Getting to the opportunity of future first

Building a successful global empire requires a fine-tuned plan to take advantage of business opportunities cropping up in today's fast-paced markets. Kairos Future, a new player in the Chinese market, has a profound understanding of this.

For the past 20 years, it has helped its clients adopt a systematic approach to scenario planning and futures-driven strategy and innovation that enhances any weak parts of the process.

"At Kairos Future, we believe in capturing the moment: grabbing opportunities when they appear," says Mats Lindgren, founder and CEO of the global consulting and research company. For many firms, China is the world's premier source of opportunity. In order to assist companies and business leaders in understanding and shaping their futures in this expanding market, Kairos Future has established "ChinaLab".

"ChinaLab is basically all the activities we do in relation to China," Lindgren explains. "For many of our international projects, China always ends up being a targeted region."

The company has assisted organizations such as the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) in understanding the outbound Chinese travel to Europe. "By analyzing millions of blog posts and microblogs, we were able to identify upcoming trends and previously unknown travel segments - and thus unearth new business opportunities for European destinations and travel agencies," he says.

"We call that 'co-created competitive intelligence', and we use it to assist companies to understand the changing business landscape in China," Lindgren adds. "Our patent-pending technology can automatically and autonomously identify new trends and patterns in large amounts of unstructured data: such as news and social media, or research papers or patent abstracts. We have even analyzed the complete Chinese patent database to help clients to identify competitors, potential partners or innovative regions."

The company also recently launched a mobile platform for crowd-sourced trendspotting and innovation called "Co:tunity". "With Co:tunity, individuals can spot and share trends and ideas with their smartphones, as easily as making a status-update on Weibo," he says.

"It has been very well-received by companies in China that want to engage customers, partners and employees in innovation."

Kairos Future is establishing a new office in Shanghai in response to the growing demands of the Chinese market.

The company considers future possibilities in the country to be limitless.

www.kairosfuture.cn

World Eye Reports provided the story