Ericsson Asks 20 Innovative Thinkers About the Year 2020

Swedish telecomm giant Ericsson is building a picture of the future. Their 2020 project is seeking the opinion of twenty innovative thinkers on how the world will change in the next decade. People like Vint Cerf, father of the internet, and Adrian Bowyer, founder of 3D printing company RepRap. Ericsson has interviewed each of these future-minded individuals and provided conveniently brief (<5 minutes) videos of their thoughts on the years ahead. These videos have been slowly released since early spring, and now 15 of the 20 are available for you to peruse. We've got the introduction to the project and a great sample of the talks for you in the clips below.

Picking the mind of great thinkers is a time honored tradition of large corporations. Even the Hub, corporately svelte as it is, loves to analyze the ideas of big names. (By the way have you seen our own stories about Vint Cerf, and RepRap?) Ericsson does a great job of getting each speaker to be concise and direct, which makes their ideas that much easier to share with others. The 2020 Project may not exactly be unique, but it's a great way to get those unfamiliar with future forecasting into the spirit of things. And even these brief interviews can raise some really interesting questions. After the Ericsson introductory video I've included the talk with Charles Leadbeater, a world-famous management guru, who discusses the ways that corporate hierarchies are set to adopt more open structures which may include customers. Fascinating stuff.