We live in a very challenging world. Corporations that once seemed invincible are closing their doors. Many industries are being weakened or swept away. Climate patterns that we once took for granted are changing. Abundant resources are becoming scarce. A global shift in power is underway, and new world leaders are emerging. The Internet is changing our culture and institutions. We’re facing a massive demographic shift and new economic challenges, due to an aging generation. Science and technology continue to create breakthroughs, and provoke new ethical questions.

These are only a few of the powerful forces that are changing our world.

In our own lives, in our communities, in the organizations we lead and work for, we must somehow understand and deal with unprecedented, destabilizing change.

Innovation Watch explores the question, “What’s next?”

We’re continuously scanning for early signals of change — monitoring news sources, searching for websites on future-facing topics, and linking to audio and video clips on emerging trends. We track and highlight books that explore, interpret, and advocate change, and that help to shape the future themselves through new breakthrough ideas.

The results of these searches and scans are shared openly on this website, and are also provided as RSS feeds. The free Innovation Watch Newsletter, published biweekly, is emailed to readers in more than 40 countries who have a personal or professional interest in change.

The website includes extensive resource lists (now being reloaded from the previous version of the site) that provide a history of innovation; deeper understanding of the dynamics of disruptive change; guidance on how to be more innovative and adaptive; and tools for strategic foresight, so organizations can be better prepared and more resilient in an increasingly risky and uncertain world.

Innovation Watch is published by David Forrest, a Canadian writer and strategy consultant. David is a member of the Professional Writers Association of Canada; the World Future Society; the Foresight Network; the Futures Education and Research Network; the Alliance for Capitalizing on Change; and the advisory board of the Accelerating Studies Foundation, based in Mountain View, California. A university-trained ecologist, he coined the term ‘enterprise ecology’ in the 1980s to describe the application of ecological principles to competition, innovation, and strategy in business.