Futures & Insight conference 2026

09.45 Welcome from the Chairs

Josh McBain, Founder & CEO, Next Up

John Robson, formerly Co-founder, Sparkler & Non Exec Chair, Next Up

10.00 Beyond trends & predictions: reframing foresight for an age of uncertainty

Interest in strategic foresight is growing rapidly, but shared understanding of what it is and how it creates value is still taking shape.

Join a panel of client leaders who are actively embedding foresight into innovation, strategy, risk or insight and explore how insight and foresight can work together to build resilient, future-ready organisations.

• Moving from short-term insight to long-term resilience
• Making foresight commercially actionable
• Examples of where insight and foresight dovetail most effectively
• The future capability mix for insight teams

Chair

Josh McBain, Founder & CEO, Next Up

Panellists

Joe Ballantyne, Principal Product Manager, Amazon

Edith Bardin, Global Brand & Communications Insights Adviser, Shell

Adam Langridge, Corporate Strategy Manager, Strategic Foresight, Jaguar Land Rover

Franziska Krauskopf, Senior Strategic Foresight Manager, Beiersdorf

10.30 Mapping emerging opportunities in the space economy

Human activity in space is accelerating as commercial, government and defence investment drives rapid technological change. In a major study for the UK Space Agency, RAND Europe used horizon scanning, expert engagement and scenario exploration to map almost 200 potential future uses of space out to 2050.

This session shares key insights from the research, showing how space activities may increasingly intersect with climate, security, health, energy and the wider economy. It will demonstrate how foresight approaches can help organisations identify emerging opportunities, manage risk, build resilience and inform long-term strategy in fast changing and highly interconnected domains. 

Erik Silfversten, Director of the Centre for Futures and Foresight Studies, RAND Europe

UK Space Agency - tbc 

11.00 Morning refreshments

11.30 Embedding foresight for resilience and commercial growth

Join Foresight Factory and client partners to hear what applied foresight looks like when embedded into real commercial decision-making. Hear how a Foresight Ecosystem, which integrates signals, trend frameworks, AI-enhanced data modelling and opportunity spaces into business planning and risk governance, informs commercial trade-offs and predictive decision-making in two very different scenarios.

Aer Rianta International will share how foresight was applied to optimise footfall, promotional strategy and product mix across travel retail environments and directly informed trading decisions and strengthened commercial positioning in competitive bid contexts.  Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate will share how dynamic trend frameworks enabled diversification and extended planning horizons from two to five years.

Meabh Quoirin, CEO and Co-Owner, Foresight Factory

Dom Dwight, former Strategy & Innovation Director, Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate

Deirdre Roache, Head of Research & Insights, Dublin Airport (formerly Insights Manager, Aer Rianta International)

12.00 Changemakers over trendsetters: how Versuni built scenarios to innovate for an uncertain future

What if innovation stopped chasing trends and started collaborating with changemakers already shaping the future? This session explores how Versuni partnered with Truth and Ashoka to create a foresight foundation and 10 scenarios for the home in 2035.

Blending social entrepreneurship, scenario planning and AI-generated immersive workshops, the approach moved teams beyond incremental thinking. Discover how changemakers helped unlock more actionable innovation, how to build a foresight framework teams can rally behind, and how to turn future possibilities into tangible innovation pathways.

Dr Bridget Dalton, Head of Futures, Truth Consulting

Sakshi Kaul, Global Foresight Director, Versuni

Kelly Davies, Global Co-Founder - Everyone a Changemaker, Ashoka

12.30 Fuelling the future: redefining breakfast and snacking for the next decade

How do you move from understanding today’s breakfast and snacking habits to confidently shaping where the category will be in 5 to 10 years’ time? This innovation case study shows how The Big Picture and Müller connected deep human understanding with future-facing opportunity resulting in a stakeholder-backed innovation roadmap shaping Müller’s long-term pipeline.

Hear how the mixed-method sprint fused ethnography and AI trends mapping to define clear opportunity platforms. Live illustrated ideation translated platforms into life, accelerating alignment and ambition. And customer co-creation further refined and prioritised concepts.

Chris Aukett, Managing Partner & Co-owner, The Big Picture

Nikita Eloise Simone, Research Manager, The Big Picture

Jessica Duckworth, Senior Innovation Manager, Müller UK & Ireland

13.00 Lunch

14.00 Strategic imagination: crafting futures with meaning

Foresight is fundamental for creating desirable futures but with so much volatility, projecting the future from today’s assumptions is no longer enough. This session will show how instead, strategic imagination can help organisations navigate uncertainty, reveal new pathways forwards and design alternative futures. Delegates will examine how imaginative techniques, speculation and meaning-making through semiotics can help organisations to consider how future contexts, values and everyday realities might be different.

Cato Hunt, Joint Managing Director, Space Doctors (part of Human8)

14.30 The forecast for forecasters 

If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that the futures specialism must evolve; practitioners have had to be nimble, to diversify their skillsets, to include multiple new data-sets to further ‘prove’ – aka validate – where the future is heading.  

This panel brings together leading foresight innovators to explore how the discipline is evolving. From new methodologies to commercially grounded futures, discover the tools, techniques and mindsets shaping a more accountable, inspiring and business-critical era of foresight.

Chair

Amy Nicholson, Director (Futures), Crowd DNA

Panel

Maria Victoria O'Hana, Foresight Practitioner & Creative Brand Strategist

Kathryn Bishop, Editor and Foresight Writer & Researcher

Adam Steel, Foresight Manager, McDonald's

15.00 Afternoon refreshments

15.30 The psychological conditions for futures thinking: a novel framework for boosting engagement and activation

Even with carefully calibrated methods and bright minds in the room, futures thinking and foresight can fail to generate useful insight or translate into meaningful action. 

This session explores the individual and organisational dynamics that shape how we engage with futures, including why stakeholders may intellectually endorse foresight while behaviourally defaulting to short-termism. It introduces the Windows of Possibility framework for understanding how present context shapes how we relate to the future and the key considerations for meaningful engagement and action.

Emily Shipp, Psychologist, Futures Thinking, University of Edinburgh Futures Institute

16.00 From insight to foresight: building culturally grounded futures for Islamic finance

What began as a small-budget research brief evolved into a future-facing strategy for engaging tomorrow's Shariah consumer. This project shows how deep cultural intelligence combined with futures thinking transformed an immediate insight need into long-term strategic advantage.

The project was grounded in community?informed foresight, combining horizon scanning for emerging behaviours in Sharia?compliant investing, while working with Islamic finance experts and community leaders. In depth interviews with Shariah investors further uncovered subconscious motivations shaped by faith, identity and social norms. This ensured future scenarios reflected culturally real financial journeys.

The result was an actionable, future roadmap that anticipates tomorrow’s Shariah consumer and embeds cultural intelligence as a strategic lever for more inclusive, future ready activation.

Matt Coggan, Director, Boxclever

Lena Kadir, Research Director, Lena Kadir Qualitative Insights

Shazia Ali, Director, Mint Research

Omar Khaliel, CEO, Riba Free Foundation

Pierce Keating, Customer Insight Manager, Foresters Financial

16.30 Closing comments from the Chairs

16.45 End of conference