Each year Trendwatching.com publishes its view on most promising innovations (www.trendwatching.com/briefing). This year, Trendwatching.com published a pool of 67 trendy ideas, inspiring on improving consumer living and understanding the mindset.
Trendwatching.com split the 67 ideas into various categories and encouraged maintaining a rough approach to innovation - we need not think of R&D labs of ultimate most astonishing innovations. Instead, innovations can be small, frivolous and inexpensive and yet succeed in enchanting and exciting people.
Reading through the 67 innovations following logics were no surprise:
* Innovations as service. Helping for self expression, excitement, making a statement, enjoyment, learning, giving for others. Hotels providing educational classes or sketching a travel accident through an online service.
* Sustainability and social causes. Innovations helping people to recycle, re-use, save energy, make donations and support less fortunate. ATM machines with charity donations, buying things and giving in return.
* Shopping made easy and local. Bringing a shop to the consumer eg at camping site, mobile soup delivery, providing regional flavours, online shopping preferences tools, navigation services, garden-for-rent.
* Personalization. iPhone and online applications for providing your preferences online and ordering unique. Yogurt, shorts, petfood, lingerie, crowdsourcing products, group buying. Having used an online photo album tool for creating a wedding gift, I was excited on BookOfFame. A custom made notebook on Facebook feeds. Having read endless funny email conversations between friends, we always keep laughing about saving the conversations and printing them out for a memory when we´re old. And we never do. Now somebody has actually thought of keeping track of these conversations just as having a photo album, a blog or a diary.
The most futuristic idea to me was RosettaStone: a tablet with an embedded microchip to represent key things of a deceased´s life in a grave. Readable through a mobile device. Is this the future of cemeteries? Will it become a true multimedia presentation in the future of what we were? Or will personal barcodes be a new way of expressing ourselves?
Most positively surprising for me was the limited number of iPhone applications in the briefing. Hooray, there are also other ways to innovate and enjoy life.
