Online Futurists

Looking for Web sites featuring new or coming-soon product innovations or consumer insights? Check out Trendwatching and its sister site Springwise.
Here is an interesting taste:

“In economies that increasingly depend on (and thus value) creative thinking and acting, well-known status symbols tied to owning and consuming goods and services will find worthy competition from ‘STATUS SKILLS’: those skills that consumers are mastering to make the most of those same goods and services, bringing them status by being good at something, and the story telling that comes with it.”Note: this is *not* an anti-business trend. It still relies on a dominantly capitalist system, in which consumption remains important, yet is partly replaced by another highly valued, status-providing activity: mastering skills, and the show & tell circus that comes with it. Which opens entirely new markets for both providers of skills, and those skillful consumers who may become competing producers of (niche) goods and services. For more on the non-commercial aspects of this trend, see the opportunities section at the bottom of this briefing. They go on to detail examples including special high-performance driving schools driving schools by BMW, Mini, Land Rover and others, and photography courses by Kodak and Nikon.

I’m not sure it is fair to call these entirely new things, but if they are newly popular with a high-dollars crowd, enough to attract the big product-oriented corporate names into the training business, well there must be something happening there.