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About the episode

This episode focuses on innovation. How does innovation work for companies? How to implement an effective innovation process? What is strategic foresight? To discuss the topic, I invited Chris Kalaboukis, the optimistic futurist. We also discuss why we can't learn from the past and why all futurologists are like meteorologists. And where are all the Tamagotchis?

About the guest

Chris Kalaboukis, the optimistic futurist™, is a disruptive visionary innovator, prolific inventor, artificer, and futurist. He is the founder of hellofuture, a global foresight, design & strategy consultancy specializing in the development of new products, services, patents, and strategies for financial services, technology, media, and retail/e-commerce companies.

He is also named inventor on 114 patents and cited on 1126 patents in the internet, social networking, and fintech space. A serial entrepreneur, he has helmed several startups from inception to launch. He has authored several books on innovation and the future and blogs and podcasts at thinkfuture.com

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.

About the host

My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Want to become a guest on the show? Contact here.

Quotes from the show

Is your company utilizing strategic foresight? Not knowing where you’re going to be in the future is a risk that is always present in any business. And so, you continue doing things as you have been doing them and only start to realize what's wrong or lacking until a crisis hits you in the face, leaving you without much time or focus to saving yourself.

This is where strategic foresight comes in handy, and it equips you with the sense of where you’ll be five to ten years from now by looking into your goals.

Combine it with your design thinking results and your business model, and you may be very well off to a solid future.

In life, nothing really happens until we are forced to act upon an idea, a threat, or a crisis. It takes a great deal of disruption most of the time to push us towards where we have meant to go.

But the question is, would you really like to wait for that disruption before acting up? No? We guess so, too.

You must learn to be observational to the signals of what's happening out there, and act before something even arrives. You must be ready to bounce back from anything that could occur, and that's where strategic foresight comes in handy.

Remember, what happened in the past resulted from many factors and variables conniving and taking place the way that they did – just for that one event to happen. And it's almost close to impossible for the same variables and events to happen again in the present time to bring in the same result.

This doesn't mean that you can't learn from the past, but it might also not be the best choice when learning about the future.