2009 Horizon Report Economic Development Edition

Methodology

Every edition of the Horizon Report is produced using a carefully calibrated process that is informed by both primary and secondary research. Nearly a hundred technologies, as well as dozens of meaningful trends and challenges are examined for possible inclusion in the report each year; an internationally renowned Advisory Board examines each topic in progressively more detail, reducing the set until the final listing of technologies, trends, and challenges is selected. The entire process takes place online and documentation for this edition can be found at http://biz.wiki.nmc.org/.

About half of the thirty to forty members of an Advisory Board are newly chosen each year, and the board as a whole is designed to represent a wide range of backgrounds, nationalities, and interests. To date, more than 300 internationally recognized practitioners and experts have participated on one or more of the Horizon Project Advisory Boards.

Once the Advisory Board is constituted, their work begins with a systematic review of the literature — press clippings, reports, essays, and other materials — that pertain to emerging technology. Advisory Board members are provided with an extensive set of background materials when the project begins, and then are asked to comment, identify those which seem particularly worthwhile, and add to the set. A key criterion for this edition was the potential relevance of the topics to business practices in marketing, collaboration, customer service, and productivity. A carefully selected collection of RSS feeds from some 50 leading publications ensures that these resources stay current as the project progresses, and they are used to inform the thinking of the participants through the process.

Following the review of the literature, the Advisory Board engages in the process of addressing the five research questions that are at the core of the Horizon Project. These questions are designed to elicit a comprehensive listing of interesting technologies, challenges, and trends from the Advisory Board, and are the same within each of the various Horizon Project research areas so as to facilitate longitudinal analyses. The questions used for the Economic Development Edition are:

1. What would you list among the established technologies that growth-focused small to medium businesses should all be using broadly today to support or enhance business practices in marketing, collaboration, customer service, and productivity?
2. What technologies that have a solid user base in other industries should small to medium businesses be actively looking for ways to apply?
3. What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that small to medium businesses should begin to take notice during the next three to five years? What organizations or companies are the leaders in these technologies?
4. What do you see as the critical challenges related to innovation and development that small to medium businesses will face during the next five years?
5. What trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which small to medium businesses approach their core practices in marketing, collaboration, customer service, and productivity?

One of the Advisory Board’s most important tasks is to answer these five questions as systematically and broadly as possible, so as to generate a large number of potential topics to consider. The regional and sector-based reports add one additional step as a way to seed the responses: the topics from the short lists of the global and other regional editions for the current year are included in the list of topics to consider. Once this work is done, usually within just a few days, the Advisory Board moves to a unique consensus-building process that uses an iterative Delphi-based methodology.

In the first step of this approach, the responses to the research questions are systematically ranked and placed into adoption horizons by each Advisory Board member using a multi-vote system that allows members to weight their selections. Each member is asked to also identify the timeframe during which they feel the technology would enter mainstream use — defined for the purpose of the project as about 20% of organizations adopting it within the period discussed. (This figure is based on the research of Geoffrey A. Moore and refers to the critical mass of adoptions needed for a technology to have a chance of entering broad use.) These rankings are compiled into a collective set of responses, and inevitably, the ones around which there is the most agreement are quickly apparent.

Each of the twelve semi-finalist topics is then written up in the format of the Horizon Report. With the benefit of the full picture of how the topic would look in the report, the “short list” is then ranked yet again, this time with a reverse ranking approach. The six technologies and applications that emerged at the top of the rankings — two per adoption horizon — are detailed in the preceding sections along with the challenges and trends also selected by the advisory board.

To anchor the report in a stream of timely and relevant information about the topics highlighted here, an ongoing component of the project generates an expanding set of web links, tagged on Delicious.com, which has been established to help extend the findings of the project and allow new information to be shared within the community. The Delicious.com tags used for the project are listed under the “Further Reading” section of each of the six topic areas, and readers are invited to view not only the resources that were listed in the report, but many others that were used in our research as well. Readers are further encouraged to add their own examples and readings to these dynamic lists by tagging them for inclusion in each category.

For additional detail on the project methodology or to review the actual instrumentation, the ranking, and the interim products behind the report, please visit http://biz.wiki.nmc.org/.