What’s Next Consulting Oy is focused on issues like anticipating and innovating the future changes by using weak signals. Weak signals are signs of some new issues and they can tell us about changes in the future.

The main actor in What’s Next Consulting is futurist Elina Hiltunen who is Dr. in Economics (topic of the PhD thesis: weak signals in organizational futures learning). You can find her PhD thesis here. Hiltunen has been interested in weak signals since 1998. Read here an interview about Hiltunen.

What’s Next Consulting and Elina Hiltunen offers for companies tools, education and inspiring lectures about weak signals. Example of one tool is the Futures Window, which is a method that utilizes visual weak signals (read here more).

Elina is also working with a crowdsourcing futures tool, TrendWiki. TrendWiki is a tool for organizations for weak signal collecting and analyzing. It utilizes the ideas of social media and includes sophisticated text mining tools. If you got interested about the tool, send email to Elina: whatsnext[at]luukku.com for testing the demo version.

Here is a column about Hiltunen’s views about anticipating the future:

Some examples of speeches of Hiltunen:

• Gartner BI conference, London, Feb 2010
• Affect management meeting May 2010
• EIRMA conferene, Barcelona May 2010
• Malta Innovation conference, April, 2009
• Prague, Science Beyond Fiction conference, panelist, spring, 2009
• European Futurist Conference, key note speaker, November, 2007
• CostA 22 conference, Greece, july, 2007
• Trend und Zunkunfsmanagemant conference , Germany, one of the key note speaker, May , 2007
• Call for Creative Futures, Finland, October, 2006
• Helsinki Design Hub, key note speaker, sebtember, 2006
• Creating Global Strategies for Humanity’s Future, WFS conference, Canada, july, 2007

Other international work:

Spotting weak signals for BBC’s radio program: Culture Shock

Columnist at Wired UK (Finnish teenager watch)

Writer in IET magazine

Writer in Future Takes magazine

Academic work:

• Was it a wild card or just our blindness to gradual change?, Journal of Future Studies, 2006
• The Future Sign and its three dimensions, Futures, 2007
• The signification process of the future sign (Kuusi ja Hiltunen), Tutu e-julkaisu, 2007
• Where do future-oriented people find weak signals?, Tutu e-julkaisu, 2007
• The futures window- a medium for presenting visual weak signals to trigger employees’ futures thinking in organizations, HSE julkaisu, 2007
• Scenarios: Process and Outcome, Journal of Future Studies, Scenario Symposium
• Crowdsourcing weak signals at Finpro, Journal of Future Studies, 2011

Contact:

What’s Next Consulting Oy/

Elina Hiltunen
Location: Finland
E-mail: whatsnext@luukku.com
Tel +358-44-0299 122