In different directions

Will our cities keep growing until economic and social life is largely concentrated in megacities? Or will the trend head in a different direction? Knowing what the future holds is very important for a company, because it has to be prepared. Therefore, in collaboration with partners, the New Business department of Bayer MaterialScience has developed future scenarios of life and work in the year 2020.

Eckard Foltin can see into the future, even without the help of a crystal ball or the mysterious rituals of a fortuneteller. To put it more precisely, the head of the Bayer MaterialScience Creative Center sees not one, but several “futures”. Together with InventionNet Corporate Consultants and 12 partners from the business and university communities, his team has developed contrasting scenarios to describe our economy and the way we might live in the year 2020.

In the Oligocenters Scenario, society is highly polarized: exclusive high-tech products and materials for a small elite contrast with goods for the disadvantaged majority of the population.

The motive behind futures studies is pragmatic: “For an inventor company like Bayer, it’s important to identify trends as early as possible,” explains Foltin, who is an engineer by trade. “The differentiated future scenarios are based on different paths of development, which are in turn influenced by technological and social change.” Timely and systematic analysis of the various interactions helps to define concepts that show the potential demand and market opportunities for new materials and applications.

But how do you differentiate between key trends and total fl ops? Foltin’s favorite example of a bad prediction is a diagram from the turn of the 19 th to the 20 th century showing predicted change in modes of transportation: the “Horse” curve points steeply upwards, while the “Automobile” curve indicates only meager growth. “What would you have invested in?” the Bayer futurist asks with a challenging smile. Back then, not even the automobile manufacturers themselves expected the boom that was soon to come. Even Gottlieb Daimler said in 1901: “Global demand for motor vehicles will never exceed one million, if for no other reason than the lack of available chauffeurs.” But the future took quite a different turn: today there are 600 million cars on the roads.

In the Polycenters Scenario, the middle class is dominant. Technology and intelligent materials enjoy widespread use.

“We now know that we can’t view the future simply as an extension of the present,” explains physicist Dr. Rainer Hagen, one of Eckard Foltin’s colleagues. If you want a rough picture of the changes to come, you have to develop complex scenarios incorporating not only technological and economic factors, but also political, cultural, demographic and sociopsychological aspects, all of which are referred to as “descriptors”. “We try to define feasible alternatives for our future world,” says Foltin, drawing what looks like a trumpet on a sheet of paper. “This is where we are now,” he says, pointing to the mouthpiece. “The horn describes the different ways our future may unfold. The closer it is, the more certain we are about it today. But just a few years from now, the possibilities start to vary significantly. Right now, we are therefore concentrating on two, very distinct scenarios.”

Foltin calls the two scenarios “Oligocenters” and “Polycenters”. The first, which is the most probable from today’s standpoint, is characterized by the dominance of few societal groups (taken from the Greek “oligarchy”, meaning “government by the few”). In the second scenario, a number of societal forces are well represented (from the Greek “poly”, meaning “many”).

Ir a Oligocenters Scenario: exclusive high-tech
Ir a Polycenters Scenario: technology for the middle class
Ir a Farsighted products