AAI Foresight Inc. 2019 Annual Report

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Volume 5,
Number 12
December 3, 2019

AAI Foresight Inc. 2019 Annual Report

By Timothy C. Mack, Managing Principal

Consulting and Research

Over 2019, AAI Foresight was pleased to share content from Foresight Signals with the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) for its Compass publication, as we have over the years (sadly, too often involving obits and tributes). Other ongoing collegial relationships include the Northwest MIT Enterprise Forum.

AAI Foresight also continued to enjoy an active consulting practice in 2019, including an expanded relationship in the electric power field with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and an increasing number of U.S. National Laboratories and their contractors.

Communications

In November, AAI Foresight’s monthly e-newsletter, Foresight Signals, marked five years of continuous publication. It remains the only regularly published newsletter in our field with an open subscription policy that reports on activity in the broader futurist and foresight community.

FS is distributed free to a loyal subscriber base, which increased 4.5% in 2019. The newsletter’s average open rate of 38.2% exceeds that of its consulting industry peers (29.8%), and its “unsubscribe” rate averages 0.1% per issue, also below that of its peers (0.3%).

FS is produced by AAI Foresight’s consulting editor, Cynthia G. Wagner, with contributions in 2019 from technology analyst Randall Mayes and myself as AAI Foresight’s managing principal (and FS publisher). This past year, FS made a more concentrated effort to report on foresight-oriented events, such as:

Among other groups we covered in 2019 were the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), Club of Amsterdam, Fast Forward Publishing, Federal Foresight Community of Interest, Hudson Institute, Institute for the Future, Institute for Alternative Futures, The Millennium Project, Pew Research Center, Teach the Future, World Future Society, and World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF).

In addition, AAI Foresight continued its series of white papers with NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell's Foresight Report, “Frontier Technologies and the Human Future: Sustainability Solutions.”

Sadly, 2019 marked the passing of some of the pioneers of futures studies, most recently Wendell Bell, Yale University professor of sociology and futures studies. In 2005, WFSF awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2008, APF named Bell’s 1997 two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies (1997) one of the 10 most important futures books of all time. [Read more]

Others to whom FS paid tributes in 2019 were Heidi Toffler (March), Barbara Marx Hubbard (April), John W. McDonald (June), Gary Marx (June), Molly Waters (July), and Edward Cornish (August special edition).

Call for Annual Reports

Now, it’s your turn! Please send us highlights of your 2019 activities to share with the futurist and foresight community. And of course we welcome your news throughout the year—forward your “foresight signals” to Cindy at CynthiaGWagner@gmail.com.

Take care, and together may we make the New Year a prosperous and peaceful one for all.

Timothy C. Mack
Managing Principal
AAI Foresight Inc.
tcm333@gmail.com