Links

Business/Economy

Brain Studies

Chaos Theory and Complexity

 Cognitive Entertainment

  • The Applied Improvisation Network – A community of practitioners and clients who value the use of improvisation skills in organizations to improve relationships, increase authenticity, promote spontaneity, foster trust, and build communities of practice. 
  • Storytelling Websites (University of North Texas)
  • TED – TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
  • The Memory Project - Combines emerging technologies – such as digital libraries, wireless networks, and gaming engines – into convenient systems that improve our ability to remember. 

Community Development

  • Communities of the Future – A consultancy that is preparing local communities for the future.
  • i-Open -  I-Open is focused on the habits we need to innovate in the “civic space”.  Regions with thick, open networks will be more prosperous. They will learn faster. They will spot opportunities faster. They will align their resources faster, and they will act faster.
  • Mid-town Brews – Builds real-time networks, posts news, and delivers live broadcasts for 21st Century economic development opportunities.

Collaborative Intelligence

  • Free Culture.org – An international student movement for free culture.
  • Howard Rheingold – Non-resident Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication and author of “Smart Mobs.”
  • Institute for the Future of the Book – Focus on next generation electronic books.
  • MIT Center for Collective Intelligence – The Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing they way people work together.
  • MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence – This Handbook provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence, summarizing what is known, providing references to sources for further information, and suggesting possibilities for future research.
  • Open Space World – A simple way to run productive meetings, with five to 2000+ people, and a powerful way to lead any kind of organization, in everyday practice and ongoing change.
  • Real-Time Delphi Method(MS Word Document) – An efficient, “round-less” almost real-time delphi method.
  • We Are Smarter Than Me – Colloborative online book to be published by Pearson Publishing.

Convergence

  • NBIC Convergence Report – A NSF/DOC-sponsored report on the nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science convergence

Dialogue

  • Global Dialogue Institute – Deep-Dialogue is a way of encountering and understanding oneself and the world at the deepest levels, opening up possibilities of grasping the fundamental meanings of life, individually and corporately, and its various dimensions. This in turn transforms the way we deal with ourselves, others, and the world.
  • Group Process Consulting - The process of Dialogue is developmental for a group. It shifts the norms of the group away from unproductive patterns to new norms of honest communication and shared responsibility.

Emergence

  • Emergent Systems - Adaptive transformation strategies for vital organizations.

Future Learning

  • 21st Century Learning Initiative – The 21st Century Learning Initiative’s essential purpose is to facilitate the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity.
  • Creating Learning Communities – A group of people dedicated to the promotion of a new educational system with the student in the center.
  • New Horizons for Learning – A leading-edge resource for educational change
  • The Future of Higher Education (Book) -A free and comprehensive online book on the future of education by Parker Rossman.

Futuring

Global Brain

  • Centre Leo Apostel - The center’s aim is the development of world views that integrate the results of different scientific and cultural disciplines.
  • Global Brain Group -The Global Brain Group has been created to discuss the emergence of a global brain out of the computer network, which would function as a nervous system for the human superorganism.

Integral

  • Integral Institute – The world’s premier site for integral research and applications.
  • Integral University – The world’s first integral learning community. Offers Master’s degree and Certificates.
  • Integrative Thinking – Graham Douglas site. Includes modules that will lead to Integrative Improvement in individuals and organisations in the emerging technology-facilitated, bottom-up, distributed economy.

Innovation and Creativity

  • American Creativity Association – Global creativity community.
  • (Future) Art by Zac Lowing – Zac is from Schaumburg, Illinois, and is the best futuring artist I’ve found.
  • Innovation Network – Answers three questions:  1) What is innovation?, 2) How innovative is your organization, and 3) How can your organization be more innovative?
  • Innovation Tools - InnovationTools provides entrepreneurs and innovators with a focused, growing collection of the best resources on business innovation, creativity and brainstorming.
  • International Center for Studies in Creativity – The International Center for Studies in Creativity (ICSC) at Buffalo State credentials creativity utilizing a diverse menu of programs that cultivates skills in creative thinking, innovative leadership practices, and problem-solving techniques.

Intellectual Property

  • Creative Commons Copyright - Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

Knowledge Creation

  • The Invention of Knowledge - A general theory of knowledge predicting great revolutions in the disciplines — the beginning of the Unique Artifacts period.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Networks, Compendiums, and Business Intelligence

  • Academici - The global resource providing a web-based environment in which knowledge workers can interact, collaborate, transfer knowledge, and conduct commerce with each other, with commercial and governmental organizations.
  • Applied Foresight – The seminal Applied Foresight Network (AFN) is a global web of university-based centres connected by a network of forums for professors, students, teachers, and concerned citizens.
  • Brint Institute – Comprehensive knowledge management and business intelligence portal.
  • CEO Express – Business intelligence portal designed for CEOs.
  • Compendium Institute – Compendium is about sharing ideas, creating artifacts, making things together, and breaking down the boundaries between dialogue, artifact, knowledge, and data.
  •  Digital Universe – The mission of the Digital Universe is ambitious and never–ending: to organize and contextualize the sum total of human knowledge and make it available to everyone online.
  • Edge Foundation, Inc. – An informal group whose membership includes of some of the most interesting minds in the world.
  • Gurteen Knowledge Management – Founded by David Gurteen as a resource for the Gurteen Knowledge Community - a global learning community of over 15,000 people in 154 countries.  The main themes of the site are knowledge management, learning, creativity, innovation, and personal development.
  • Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) – Aim to create a worldwide inter- and transdisciplinary network of highly original researchers, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, and artists – a network of people who feel that the current higher education system stifles their abilities and potential.
  • The WebAssistant TeleCommunity – An integrated knowledge management platform and web products publishing house, with which various innovative products can be published in walled or open knowledge exchanges.

 Leadership and Change

  • Enlightened Business Institute – Provide traditional business services based on a unique world view that explains how and why we encounter certain people, events, opportunities and challenges in our professional and personal lives.
  • Immelt – Things Leaders Do – When GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt teaches up-and-coming leaders at the company’s famed management-development center, he runs through a checklist of what he calls “Things Leaders Do.”
  • Leading Change – U.S. Army link library.
  • Toyota Lean Leadership – An interpretation of the Toyota way.
  • Perth Leadership Institute – Perth has developed an entirely new approach to executive development which focuses on improving the financial behaviors and performance of managers and executives.
  • The Change Management Toolbox – A platform on which you can find information and tools related to change in organizations, teams, communities and individuals and meet with other people who are involved in change processes.
  • Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management – A mission to 1) stimulate basic research and practical application in the area of leadership and change, 2) foster an understanding of how to develop organizational leadership, and 3) support the leadership development agendas of the Wharton School and University of Pennsylvania.
  • Wharton Delphi – Designing the 21st Century Enterprise.

Medicine

Machine Thinking

Military and Intelligence

  • American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) – The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a private, nonpartisan, not-for-profit institution dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics, and social welfare.  
  • Air War College – Gateway to Internet Studies.
  • DARPA -  DARPA is the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA’s mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security.
  • Foreign Affairs Online – Foreign affairs link library. 
  • Forecast International - Forecast International, Inc. provides market intelligence and analyses for the aerospace, defense, military electronics, and power systems industries. Forecast International products are designed to assist corporate executives, military leaders and top government personnel in strategic planning and gathering market intelligence.
  • Proteus USA – Proteus USA will promote further discourse, study and research, focusing on the refinement, development and application of new and emerging “futures” concepts, methods, processes and scenarios.
  • RAND Corporation - A non-profit institution that addresses the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world.

Miscellaneous

  • Dave Pollard’s Blog – Dave Pollard’s environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
  • Neil Slade’s Amazing Brain Music – Enjoyable and stimulating cutting-edge methods for remarkable brain self-stimulation and control are presented here with stories, articles, music, art, and photos.<
  • Neurosphere – Site about the existence of a noosphere, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of a “thinking layer” interconnecting all humans.
  • Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems – Complex systems can be identified by what they do – display organization without a central organizing principle (emergence) and also by how they may or may not be analyzed – decomposing the system and analyzing subparts does not necessarily give a clue as to the behavior of the whole
  • The Metaphorum Group – Developing Stafford Beer’s Legacy in Management Cybernetics.
  • The Unreasonable Man – Ian Yorston’s weblog.

Nanotechnology and Molecular Manufacturing

New Media

  • Robin Good- An exhaustive resource for new media and communications.

Performance

Predictive Markets

  • Long Bets - A public arena for competitive predictions about the future.

Research Organizations

  • Forrester Research – All Topics – An independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice about technology’s impact on business and consumers.  See also: Forrester Podcasts
  • Nielson BuzzMetrics – The global measurement standard in Consumer-Generated Media.
  • Pew Internet – Produces reports that explore the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life.
  • Sagamore Institute for Policy Research – An international think tank located in America’s Heartland.

Singularity

  • Accelerating Future – Blog about transhumanism, AI, nanotechnology, and existential risk.
  • Acceleration Studies Foundation – An educational 501(c)(3) nonprofit engaged in outreach, education, research, and selective advocacy with respect to communities and technologies of accelerating change.
    • Acceleration Watch - An educational affiliate of the Acceleration Studies Foundation. Through the ASF we produce a free newsletter for strategists and futurists, helpful to understanding and managing accelerating technological change.
  • Gyre.org – track the breakthroughs and implications of the next military and technological revolutions.
  • Innovation Watch – Innovation Watch follows trends in science, technology, business, society, global politics and the environment, and speculates about where they may be taking us. News feeds, weblogs, books and articles explore what the future might look like.
  • Kurzweil AI.net – Features the big thoughts of today’s big thinkers examining the confluence of accelerating revolutions that are shaping our future world, and the inside story on new technological and social realities from the pioneers actively working in these arenas.
  • Plausible Futures Newsletter – News and analysis for future studies and scenario planning.
  • Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence – In the coming decades, humanity will likely create a powerful artificial intelligence. SIAI exists to handle the implied challenge, both the opportunity and the risk.
  • Technological Singularity -Paper by Vernor Vinge.  Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.
  • The J Curve – Steve Jurvetson’s blog for fans of Kurzweil’s curves and exponentials in general.
  • The Singularity Summit at Stanford – The Symbolic Systems Program and CSLI are pleased to host the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a rare gathering of thinkers to explore the rising impact of science and technology on society. The summit has been organized to further the understanding of a controversial idea – the singularity scenario.

Social Entrepreneuring

  • Ashoka.org – global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs.  Men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems.
  • Care2 – The largest online community of people making a difference in healthy and green living, human rights and animal welfare.
  • ChangeMakers.Net - Focuses on the rapidly growing world of social innovation. It provides solutions and resources needed to help everyone become a changemaker and presents compelling stories that explore the fundamental principles of successful social innovation around the world. 
  • International Network of Social Entrepreneurs - INSE provides a global platform for Social Entrepreneurs to connect, share and collaborate on a series of key sustainable projects contributing to the complete eradication of extreme poverty by 2015 and the restoration of peace on Earth.
  • Social Edge -  An online community for philanthropists, nonprofit professionals, and the business community to network, learns, debate, inspire, and share expertise and resources.

Social Transformation

  • Enlightenment Magazine – A spiritual, cultural, philosophical, and otherwise category-busting magazine committed to bringing a new perspective to politics, business, science, the arts, and the environment.
  • New Civilization Network - The New Civilization Network (NCN) is a meeting place for people of good will who are working on building a world that works for all of us. A world of increased quality of life, freedom, fun and inspiration for all. A world where the needs of all of humanity are met.
  • Social Sciences Research Network – Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.

Software

Systems Thinking

Sustainability

  • Institute for Sustainable Futures - The Institute for Sustainable Futures was established in 1996 as a flagship research institute of the University of Technology, Sydney.  It’s mission is to create change towards sustainable futures through independent, project-based research.

Transhumanism

  • Transhumanist Resources – Transhumanism is a philosophy that humanity can, and should, strive to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially. It encourages research into such areas as life extension, cryonics, nanotechnology, physical and mental enhancements, uploading human consciousness into computers and megascale engineering.