Over the past few years, we’ve heard a steadily rising chorus of complaints from American labor unions about the apparent flow of manufacturing jobs from the U.S. to China, Mexico and other countries. Are we hearing the “giant sucking sound” Ross Perot warned us about during the NAFTA debates? No, contrary to conventional U.S. belief, we’re not seeing a net relocation of manufacturing jobs from the U.S. to the developing world. On the contrary, we’re seeing something new: a powerful, long-term, global trend associated with the transition from the “industrial age” to the “information age.” We’ll explore the underlying causal factors and how this trend is likely to evolve over the coming years.

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Faith is coming to be the crucial fault line of American politics, and it promises to dramatically reshape party affiliations and electoral maps. The full magnitude of this seismic shift will likely be felt for the first time in the 2004 election cycle. We'll discuss why this is important and what you can expect. Regardless of whether you're on the left or on the right, it's crucial that you understand this trend and its implications for public policy in the coming decade and beyond.

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Regardless of whether you call it faith, religion, or spirituality — a strong commitment to a deeply held worldview is on the rise and constitutes a crucial component of the "family-focused" values we're seeing dominate the "public forum" in the early 21st century. Today, despite the emphasis on diversity — or maybe because of it — it's becoming increasingly important for us to define and "live out" our belief systems. This inevitably means that faith is going to become a factor in the workplace. We'll explore this trend, discuss its implications, and determine where it's likely to lead.

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In too many companies, the expertise that a team needs to complete a project successfully exists within the enterprise — but no one knows who has it, or how or where to find it. This leads to the emerging trend of expertise tracking — the effort to compile constantly updated lists of the experts in each specialty throughout the organization. We'll examine this trend and how you can take advantage of it to improve your company's effectiveness.

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Open innovation is not limited to using ideas from competitors and other industries. It can go as far as involving the customer in the creation of the product. In fact, some of the world's top thinkers in the fields of strategy and innovation believe this trend could represen the next big wave in business. We'll investigate what co-creation really is, where it stands today, and where it's likely headed. In the process, we'll tee up some of the crucial issues, so you can begin seriously considering the implications for your business.

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Open innovation is one of the hot buzzwords of this decade, and it's essentially intertwined with the trend toward industrial espionage as well as the open source trend. We'll take a look at what's driving open innovation and how it's likely to evolve.

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In an era when more and more companies are spending big bucks to steal ideas, and others are spending even bigger bucks to protect their intellectual property, one of the biggest movements in business is going the opposite way. Where well-funded proprietary products have failed, the open source movement seems to be succeeding in building a barrier to the ever-expanding Microsoft empire. We'll trace the factors underlying the open source trend and its implications.

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Industrial espionage and counter-espionage are becoming big factors in how we do business. Throughout history, competitor intelligence has been an accepted part of doing business and its evil sibling, industrial espionage, has been right there with it, lurking in the shadows. In the agrarian and industrial eras the stakes were a lot smaller and the tools for espionage and counter-espionage were a lot less sophisticated. Furthermore, with the fortunes of nations tied to the competitive positions occupied by their key industries in the global economy, the resources of the traditional spy agencies have been brought to bear in this arena. We'll explore the underlying causal factors behind the increasing use of industrial espionage techniques, the broader implications of this trend, and some forecasts for your consideration.

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