EPIC 2025 – Ethnofutures for Innovation: Practicing Foresight with Diverse Intelligences

In this tutorial you will:

• Integrate foresight and ethnography for multimodal data collection and analysis
• Identify people and innovation centers at the leading edge of your research or market domain
• Build grounded future scenarios that support discovery, strategy, planning, and decision making
• Discover use cases for applying ethnofutures in your own work

Predictive analytics have become increasingly sophisticated, yet organizations still struggle to anticipate and plan for social change, emerging use cases, and spaces of transformative innovation.

Ethnofutures is a practice for building future scenarios that are grounded in multimodal data, with techniques for getting beyond the conventional wisdom that often constrains innovation, planning, and decision making. It brings together principles and techniques from foresight and ethnography, such as horizon scanning, megatrends, ethnographic futures interviews, and observations.

In this tutorial, participants will learn ethnofutures approaches to data collection and analysis, then work through concrete applications. We will also build specific use cases for practicing ethnofutures in our own work. The tutorial will be particularly valuable for researchers, designers, and strategists guiding innovation, organizational transformation, product and service design, new markets, brand communications, community development, and related areas.

Generating future scenarios that are authentic and inclusive is crucial to the value they drive. When we practice ethnofutures, we systematically engage diverse intelligences through multiple methods, data sources, social domains, and cultural perspectives. We do nuanced analyses of stakeholder groups, enabling us to identify key spaces of innovation that may not be represented by standard organizational and market categories. Bottom-up techniques also connect us with people on the leading edge of our research or market domains so we can detect early signals of change.

Finally, ethnofutures is valuable because it recognizes the enormous variety of intelligences and innovation centers outside the logics that dominate industry and institutional environments. It is a practice that enables us to think beyond conventional narratives about who and what ‘make the future’, with the potential to guide decisions that support the agency, expertise, and collective action of diverse communities.

Who Will Benefit from This Tutorial?

Participants should have some experience using ethnography for projects in organizational environments, but do not need formal experience with futures or foresight.

Learn more here: https://www.epicpeople.org/project/52825-ethnofutures-innovation-practicing-foresight/