The Unicist Approach to Future Research is used for the building of future scenarios of countries, business and markets.
This approach to future research is a unicist logical approach based on inferring the future based on the laws of evolution established by the ontogenetic intelligence of nature, which allowed developing the unicist ontology of evolution.
The New Stage that is being opened by the 4th Industrial Revolution
The 4th Industrial Revolution is introducing adaptability in the industrial and business world. The Industry 4.0 concept proposes to manage businesses as adaptive systems increasing customer orientation, productivity and quality. Adaptability requires managing the concepts of the business functions in order to be able to integrate different people, technologies, processes, systems, objects and tools.
Adaptability requires managing the concepts and fundamentals of the business functions which allow managing the root causes of market behavior, the root causes of businesses processes and the root causes of industrial processes to ensure customer satisfaction, productivity and quality.
New requirements of the 4IR:
- Functional Design to build adaptive processes.
- Binary Actions to ensure the results of processes.
- Artificial Intelligence to empower adaptability.
- Functional Segmentation to increase market share.
- Conceptual Analysis to manage functionality.
- Catalysts to expand and accelerate processes.
- Business Objects to ensure productivity and quality.
- Object Driven Organization to increase profitability.
Study on the Consequences of COVID-19
The purpose of this study was the development of a future scenario that allowed all types of organizations to develop counter-cycles to begin the next stage. It applies to all the contexts that work within the 2nd, 3rd or 4th Industrial Revolution environments.
The COVID-19 crisis is and will be fostering several structural changes in the environment, that will adopt multiple shapes according to the archetype of each culture.
The financial crisis 2008 allowed The Unicist Research Institute, to structure the unicist countercyclical approach to manage crises.
Globalization: The Era of Participation
The objective of people in the Era of Participation is to find a better place in the world, conserve it, expand it and avoid losing it.
This era changes the way people deal with others. It generated a major change of habits that gives access to influential roles to all those who feel that they have something to say and drives towards an increasing transparency of public and private actions.
The notorious change in communication technologies, that gave most of the hidden villages in peripheral countries an access to the world, made evident that a new ideology was being introduced.
Growth Crisis 2008-2010
The financial crisis broke the integration of the system between the market and the companies and between the companies and their shareholders.
Consumerism was used by the developed cultures to sustain growth but it generated a dysfunctional market behavior. Consumerism developed into a speculative behavior that provoked an artificial increase of the prices of all the goods that can be owned.
The capitalist system is not only based on private property, it is based on trust and credibility and the integration of the population in the property of the economic institutions. This is what has been named neo-capitalism.
Sustainable Globalization Building
The building of sustainable globalization requires the existence of a context that defines the possibilities of this process.
If the context is not given, it is only possible to develop globalizing actions that have no sustainability.
The purpose of the context is the building of true synergy in the globalization process among the members.
This implies that the interests of the members are not only considered but also energized through this process.
Neo-Capitalism: The Future of Capitalism
This work deals with the conceptual structure of capitalism and its integration with economic democracy.
It includes no ideological considerations or influence. It is based on the unicist approach to complexity science, which uses a pragmatic, structural and functionalist framework.
There are prejudices and fallacious myths installed in the world dealing with the concept of capitalism. Unfortunately, no literature could be found that approached capitalism based on its concept to define its nature (the “stem cell” of capitalism).
The 10-year Trend for Healthcare Organizations in the United States
This is a synthesis of the trends developed at the Future Research Lab on the “Evolution of Healthcare in the US”. They are based on the global healthcare trends in developed countries that have been developed.
The objective of this research was to find the trends that underlie the healthcare business in the US and to develop the future scenario that arose based on the changes introduced in medical regulations and on the possibilities opened by the use of new technologies.
The 10-year Future Scenario of Global Consumer Markets
This is a synthesis of the future scenario development, that was triggered by the research on global behaviors www.unicist.org/research_project3_en.pdf and was upgraded due to the stagnation of the growth of countries in the EU since 2008.
It included the following countries:
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, USA and Venezuela.
The 10-year Future Scenario of Adaptive Marketing
This Marketing should be adaptive by definition, but this is not always the case. The changes in communications, the era of participation, Internet and the IT technologies are driving marketing towards the next step, which is in fact a back to basics: Adaptive Marketing.
The following synthesis of the results of the research shows what is already happening in the market and how these actions will evolve due to the use of the technologies that are now available.
The 10-year Future Scenario of the Internet (www)
Internet is becoming a “Virtual Emulation of the Real World” which drives to major changes in its development and use.
This is a 10-year future scenario developed using unicist double dialectical logical inferences based on the actual conceptual functionality of Internet, the available technologies and those that are being introduced.
The name Internet or www is already an anachronism because it describes an entity that seems to provide a network between the participants, but in fact evolved towards being an entity that has its own “artificial life”.
The 10-year Future Scenario of Object Driven Virtual Collaboration
The communication and IT technologies allowed making the next step in organizational design, integrating personal and virtual collaboration, organizing roles and using business objects, to maximize results and minimize costs.
Virtual collaboration is the natural way to organize when there is a need of expert knowledge. Nowadays expert knowledge can be integrated in most of the cases by using the IT technologies that allow sharing data and images.
The 20-year Future Scenario of Adaptive Leadership
In April 2011 the Unicist Future Research Lab began a process to define which will be the possible evolution of the types of leadership in the world. The objective of the research was to find the trends in leadership that are driven by the upgrade of technologies.
The unicist approach to future research applied to leadership is based on an inference based methodology to describe possible scenarios based on the knowledge of the concept of leadership and the laws of social evolution considering the evolution of the technologies and their consequences.
Cultural Confrontation Scenario: the Clash between Adaptive and Over-adaptive Cultures
The root cause of the clash between cultures is in fact the confrontation between over-adaptive and adaptive cultures.
Over-adaptive cultures are naturally driven by a dualistic approach which drives them to consider enemies all those that are different or have a superior level of adaptiveness.
On the other hand, adaptive cultures are driven by integrative approaches that allow them influencing the environment while being influenced by it.
The 10-year Future Scenario for Superior Education in Business
This future research process was developed as a consequence of the economic crisis that was triggered in 2008. The purpose of the research, was to find the human aspects that participated in the crisis and how education could have helped to anticipate it and/or accelerate the recovery.
Educational models respond naturally to the needs, archetypes and lifestyles of cultures and their development. The changes in superior education should be guiding the changes of cultures but, unfortunately, mostly they are a consequence of the changes of cultures.
Unicist Future Research Lab
The Unicist Research Institute