The Future Forecast Report

Introduction

The Innovation process at Fidelity Labs begins with signals gathering. Our Innovation process is simple: Scan,Try, Scale.  We first scan the horizon, looking out for emerging technologies or trends that are likely to disrupt our industry.  The most promising of those then turn into hypothesis statements and eventually evolve into Innovation Lab experiments. The most successful experiments then (hopefully!) get adopted and scaled back into the Enterprise .

The responsibility for identifying and prioritizing these trends falls to our Innovation Intelligence team, led by Yannick Bowe, that sits within the broader Fidelity Labs team. The Intelligence team keeps their finger on the pulse of the contemporary zeitgeist. They subscribe to cultural and industry publications, monitor social and news outlets, M&A activity and keep close relationships with various startup and incubator communities.

They collect and log signals into our purpose-built, Signals Database, tagging each item with relevant metadata (e.g. Time horizon, is it part of a macro trend, confidence level, etc..).

This database gets constantly reviewed, resulting in the publishing of 2-3x trend scouting reports each month. These are short, typically single page reports that define new emerging trends we've spotted and outline the relevancy and potential impact/opportunity for us.

These scouting reports are monitored and maintained through the year, continuously being updated and reviewed for relevancy and overlap with other emerging signals.

At the end of the year the team gets together and reviews all of the ~30 scouting reports produced throughout the year, reflecting on how these trends have morphed into something new, fizzled out or even combined into something even bigger.

The Report

These combinations of maturing, bigger trends then form the foundation for our Future Forecast Report - a deep dive into the key trends that we believe will persist and bring transformative change to the way our business is done in the future.

To produce this deep dive, the team engages specialists across the entire organization including investment management, workplace investing, personal investing, operations, marketing, technology and strategic ventures to develop a ‘house view’ of the key trends providing the greatest opportunities for our organization, our customers or the broader industry.

We seek out opposing viewpoints and different opinions, often inviting subject matter experts to co-author with us to deliver the most robust and comprehensive perspective on the trend.

The single page scouting reports evolve into individual chapters, providing in-depth analysis, examples and context.

The report is architected to be useful to internal staff, our customers, our clients and potential hires. Each chapter is segmented into different sections: The Brief, The Narrative, The Big Picture and The Deep Dive. Each section covers the trend in different depth of detail and technicality, providing appropriate coverage for the various audiences.

We also produce a variety of packaging for the content, appropriate for our different audience segments. We have the full report, typically clocking in around sixty pages. From that we produce an email-sized attachment of 5-8 pages for executive consumption, a LinkedIn-sized post for each of the trends and a series of image slideshows for social media consumption.

This library of assets created for each trend fills up our content well that we dip into throughout the year. Since raising internal awareness of these trends is one of our primary objectives, the team creates an internal communication plan and content calendar for the year.

We start by defining our target audiences (e.g. sales, marketing, technology or personal investing teams) and then schedule department-wide webinars and workshops. The content from the report acts as event tentpoles, supporting an agenda that typically includes external speakers and demos from related industry startups.

These events, branded as The Future Forecast Talk Series, run throughout the year and bridge the understanding gap between the emerging trend research and the different parts of the business where they will most likely land.  

Post-event participant surveys show the value and quality of the content is highly useful and rate it 4.8/5 and often is the spark that ignites a piece of change within the department.