New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

As you perform your business planning, whether you are planning a start-up or mulling over your annual plan for your existing business, consider the trends you see around you and attempt to determine whether they are a flash-in-the-pan fad (unsustainable trend) or whether they are trends with staying power that are likely to transform your target market (sustainable trend.)

While I do not agree with some of the trends, nor their philosophical implications as pointed out by the author, the following article in February's Harvard Business Review highlights several trends of both types (sustainable and unsustainable) that should help you hone your thinking in your planning process:

Sustainable Trends

A modest level of terrorism is something we can and must endure for a long time. It is best combated with the tools of public health: isolating the origins, disrupting the vectors of transmission, and protecting potential victims.

Computing power is still increasing, despite predictions that Moore’s law couldn’t possibly hold any longer. Advances in technology are plumbing ever smaller units of storage; as Richard Feynman said, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.”

Human enhancements to ameliorate disabilities and the effects of aging will keep coming. Stay tuned for many more drugs and devices, some based on nanotechnology, that help average people perform better.

Agricultural productivity can increase indefinitely. Even the most sophisticated farmers have yet to see the full effect of the biotech revolution.

Urbanization is surprisingly sustainable. More than half the people on the planet now live in cities, with huge implications for birth rates (down), poverty (down), and economic growth (up).

World GDP will continue to rise, owing to increasing productivity (driven mostly by IT), globalization, and the spread of markets.

Robots are here to stay. They will drive manufacturing employment down and productivity up—and vastly increase mass customization.

Labor mobility persists. Despite the current furor over illegal immigration, people will still move to seek economic advantage.

The cost of nearly everything will continue to decline, as it has for hundreds of years.

Mean IQ scores will continue to rise, as they have since 1920, perhaps because an increasingly complex world helps to train our minds. On the horizon are drugs that improve memory and devices that enhance cognition.

Unsustainable Trends

Carbon emissions cannot continue to increase. They must decline in absolute terms, not just per dollar of GDP. Regulations are paving the way by forcing emitters to cover more of the carbon-remediation costs.

Health care spending cannot continue its upward trend. It’s currently 16% of GDP in the United States; that figure will decline as drugs with greater efficacy start to account for more of our medical spending.

The decline in the mean retirement age has come to an end. The average is increasing because of financial needs, boredom, and better health care.

Ecological diversity must not be allowed to decline unchallenged. Toward that end, the Nature Conservancy has purchased 117 million ecologically important acres and 5,000 miles of rivers.

The decline in union membership in the United States has probably run its course. Middle-class Americans are even likely to become advocates for unions overseas.

World poverty rates cannot rise any longer. They will begin to decline as urbanization continues and world markets expand.

The world’s dependence on fishing will change dramatically. As major fisheries decline or collapse, offshore marine agriculture will replace them. Already, inshore aquaculture supplies 50% of all our seafood.

Nuclear weapons are now trending out. They will continue to be dismantled and to fall into disuse. Many have no real mission, other than to increase the threat of terrorism.

Oil production is near its peak. In the future, the costs of biofuels, carbon remediation, and mining tar sands—not increased production—will determine oil prices.

The U.S. trade deficit can’t rise much beyond the current level, and a continuing decline in the reserve currency will reverse it.

By Garrett Gruener

Source: Harvard Business Review