I’ve read Joel Barker and Scott Erickson’s “Five Regions of the Future”.
The book reveals itself as a framework which helps cataloging the technologies and views of the future into five categories, which they call Regions. However this approach might sound simplistic, the its simplicity makes it very useful and valuable.
After reading the book, the patterns applied in R&D and its commercial implications became all too obvious, yet thought provoking because the book itself only scratches the possibilities of each category.
These Regions are:
- Super Tech – The bigger, the stronger and the faster – all of them, the better.
- Limit Tech – Resources are few and we are endangered running out of resources.
- Local Tech – Scaling properly. There will be the sufficient for everyone, only the sufficient.
- Nature Tech – Mother nature has the solution for everything, she’s been trying and experimenting for 2 billions years.
- Human Tech – The humans has the solutions for themselves, within themselves.
I guess it summarises regions.
I have been provoked by the book to develope the following list.
Which regions do few countries fit best?
I picked up only two: China and Brazil.
- China: Super Tech.
- Super Tech – China is big and it’s getting bigger. There are approximately 1,4bi of chineses. Everyday I read on papers the audacious goals China holds for the future.
- Super Tech – China is consuming resources from all over the world, provoking the raise of the inflation on many commodities.
- Super Tech – China is one of the most pollution producers of the world.
- Super Tech – China has been developing military strength.
- Brazil: Nature Tech and Local Tech – Trying to change to Super Tech through the “Desenvolvimentismo” (developmentism)
- Nature Tech – Embrapa is one of the most efficient public companies in the world regarding agropecurial research.
- Nature Tech – The Amazon Forest is acknowledged as a source of huge biodiversity. Several researchers seek in its wild life solutions for several issues ranging from health to engineering.
- Local Tech – The regional folklore has became product of exportation, such sandals Havaina.
- Local Tech – The over-crowded cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro created a massive migration wave to the country side, and a net of medium size cities is emerging.
- Super Tech – Petrobrás in 1970s manage to find petroleum in the coast beneath the salt layer, and in the year of 2007, Lula’s government initiated efforts in pumping it.
- Super Tech – Greatest agropecurial production. Worldly chief exporter of soybeans, cattle and raw minerals.
I shall search for more technologies in the newspapers and eletronic media, and post them here tagging them according to the Five Regions – resume the Joel Barker’s job. He stopped in the December of 2006.
