as a tool to prepare a society for critical transitions ahead.

Human energy and time are precious and increasingly finite, as we struggle to navigate a world cluttered with junk, fake news and brands scrapping for their piece of the pie. Amidst the noise, life's poignant moments remind us what's important. Grocery shopping is not important, but feeding my family is. Social media isn't important but staying plugged in to my community is. Solutions in service of core human values create purpose, which is the only sustainable currency in today's marketplace.Success is no longer measured by shareholder value or pure profit, alone. Everyone is an innovator. The leaders of tomorrow are placing empathy and compassion at the top of their resumes. This critical tectonic shift begins with a collective demand that technology and commerce serve humanity—and the journey begins at the intersection of purpose and innovation.

Over the past few years, China has embarked on a policy of informatization, which seeks to introduce ITs into all aspects of social and economic life. Ambitious plans on the use of big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence promise a better future and continued development for the Chinese nation. Moreover, China is increasingly playing a global role as a technology leader. These efforts are often met with criticism or even fear in the Western world, yet to what extent is this warranted? This keynote will address how China's leadership sees the world and the role of technology in it, how the ambition of plans has met with reality thus far, and what can be learned from China's digital drive.

Instead of a utopian future in which technological advancement casts a dazzling, emancipatory light on the world, we seem to be entering a new dark age characterised by ever more bizarre and unforeseen events. The Enlightenment ideal of distributing more information ever more widely has not led us to greater understanding and growing peace, but instead seems to be fostering social divisions, distrust, conspiracy theories and post-factual politics. How have we come to this point – and has utopia gone forever?

Just 40 years ago, China had no brands and no market economy. Fast forward to 2019, China is the biggest e-commerce market in the world, three times the number of internet users than the US, and by far the largest and most sophisticated users of mobile payments.Known for being copycats, China's tech industry is now being copied. Chinese internet giants (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) and its super apps have transformed consumer lifestyle and business models. Some of these smart applications have been copied by major global players.