Curso de Summer Course in Innovation and Future Thinking

This course begins by asking the fundamental question: “Why think about the future?” It will explore this through an overview of essential futuring skills—horizon scanning and trends identification and analysis—looking at weak signals, micro- and macro-trends—and how to use these to think about implications and unexpected outcomes. This will include observational analysis, searching Barcelona for indicators about the future, studying behaviors, messages and signs that point to emergent change.

We will visit scenario development, roadmapping, timelines and backcasting, and creative ideation to develop new future narratives as a way of writing stories about the future we can use strategically. We will also have Skype talks from futurists, innovators and designers who employ these techniques in their own work.

From this basis, we will look at innovation practices and processes—traditional top-down, bottomup and open innovation—and how these are being used in both major companies and cutting edge startups. By learning how to tie foresight to innovation, we will look at future-proofing new design and product development.

Lastly, we will look at prototyping using the futures we have created and build toward a final project that presents solutions to the wicked problems we’ve uncovered—creating for the next decade.