Papers presented by Devon Powers since 2019

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

"'The Smartest People I Could Find': Collaborative Futuring and the Corporate Use of Collective Knowledge"

Abstract:

In 1974, former ad execs Faith Popcorn and Stuart Pittman embarked upon a new business venture. Called BrainReserve, Popcorn and Pittman aspired to build a business to counsel clients about cultural trends, in a manner more future-directed than a typical advertising agency. Their methods were also unconventional. Popcorn’s plan was to “gather all the smartest people I could find to solve whatever problem was at hand”—using a team of expert “brains” to think big regarding America’s cultural revolutions (Powers 2018). BrainReserve’s approach was novel within advertising, but was normalizing within the trends industry, which emerged as a unique genre of management consulting around 1970. The industry evolved several collaborative methods to both benefit from group wisdom and to glean knowledge from “the crowd,” including Delphi studies, brainstorming, and cool hunting (Kleiner 2008, Gordon 1967). Though academics mostly distanced themselves from futurology after the 1970s, businesses eagerly experimented with tapping into collective intelligence and embraced group understanding as the key to the future. This paper examines the centrality of collaboration to corporate futurism. Following Peter Taylor’s (2016) contention that “corporate social science is the future,” this case will show how corporate futurism is both figuratively the space in which new forms of research emerged, and literally a primary site for systematic future imagining. References Gordon, Theodore J. “Forecasters Turn to Delphi.” Futurist, February 1967. Kleiner, Art. The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008. Powers, Devon. "Thinking in Trends: The Rise of Trend Forecasting in the United States." Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 10, no. 1 (2018): 2-20.

Keywords: