Trend mapping : What are you doing to identify trends? What are your tools?

Hi All, Basically Gartner Reports and Big Vendor’s roadmaps and presentations

Hello Hasan

We are now in a telco strategy project, and in order to define an Prioritise the key trends that will affect out customer business in the mid and long term we use:
-1st a framework to ‘place’ those trends : three horizons for growth framework
-collected significant amount of insights from research firms, financial analysts, consultants, the client, experts (glg and similar network)
-compiled and prioritised the main trends through various iterations (internal and client)
-framed them by comparing with what has happened in the PAST.. Eg: people get very excited about changes…however if you look 5years back change happens but there are significant forces that make that change take time and not be so dramátic

Notes:
-m&a activity can be a proxy of what players are preparing for
-anlaysts (AMason, Gartner,pyramid IDC…) are by defaut CONSERVATIVE in their forecast (said my them)

Having access to actual industry experts and their insight is a very important counter-balance to analyst reports. Have seen cases of analysts’ reports being off-balance, and only partially reflective of actual industry trends. I would ask the actual industry experts on their opinion of actual trends, and cross-check the analysts’ identification of trends with them.