What will cities be like in the future?

If we are to address some of the major crises of our time: climate change, the ageing population, economic disruption, then we need more of us to be living in cities, not fewer.This may sound counter-intuitive but you are likely to have a much lower carbon footprint living in Central London than you would living in the middle of the countryside.Why? For a start, your home is likely to be newer and better insulated – not least because there are likely to be other homes above and below it. The infrastructure and the tarmac around you stores heat, keeping temperatures in cities 1-3° warmer than the countryside, further reducing your investment in heating.Cities are also the cheapest place to serve citizens with utilities. The closer together people are, the more cost effective it is to provide water, waste services, electricity and connectivity. This is why many rural parts of the country still run on oil deliveries and septic tanks and have crap broadband.

Future city logistics

When you travel in a city, the amenities are much closer by and you have a much greater chance of being able to travel by public transport. Getting to work, the shops, the pub, or a museum, you will expend a lot less energy.There has been much talk about how self-driving and electric cars might reshape our cities, removing the need for parking, for example — at least in prime areas. They can drop off their passengers and then drive themselves to an out of town garage, or return home, or continue to serve other passengers across the city until they need charging.But there is also a very reasonable challenge that asks whether we should let cars shape our cities again. After all, the last time we allowed a single form of personal transport to shape our cities, it wasn’t all positive. Self-driving, electric cars propose to reduce congestion and pollution, but we already have other ways to do those things.A city shaped by cycling, walking and mass transit is potentially very different to one shaped by smart cars. Even the smartest of cars will present barriers to pedestrians, breaking down streets into two sides. Mass transit implies hubs around which services and people congregate.

Housing for the future

I once had the pleasure of interviewing some of the leading lights in the property sector, both residential and commercial. Some of the results went into a report for Hyperoptic on the future of residential broadband.The CEO of a large developer told me that one of the biggest challenges when building something new is knowing what the user’s needs will be in five, ten, or twenty years. How can you construct something today that will have longevity when technology, culture, and working practices are changing so fast?

The future of planning

The answer comes in three parts: design, engineering, and information. Each is influenced by a principle for better strategy that is being adopted across business and I think has a strong role to play in government as well. This principle is simply that adaptation trumps optimisation as a predictor of sustainable success:

• Developers may be able to employ foresight tools to inform their decisions and enhance their arguments for particular developments.
• We have to consider when we are thinking about the future of planning that the future building may itself be much more adaptable than those in the past.
• What feeds foresight processes is good data, and there is a huge opportunity in the future for developers and local authorities to better inform their decisions with good data.

So, what will cities be like in the future? The design process is informed by rich data that combines geospatial, demographic, economic, and emotional data that assembles a business case and a design brief in a semi-automated fashion. The design itself is created with flexibility in mind, aware of imminent trends but also adaptable to those beyond the range of reasonable foresight.

What’s the future for the construction industry?

Every industry I speak to thinks that they are the laggards. They believe that their industry is the least progressive, the one with the most work to do. This is almost never true, except for the construction industry. What would it look like if they were to modernise?

Future construction trends

Regular readers will know that I believe the shape of tomorrow’s economy is much more of a network than a monolith. Distributed resources assembled and connected to deliver against today’s objectives, then reconfigured to meet tomorrow’s needs.In some ways the construction industry already works like this: each project tends to bring together a different team, and much of the labour and services are contracted. But these relationships tend to be handled in a high-friction, low agility fashion. Information flow is slow, processes are manual, and many mistakes are made.Imagine a different model. One where the interaction between the major parties was entirely digital, built on a shared set of data and more importantly, processes and principles of operation. Imagine if the contracted labour could be sourced through a similarly digital platform – an Uber for trades, or a Deliveroo for builders.You post your skills and labour requirements and the system matches it to the available labour, dynamically managing pricing to secure the required labour and balance it against budget. Each contractor would have a persistent digital CV, tracking experience, ratings, qualifications and perhaps any safety infringements.

The future cityscape

While physical objects are becoming increasingly digital, so too are digital objects becoming increasingly physical. The combination of artificial intelligence with a range of new sensing and display technologies means that digital artefacts and devices increasingly interact with us in physical ways: voice and gesture, observation and inference.Whereas a building management system today might maintain environmental conditions, monitor fire safety, and minimise energy consumption, future systems might be able to wield much greater control and do so in collaboration with other buildings and spaces around them.Imagine a building that largely builds itself, to the specifications in the design DNA that an architect defines. Imagine it can continuously optimise its internal layout to the needs of its users. Imagine it can collaborate with other nearby intelligences to maximise safety, comfort and utility for the people around it.In the future our self-driving cars will be navigating their way around self-managing buildings, themselves an ecosystem of smart devices.

The future of city planning: what will our cities be built from?

We name many of the ages of history based on the most advanced materials with which we understood how to work. There was the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, Iron Age etc. Later, we focused on forms of mechanical and later electronic sophistication: Machine Age, Atomic Age, Space Age. Right now you could argue we’re in the Information Age. So what’s next?Perhaps we might call it the ‘Quantum Age’? In this time we expand our existing comprehension of the world on a sub-atomic scale, and find new applications for this knowledge.

Introducing: borophene

Borophene was only experimentally demonstrated in 2015, which means we have a long way to go before we understand how to produce it at scale and in useful forms. Though what has been learned from the production of graphene will likely help. The same is true of all the other materials and compounds being researched. They will all have a role to play in tomorrow’s world, but only when we learn how to make and use them at scale.From new materials to new practices, the construction industry has to change. It will change, as the current model is clearly unsustainable.

Why smart cities are important

The term ‘smart city’ means different things to different people. There is something close to a standard definition, from the BSI’s PAS180 Smart City Vocabulary document:“‘Smart cities’ is a term denoting the effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens.”Smart cities have been the subject of aggressive marketing from the major tech companies for some years. Their development has come to be seen by some as a success of technology marketing over citizen need. Something of a corporate takeover.People have issues with the command-and-control format of many smart city programs, with their ‘control centres’ featuring giant screens and dashboards for some mastermind at the middle to monitor the city.We see a similar discomfort with microchips under the skin. There’s the issue of security: this type of short-range wireless chip has been shown to be susceptible to hacking using widely available hardware.But despite concerns, there are huge drivers to smart all our cities.

Smart cities and sustainability

Build smart cities means retrofitting technology, processes and partnerships to an existing, evolved organic environment. One model isn’t going to fit every city. Making it happen will be a process of negotiation, integration, iteration. And there will be lots of different parties involved: political leaders, civil servants, service providers, technology companies, health services, police forces, property owners and most important of all, the citizens themselves.Brokering a framework that keeps all of these people at least relatively happy, while delivering on the promise of smart cities is no small task. It will only come through dialogue. But it’s a conversation we need to have. Because the promise of smarter cities is too great to ignore.In the first instance there is simply lower costs, both financially and to the environment. There are lifestyle benefits: less traffic, quicker parking, more efficient public transport. Taking things a step further, there are advantages to planners: recognising a noise problem in one place might inform a change in planning to a new building nearby, perhaps requiring materials that absorb or deflect sound, or the planting of trees as a screen.

Future city technology: the challenges

Telefonica’s project in Santander has proven there is little money to be made in smart city hardware: the city rolled out 12,000 sensors funded by a relatively small EU1m from the EU. And the sum of the data collected from those sensors, just 5MB per day, similar to a single photo or MP3 file, suggests there is very little to be made in its carriage or storage.The biggest challenges, and hence the biggest potential revenues, come in processing and presenting the data in a useful form. This is where Telefonica has focused its efforts and is looking to commercialise the learning from the Santander experiment. IBM too has recognised that this is where the value lies.

Why are smart cities important?

Despite these setbacks, smart cities have the potential to push forward our sustainability efforts and bring communities together. Ultimately, there is the prospect of properly understanding our cities and the interactions that make them live, so that we can make more informed decisions about their future, in local government, in corporations, and as individuals.

The future of the city: how can communities work together for change?

If you want to save the planet, live in a city. Even better, live in a city centre. Here, all the amenities are on your doorstep. For the places that you can’t walk, public transport is easily accessible. The more densely you live – within reason – the lower your carbon footprint. And the better the chance that we arrest the decline, ensuring that the future high street will be a thriving, vibrant place.Ask people whether they care about climate change and these days and all but the most hardcore science-denier will tell you that they do. But how much do they care? Is it enough to take action? The evidence would suggest not.The Green Party increased its share of the vote in 2019 by a dramatic 60%. But this was a high point in an otherwise largely negative sea of statistics about our environmental behaviour in areas of free choice. Recycling rates? Down. Flights? Up.But by embracing a future of communities, we can make a real difference – almost without thinking about it.

Future of communities

Cities and high streets offer great potential to bring communities together. The future high street is the perfect place for a school. There will be plenty of space to build one as well. In the last 18 months, it has been accepted in the property sector that the loss of some high street retail is structural, not cyclical. Some classes of shops aren’t coming back, and there is no obvious retail replacement.We also hear about loneliness and isolation in later life a lot. This is the group who would perhaps most benefit from a move to the city centre.This group needs a rather different retirement living offer to bring them into the city. This is why I was so pleased to see Legal and General’s planned £2bn investment in city centre developments. The company’s goal is to transform failing retail space into apartments to buy and rent. These will not be for students and young professionals but for those who have retired. Projects like this will have exponentially greater impact than the government’s £675m investment fund for retail redevelopment.These are not care homes. But that’s not what most of this cohort need. They need a place to live where they have the opportunity to support themselves and engage with other people. What these new developments will have is ready access to critical amenities like doctor’s surgeries, some of which they will be building on site.

What will cities of the future look like?

Given the direction of change there may be many redevelopment opportunities in city centres. A school could replace a department store, or all or part of a shopping centre. With the coming of self-driving cars, it might replace a car park.Schools aren’t the only requirement for more families to live in a city. If they are to live well, then more green spaces, play areas, and safe pedestrianised zones would be required. But these changes all fit with the direction of travel for current city planning. And these changes all work to encourage other groups back into the city centre.Despite what the climate change deniers might say, climate change is not a job and wealth creation conspiracy. But some of the technologies and business behaviours most suited to a zero-carbon future are now well aligned to improved business performance. Renewable energy is cheaper than any other source. Flexible working drives greater productivity. Digital communications drive greater reach.

Suburban capitals

I once took part in a panel about the prospect of suburban capitals. These are satellite city centres around the major hubs that are starting to attract more companies for their HQs.If the conditions prevail and the developments keep on coming, could we re-balance investment across the country? Could we convince people to base big businesses elsewhere and treat London as somewhere to visit rather than live? Perhaps.This leads back to campaigns to improve public transport, in the South East and in the North, and in the Midlands. Living in Manchester, I’m biased and would argue that the potential of a strong Leeds/Manchester/Liverpool axis should take priority.But in general, we need better infrastructure. Speed the connections between cities and suburban capitals and we might be able to distribute the wealth a little more evenly, and tackle the UK’s productivity issues. But it will require a very different approach to government.

Saving the planet and the community

Whether it’s a smart city or a suburban capital, cities have the potential to improve our wellbeing and our impact on the planet. What we need now is investment from the government, plus an educational drive to showcase their benefits.

The city is dead. Long live the city.

I appeared on Radio 4's Moral Maze this week as one of the witnesses giving evidence to the panel of guests. I confess I struggle to listen to this programme as it gives air time to some panellists who...[seeks polite way to say this]...whose moral frameworks do not align with my own. I'll leave it at that. But this time they all reigned it in a little and appearing on the show was good fun.The topic was the future of the city. In light of the current pandemic, the death of the high street, and the acceleration of remote working, should we all be abandoning cities for smaller towns and countryside living? My answer was a resounding 'no'. In fact, quite the opposite. I argued that if we are to address some of the major crises of our time: climate change, the ageing population, economic disruption, then we need more of us to be living in cities, not fewer.

Cities against Climate Change

This may sound counter-intuitive but you are likely to have a much lower carbon footprint living in Central London than you would living in the middle of the countryside. One might be literally greener but the city is far and away the more environmentally friendly choice.Why? For a start, your home is likely to be newer and better insulated - not least because there are likely to be other homes above and below it. The infrastructure and the tarmac around you stores heat, keeping temperatures in cities 1-3° warmer than the countryside, further reducing your investment in heating.When you travel in a city, the amenities are much closer by and you have a much greater chance of being able to travel by public transport. Getting to work, the shops, the pub, or a museum, you will expend a lot less energy.

Cities against ageing

The collapse in our birth rate means that our population is ageing even faster than we thought. In the UK we have been offsetting some of this trend through immigration. That is going to be a challenge in the face of Brexit and a weak economy. We need to find solutions to caring for our ageing population with a declining tax base. One of the ways to do that is to keep people self-sufficient for longer, and when they do need care, enable us to care for them more cost-effectively.Cities are the ideal place to do this. In a city, all the amenities can be close by. Public transport should enable people to get to whatever they need without access to a car or private transport service. If they do need door to door travel, taxis are relatively cheap.When people do need care, having them grouped in a city means care workers can get to them more easily and emit less carbon in the process.

Cities for the Economy

Cities are the cheapest place to serve citizens with utilities. The closer together people are, the more cost effective it is to provide water, waste services, electricity and connectivity. This is why many rural parts of the country still run on oil deliveries and septic tanks and have crap broadband.Cities are also cheaper places to provide a wider variety of public services, at least on a per-capita basis.  Put a park or museum in and it might immediately be accessible by hundreds of thousands of people. Likewise schools and hospitals.In tough times for the economy, as we are facing now, this becomes important.If we are to escape the economic doldrums, the dense nature of a city is also important. Densely-packed cities have higher economic productivity - especially when they are well connected with public transport. The bandwidth of being there, face to face, has value. As does the proximity of other creative souls, suppliers, partners and entrepreneurs.

Change the city to save it

None if this is to say that we should preserve cities as they are. Cities thrive on change and our cities need radical change if they are to be the vehicle to address the economic, ageing, and environmental crises facing us. They need new housing. They need better infrastructure for transport, energy, and water. We need to radically rethink our high streets as places of convergence not a retail monoculture.We need to adapt our cities to changing working patterns, building for a steady flow of people around the city not artificial peaks in morning and evening. We need to begin turning parking spaces over to living as we invest in car alternatives and (eventually) autonomous vehicles make city-centre parking largely unnecessary. We need to think about other ways to re-use space that might formerly have been offices, factories, or shops. Like farming, perhaps.We need to think about affordability, ensuring that city centres don't become a monoculture of another kind. We need to bring people of all ages back to the city centre to live, and we need to make it attractive and affordable for them to do so. City centres need to be clean, green, and safe.

Not just cities

I am not advocating for everyone to live in a city. Nor am I arguing for any type of coerced relocation as we may have seen in the past. We are going to need and want people living and working across the country for the foreseeable future.I am also not arguing for further economic centralisation around London. The UK's other great cities all have roles to play in tackling the challenges we face and we will fail to tackle them if we don't focus investment there as much as anywhere.But cities, and specifically large, densely-populated cities, evolved to meet today's needs, are a critical part of the answer to today's crises.

The distributed home

As our homes shrink, we are sharing more and more 'third spaces' as part of our 'distributed home'.The BBC has analysed the rapid growth of city centre living, putting numbers to the anecdotal evidence of growth provided by the forest of cranes across British cities, and the towers that spring up beneath them. City centre living in Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester is growing near or above 150% a year.This is a trend we should encourage and expand in the future, but to do so, I think we have to reassess what we expect a home to be.

Shrinking accommodation

Houses are shrinking. They have been since the 1970s. I don’t mean that the bricks dried out and shrivelled like a sponge. The houses we build now are significantly smaller than they were. Living rooms down 32%, kitchens 13%. bedrooms 10%. There are fewer bedrooms as well: down from an average of 3.53 to 2.95. We now have the smallest footprint for homes in the EU at under 100sqm.Despite this, we still cling to the idea of a home being something with all of these components. And of a certain size.The micro home/tiny house movement has boomed on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit actual sales probably don’t warrant the noise about them on YouTube and Instagram, where their clever, compact features and cute aesthetics have become a hit. Despite this the number of truly micro homes that we have built remains relatively low, with a huge amount of opposition from planners and campaigners.In 2015, the government introduced a minimum space standard of 37sqm for single occupancy and 50sqm for two bed homes, though this standard isn’t truly enforced and has been relaxed for re-purposed properties — typically converted offices.The space standard is not totally arbitrary. There is evidence that people need space and light for their mental health. We need to escape others sometimes, and we don’t want to be in claustrophobic spaces, squeezed between walls and furniture.But I think we need to keep those standards under review.

Shared services

Micro homes make most sense in a context where people are well served with other amenities, and despite the woes of some major restaurant chains, city centres are increasingly densely packed with quality ‘third space’. There are the ubiquitous coffee shops, from the boutique to the chain. There are the gyms, the private members clubs (much more affordable when your home doesn’t consume half your income), and actually the work spaces. The blending of home and work life in a positive way, as the formal office environment starts to break down, actually might make us feel less inclined to escape to our homes.We can think of all of these third spaces as extensions of our ‘distributed home’, with the space in which we sleep, wash, and dress just being a single component.

Reshaping the environment

The distributed home won’t work for everyone living in a city. When you’re young, single and at the start of your career, perhaps you need fewer opportunities for true isolation. As we age we naturally want more space, not just for kids, and we are inherently less flexible. But technology may start to offset some of the other space challenges.Firstly, materials may change. I am a little obsessed at the moment with the possibility of changing the materials from which we construct our world. Imagine if we could get the strength and other properties we need in furniture and appliances with drastically-reduced dimensions. Imagine how much space could be freed up, especially if these items could be collapsible. Truly micro homes (under 15sqm) rely on clever folding items but this requires the occupant to constantly reconfigure their homes for different times of day. This becomes much easier if the furniture reconfigures itself around you. Smart materials could fold and unfold themselves into a variety of shapes - sofa, bed, table — perhaps even cleaning themselves and changing their hardness for different circumstances, a stiff table becoming a soft bed.Secondly, a growing proportion of our physical environment will be virtual, with the advent of mixed reality and — perhaps — holographics, for those times when we’re not sporting a headset. Our physical environment becomes deeply mutable at this point. We can flatten the four walls to reveal any environment we wish. Ensconce ourselves in a game or just live in a virtual forest, beach or mountaintop. Now the distributed home isn’t just split across a city, it’s networked across the world.Those already worried about time spent gaming may be sceptical, despite the absence of any real evidence this causes harm. And it’s true, there is no substitute for physical space: as we pack our cities more densely, the demands on public planners to integrate and improve shared outdoor spaces get ever greater.But in the coming years we have to find places for people to live that they can afford and that suit their lifestyle: an experience culture inherently supports a smaller home with fewer goods in it, at lower cost to release cash for personal pursuits beyond the material. Perhaps the distributed home is the right thing for people at certain points in their lives. Perhaps we can engineer micro and distributed homes to be truly luxurious, even with a tiny footprint.

Building the Future Council

My recent post about the future council gained a lot of attention, so I thought I’d share more of the thinking that I’ve done so far. What might it look like when you re-orient a council around people and places, rather than services?This thinking started with a question from a council chief executive a few years ago, but was actually refined through work with a medium-large (£250m turnover) corporate. Despite being very different organisations on the outside, once you got under the skin their problems were very similar. All of this work combined now forms the Stratification framework that is part of the Applied Futurist’s Toolkit.

Fundamental units

The first thing to identify in the council’s case was that the fundamental unit of organisation was services. The whole organisation had been assembled by bolting services onto the side of the existing organisation, and even the radical transformations driven by austerity had not really changed that architecture. As long as it persisted, there would be massive ‘parallelism’ in the way the organisation operated, preventing efficiencies but more importantly, fragmenting data and adding friction to service, analysis and communication.As I wrote about in the last post, the first and most important step was to re-orient the organisation around the citizen rather than the service. But we also had to recognise that this didn’t cover everything: a significant proportion of the council’s work is also place-centric, with granularity ranging from a single bin, to a building, to a whole street or park.Hence we were left with two fundamental units that could be cross-indexed: people, and places.

Unifying the citizen interface

Unifying the customer interface

With the citizen at the centre of the organisation, it was clear that we needed to unify the customer interface. The multiple touchpoints of the old architecture were highly inefficient, creating confusion, cost, disparate data and a governance nightmare, with little oversight.A unified customer interface means a common written language style, with content written to the appropriate standard for the majority of the audience. It means ensuring that there is a single answer to each question, not multiple, conflicting answers. It means using a common design language to help those with limited English or poorer vision to understand information, whether presented in a face to face, written, digital or video context.A unified customer interface means a coherent view of that experience across communications channels, using insight from contact centres to drive digital development, and vice versa.Ultimately it led to the proposal of new internal agency, equipped with the skills and resource to handle these tasks, where previously responsibility had been distributed across multiple teams.

Making services more transparent

Creating coherent service units

Behind the unified communications layer sit the services, the core propositions of the council: education, public health, adult social care, environmental services, highways, revenue and benefits — obviously these will vary depending on the type of council.I don’t pretend to be an expert in the delivery of any of these services. But one thing was clear when looking at them and their interactions inside the organisation: it was hard for them to understand each other’s work and for leaders to really understand their performance.As organisations grow and develop over time their activities often become more complex on the inside and opaque from the outside. Complex isn’t inherently bad: these teams are dealing with challenging issues. But the lack of transparency makes many things harder: partnering with other teams, reporting success, analysing failure, inducting new staff.We created a template to help these teams revisit their understanding of their core processes, their inputs, outputs and key metrics so that the could be more easily communicated to others. Sort of a paper ‘API’, that described how you might interact with them. Ultimately, it would be good to turn paper into code.

Creating a common data layer

A common data layer

Underpinning the unified customer interface and more transparent interaction between services is a shared data layer. Once you acknowledge that there are only two fundamental units that the organisation deals with — three if you count numbers (finance) — it’s clear that the council needs many fewer software systems and databases than it has acquired under a service-oriented architecture (not this SOA).The realities of the current estate, data protection legislation, and security choices may mean that you don’t actually condense everything down to a handful of systems. But as a notional vision, a unified data store of people and places is valuable because of the business value it can drive. Most people have few interactions with their council, and those they do have are relatively mundane — even automatic. But for those people who need more intensive support, more coherent information can drive much more effective intervention: earlier and more targeted, meaning better for the citizen and cheaper for the council.

External API

External interface wrapper

The nature of the post-austerity council is that much of its work is commissioning, either to third parties or to its own services companies. Streamlining these interactions is less important than streamlining the customer interactions, but nonetheless valuable. Building a largely-digital wrapper that allows the two way flow of information for commissioning, payments, the sharing of data, and the monitoring of SLAs, would speed the flow of information right through the organisation, and ideally improve the delivery of services.

How smart does a vacuum cleaner need to be?

With my gadget-man hat on, I had a demo this week of the most spectacular vacuum cleaner. It arrived in an array of cases with multiple components and a trained demonstrator to walk me through it.

This is not the Rolls Royce of vacuum cleaners. That would imply conspicuous expenditure. This is more a boy scout in a BMW: beautifully engineered and prepared for anything.I’ll be writing up a full review of the Vorwerk VK200 over on The Loadout, but what struck me most about this system was its smarts. This is a highly intelligent vacuum cleaner.

Smarts in action

This was made clear at two points in the demonstration, one deliberate, one less so.The first occasion was in showing the transitions from carpet to hard floor. The cleaner head has ultrasonic sensors to not just detect this transition but to understand how deep the carpet might be and adjust the suction and profile accordingly.Impressive.The second occasion was when the unit started misbehaving. I felt for the demonstrator, having been in that situation. It’s uncomfortable. But I didn’t read too much into it: these are products with a 17–25 year lifespan. The worst is bound to happen in a demonstration.What surprised me was his response. Not “I’ll have to fix that,” but “I’ll have to reprogram that.” This is a vacuum cleaner smart enough to be fixable by plugging in a USB cable.

Ubiquity

The processing power required to support such capabilities is hardly spectacular by modern standards. But nonetheless it struck me that yet another formerly dumb item is now smart. Not just because it has a small digital brain but because it can sense its environment and respond.When you’re looking to the future, one of the critical things to understand is just how far and how fast the price or technology falls, and its accessibility increases. The more widely used and deployed a technology becomes (often a factor of price), the more shared knowledge there is about how to deploy it. This drives further application and the price falls again, continuing the cycle.The result is that we see technology in all sorts of applications where previously it may have seemed unrealistically expensive or complex to implement. Sometimes that’s frivolous — the WiFi Kettle being a good example — and sometimes that smarts is put to good use, as in the VK200.This ubiquitous application of technology — in all its forms — drives competition, often from unforeseen sources. People with a problem recognise a technology-driven solution and see that it can be constructed with relative ease. They then launch themselves into a market that may have seen little new competition in decades.Unless your peripheral vision is alert to incoming technologies and the challenges they might carry, your business is at serious risk.