Three of Our Favorite Trend Sources

Skye Leist
July 25, 2011

Our job is tracking and forecasting small business trends. As part of this task, we keep up with a lot of trendswhich at first glance dont seem directlyrelated to small business.

We do this for two reasons. First, a lot of trends that dont look important to small businessesright now end up being very important in the future. Weve also found cross discipline trend analysis is much more powerful and accurate than focusing on a single or small set of trend areas.

Keeping up with all these trends is hard. But fortunately there are goodsources covering different trend areas we can turn to for help.

Three of our favorites are:

1. The Center for the Future of Museums: Their Dispatches from the Future of Museums is a weekly, curated mix ofarticle summaries and linkshighlighting trends likely to impact society and business in the future. Its my favorite newsletter on the future and a must read for anyone interested in trends.

2. The Sloan Work and Family Research Network blog: I like the blog, but I love their weekly Whats New in Work and Family blog post. Its a curated list of article summaries and links.If youre interested in work/life balance,flexiblework or other issues related work and its impact on families, this is the place to go.

3. JWT Intelligence: JWT is a large marketing communications agency (what used to be called an ad agency) servingmany of the worlds biggest consumer brands. Not surprisingly, their focus is consumer trends. They produce an excellent weekly roundup of curated article summaries and links on consumer trends. They also produce interesting reports, some of which are free.

Strong curation skills is what these three sites have in common. Theirweekly summariesallow usto cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

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