Trend-Driven Innovation: Beat Accelerating Customer Expectations

PREFACE

How We Came to Write This Book

This book makes a bold claim: to get you ahead of customers' accelerating expectations. What makes us think we can promise that? And why—with 22,435 books added to Amazon's Business & Money category in the last 90 days alone—should you trust us to deliver?

A lot has changed since 2002 when we started writing about trends and innovation. It's hard to remember, but back then, swipes and taps weren't anything other than physical gestures. You hailed taxis with a wave. Mark Zuckerberg was in high school. The BRICs had just been named. Buy One Give One and the Collaborative Economy weren't known business models. Indeed, when we started watching trends, neither crowdsourcing nor freemium—the two central innovations of our business model—had even been coined as terms yet! Trends were something that gurus revealed in expensive and closely guarded reports and presentations.

We turned that model on its head. We gave away Trend Briefings for free online. We invited our most passionate readers to join our global trend spotting network. It worked: over the past 13 years, we've grown from three people in a canal house in Amsterdam to teams in London, New York, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Lagos, all supported by nearly 3,000 trend spotters in over 100 countries. Professionals at 96 percent of Interbrand's Best Global Brands read our trend insights. Our online trend platform is currently used by over 1,200 brands, agencies, consultancies, nonprofits, and