Trend Cards 2023

Strategy. Innovations. Resilience.

Since 2018, we have been preparing for you the Trends Map, which for many of you is a signpost in working on your strategy. However, we realise that working with trends is not easy, and making key decisions based on their analysis is associated with many challenges. That is why we have decided to prepare an additional tool for you – Trend Cards – which will help you systematise this work, and thus facilitate and accelerate it.

Trend cards are a proprietary tool prepared by the infuture.institute research team. First of all, it is helpful in working on strategy and innovations, but it is also a source of inspiration which enables a broad thinking, outside silos.

For whom?

We have prepared the material for strategy, research, NPD departments, strategy consulting agencies that support their clients in planning activities for the coming years and startups that can work on a project using cards created by our institute.

The set includes:

Trend cards are a DIY tool.

The document is prepared in a self-printing .pdf file (A4, black and white print). Trend cards and Wild cards should be cut along the marked lines.

3 paths with suggested exercises:

In the document, apart from 54 Trend cards and 8 Wild cards, you will find a scheme for 3 workshop exercise paths that allow you to translate trends into specific solutions, depending on your needs. Each path includes: description, instructions, ready-to-print exercise mockups.

How to work with cards?

There is a number of ways to work with trend cards.

1. They can serve as a comprehensive source of information about the most important changes in the world. The cards contain descriptions of 54 trends in total, broken down into seven dominant megatrends i.e., Mirror World, Technocentric Biology, Deglobalisation, Society of Incoherence, Demographic Shifts, Health Crises, Climate Aftermath.

2. They can be used as a clear guide in the area of working with trends. Each card, apart from the description of the trend, includes an indicator of the influence of a given trend on the achievement of the sustainable development goals. This indicator was calculated on the basis of a study carried out by infuture. institute in October 2022.¹ This indicator shows how to act in the context of a given trend – strengthen or weaken it with your actions in order to be able to achieve the goals of sustainable development.

3. Trend cards are a great tool when working on a strategy or innovation. For this purpose, one of the proposed paths should be used – innovation or strategy. The innovation path helps to generate new solutions. The strategy path allows you to understand the impact of trends on your organisation’s short- and long-term strategy.

4. Trend cards are helpful in building your resilience to changing global factors. This is achieved by both the prepared resilience path and the Wild Cards included in the set. The Wild Card is an event beyond our control that completely changes the way the world functions so far. It forces changes and imposes a new view on the existing plans, activities and strategy. These events, impossible as it may seem, when they do happen, affect many aspects of our lives.

How to prepare trend workshops?

Trend cards – license:

Subject to the consent below, it is forbidden to alter, copy and in any way use or distribute the work in whole or in part without the consent of the author.

infuture.institute consents to the use of the work in whole or in part only by persons who have purchased the work directly for a fee from infuture.institute and only for purposes related to conducting training and workshops by these persons for employees in their organisation or clients; provided, however, that each time the author of the work and its source are designated.