Using innovations to spot trends therefore allows you to tap the collective intelligence of the business crowd for your future-focused customer insight.

The challenge to being ahead of the trend . . . is finding out how does the problem you're solving touch customers' lives. If you are a good systems thinker you can almost always find a point at which that problem connects with something that they care about.

Two questions will tell you whether you’re dealing with a disruptive technology or not. First, to what extent does it invalidate important traditional advantages? Second, to what extent can incumbents embrace the technology without major negative consequences for their business? If you stop and ask those questions, you’ll see that true disruptions

WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until