We have a Shaping Tomorrow member organisation interested in talking to experts and researchers in the field of bio-fuels, bio-power, secondary products created during the biomass conversion process, and issues relating to their commercial success. Early dialogue will likely lead to paid assignments for those with significant knowledge of these industry futures. Please email Mike Jackson  expressing your interest and experience. We will, send you more details on behalf of our member organisation following their review of responses.

At this stage, our member organisation is also seeking to collect trends, forces for change and global perspectives on bio-energy and related areas. This is the preliminary stage in conducting a full-scale Environmental Scan in association with the above experts. Some specific arenas within the scope of their interest are:

• Changing land use
• Consumer response
• Bio-energy intersects e.g. transport, automotive
• Environmental concerns
• Foods and wastes to energy
• Government policy
• Competing alternative energies
• Feedstocks and biotechnology advances
• Co-products and bio refineries
• Peak Oil

Please email Mike Jackson if you can help them with identifying sources for their research e.g. web-links, books, reports, people, organisations etc.

Every week, we are adding new content to Shaping Tomorrow.

As interest in shaping the future grows exponentially around the world we are finding many more interesting links than we can sensibly report in our members newsletter.

During the past week, we have added new links as follows:

49 technology
39 industries
20 organization
13 politics
7 lifestyles
5 society
4 environment
4 healthcare
1 economics

By viewing the new material and the links in our database you can anticipate how tomorrow will be different for you and your organisation.

Only Shaping Tomorrow members can regularly access the full database.  Membership costs just 25 British Pounds (+17.5% tax for those based in the European Union), or $49 in the United States. You can pay using one of many credit cards directly at our web site.

Why put yourself at a disadvantage to our members and your competition. Click here to join, today; you won't find a more comprehensive trends service at such low cost anywhere!

Chemicals strike back

"Making sense of chemicals", published this week, aims to start the process of countering six misconceptions about chemicals.

How soon would we start to complain if our convenient, ready to warm up / eat meals went off within a day - stank and mad us ill; if instead of being able to spray and wipe all that dirt and grime out of the oven, we had to scrub and rub for half an hour or more; or that wonderful natural water gave us all typhoid? In amongst the marketing myths, and the loaded language, the sound-bites and the associated images - we have forgotten how dangerous the 'natural' world is. We are also quite happy to be hypocritical and want to have our cake and eat it - literally as well as metaphorically - and have fresh air smells waft around the house (to cover all those natural ones), made of chemicals; expensive products to detox us or help us lose weight when a little self control and more exercise would be better!

And, we are moving in to a new era, where tailoring products to our personal profiles is becoming a reality. Avoiding side effects of drugs to treat depression by trial and error is a long and difficult process, psychiatrist are testing a new set of tools to match the drug to the patient using a genetic marker.

A new research project is looking at the genetics of addiction and developing DNA-based cures to help smokers kick the habit.

Personalised medicine is one of the long term goals, and may be one of the keys to making us change our perceptions.

What has been still forgotten is that, as a one time boss of mine used to say, 'The truth is irrelevant, people's perception of the truth is what counts.' Trying to change perceptions, if they are emotionally based, with facts is rarely going to work - and they are up against the might of the advertising budgets of FMCG goods companies, whose ability to appeal to our subconscious and emotive responses, our lazier and more self indulgent sides is second to none.

Sheila Moorcroft
Research Director, Shaping Tomorrow

More researchers needed

Shaping Tomorrow's continued growth and developing services means we are constantly looking for more professional researchers and content providers. They contribute to our newsletter, database, blindspots and newly created Horizon Scanning service.

We need you to:

• add new links,
• check existing links and retire old material from our website
• improve the sourcing and descriptions of all of our material
• capture and describe the key trends associated with the material 

You will need to be detail-conscious, web-savvy and interested in the subjects, geographies or industries you choose to research. The rest we can teach you.

In return, we offer free Personal Membership of Shaping Tomorrow including the ability for you to create your own gratis public database using our taxonomy, possible client work and acknowledgement of your insider role within our community. Or, alternatively, we can help you create your own private database and taxonomy at very competitive prices. So why not use us to market your work to our thousands of members an organisations at no cost, other than time, to you.

If interested, please contact Mike Jackson for an exploratory discussion.