We bring the future to life

We bring the future to life through the use of visionary academic perspectives and rigorous foresight methodologies.

 

Visions

Foresight timelines that showcase potential future perspectives across different themes. Explore disruptive technologies, future of urban air, future of high performance computing and future of water through inspirational and engaging visualisations.

The world in 2050

The future in 2050: What might change? What might stay the same? Check out our interactive feature exploring how low-carbon, climate-resilient innovations could transform humanity’s relationship with the planet.

Table of disruptive technologies

Interrogate our table of disruptive tech with 100 wonderful, weird (and possibly worrying) ways the world might change in the foreseeable future.

 

Automated Futures

Automated futures aims to inspire future thinking in robotics and artificial intelligence. What might be next? What might be only a dream? 

The future of urban air

What does ‘air’ mean beyond pollution? Delve into potential future disruption and innovative solutions to issues that impact all our senses.

 

Services

We create spaces for business leaders and academics to collaborate on futures perspectives by exploring breakthrough technologies and future science disruption. 

Scan the horizons

Understand how the future might unfold. Explore weak signals of change or potential disruptors to your business together with the College’s academics.

Bespoke workshops

Unlock future opportunities, inspire your team to think about the future, identify uncertainties and define your strategic priorities through a collaborative workshop. 

Thought-leadership projects

Develop engaging future visions and roadmaps for your business. Together with academics identify what might be possible and create new engaging thought-leadership pieces. 

Explore

Access shorter future-thinking pieces. Here we share foresight interviews with expert academics, our thoughts on emerging trends and methodologies and summaries of new disruptive themes. 

Unlocking the patterns of disease hidden in medical images

Unlocking the patterns of disease hidden in medical images

Acting now for impact later: The importance of foresight for policy makers

Policymaking is essential to steer societies towards positive change. Good policies have comprehensive visions about the future embedded in them. For example, policies about renewable energy are based on the vision of a healthier planet. Short-sighted policy making often has dire consequences, compromising future generations’ opportunities for short-term gains. It’s difficult to decouple policy from political cycles, but in this blog, we explain with practical examples how foresight-led planning can have positive impacts both now and in the longer term. read more

AI in action: Signals from automated scientific futures

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming for science what a Deus-ex-Machina is for literature. A device capable of resolving seemingly unsolvable problems in the story plot in an unexpected and unexplained way.   Automated scientific discovery is, in a sense, the ultimate frontier of computation. A future where AI software can make discoveries, from unseen new molecules to novel branches of science, pushing beyond the limits of human intellect. How might the evolution of computation create a post-scientific world?  What will this mean to our industrial world? read more

Entering the quantum era

Computers were invented less than 80 years ago, moving from huge machines occupying a whole room to devices that we can fit in our pockets in just a couple of generations. Today, humanity has embarked on a race to develop the next computing paradigm shift: quantum computers. These are devices that harness the properties of nature at the nanoscale to compute in a fundamentally new and powerful way. But what exactly are quantum computers? How do they work?  And what do they promise? read more