There’s a wide range of things being discussed on stage at the moment. I’m hearing a theme of methodology, as that’s the way I’m inclined to think. How you can spot trends on a macro level, and how find specific interesting projects. A few thoughts:

Morten Lund spoke of risk. Risk equals return and risk equals impact, he said. In choosing these projects you shouldn’t over-strategize (management consultants got a serious bashing, specifically McKinsey) but instead trust your gut feeling. There’s a lot to be said about when the gut feeling is right and not, and how it differs depending on person, but let’s leave that for a moment.

Over to Joi Ito. He had an interesting introduction about communication layers and what happend when disruption entered on each layer. But at the end of the talk, he said that trends and innovation is found in the crossroads of technology evolution and the behaviour of young people. Short, but concise.

So, with these statments in mind, how to find trends and the next thing? First, research tech and consumer behaviour and then distill the projects by gut feeling. That would mean finding by process, refining by feeling. I instinctively think that the opposite would be equally interesting – finding by feeling, and refining by process.

Either way you go, it’s interesting that something as abstract as gut feeling comes up a key success factor (McKinsey word!) when knowing what’s next.