Created 01/10/2011 8:21:05 AM

Prediction industry is an amazing business and there is a real competition among foresight practitioners to offer more reliable forecasts. It's not just a matter of forecast, but a battle of "ideas". What’s valuable is being able to critically judge a torrent of information and to be able determine which "ideas" are worth taking seriously— worth planning for and investing in (Gordon, 2008).

DuPont company announced (last January) its acquisition of Denmark-based Danisco based on the ‘clear synergies with [its] Nutrition & Health and Applied BioSciences‘ business units (DuPont, 2011).

DuPont’s $5.8 Billion strategic investment is based on two macro trends that will shape global markets over the next half century (50 years):

• increased global demand for food (both commodity ingredients and specialty ‘functional foods‘ with health benefits)
• increased constraints on industrial production based on chemical engineering & hydrocarbon feed-stocks (and likely shift to biologically-inspired and biologically-driven systems.)

Danisco is the world’s largest food ingredients maker. The shift from chemical engineering to bioengineering goes far beyond biofuels and encompasses industrial processes across all major industry sectors from energy, agriculture, healthcare and textiles to construction, pharmaceuticals and materials manufacturing. DuPont is investing in a bridge from its chemical engineering past, to its biotechnology future — but it might also be a catalyst speeding up other global investments in this emerging bio-industrial age!

According to Gordon (2008), there are five kinds of forecasts according to their time frame: short, short-medium, long-medium, long, and ultra-long forecasts (pp. 20-21). Long forecasts, look 10- 25 years ahead. On the other hand, Ultra-long term forecasts are anything from 25 to 10,000 years. Given that DuPont Company has based its investment on a 50 years trends forecast, should we consider it a "long" or "ultra-long" forecast? Please note that we are not faced with philosophical or existential matters in this case.    

References:

DuPont Company (2011). DuPont acquisition of Danisco seen as catalyst for Era of Bio Industrialism, Retrieved from: http://www2.dupont.com/Media_Center/en_US/daily_news/january/article20110111.html

Gordon, Adam (2008). Future Savvy: Identifying Trends to Make Better Decisions, Manage Uncertainty, and Profit from Change. NY: AMACOM, pp. 3, 20-21.