Bill Gates once famously said:

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”

And he is right.

The speed of everything is changing - and the scale of interconnectedness and complexity is increasing - and so that makes it even more important to pick our heads up from day-to-day tasks and assess what is coming over the horizon.

At MarketsandMarkets (MnM), our Foresight Team focuses exactly on that: spotting long-term disruptions so companies understand how they’ll be impacted and can figure out what actions they should start taking today to be ready for tomorrow.

The aim of foresight is to challenge existing beliefs, values and behavior to avoid being trapped in a “business as usual” mindset.

To help with this, MnM has developed a framework built around .

If you look at the MnM Trends Wheel, you’ll notice it’s broken down into three “horizons”:

So why should businesses care about foresight?

Simply put, it pushes companies to look beyond short-term goals and adopt a long-term perspective.

A scientific study by René Rohrbeck & Ménès Etingue Kum found that “future-prepared” companies outperform their peers with 33% higher profitability and 200% higher growth. That’s a massive edge.

Strategic foresight helps organizations anticipate emerging trends and seize opportunities early. It gives them a competitive advantage by allowing them to understand the complex, unpredictable environments they operate in. They can better identify opportunities, anticipate risks, and build smarter, more resilient strategies.

What’s more, integrating foresight into a company’s culture encourages people to think ahead and spot new business possibilities — even ones outside their current models. By seeing change as an opportunity (instead of a threat), companies become more agile and ready to tackle the future.

While long term Mega Trends are important, our team and industry experts also look for weak signals (early signs of directional change) that could scale up to disrupt industries. Not only are weak signals the first hints of emerging trends or technologies, but they can also spark creative thinking. Companies can begin to think about new products, services, or strategies inspired by emerging possibilities. For example, in the early 2000s, people starting to share rides informally through online forums. It didn’t seem significant at the time, but it hinted at the later rise of the sharing economy and companies like Uber and Airbnb.

In MnM, we recently launched a study on Industries of the Future, covering over 150 high-impact future markets that could represent a staggering $35 trillion opportunity by 2035.

Our experts have analyzed more than 6,000 markets to pinpoint the dynamic, fast-growing sectors expected to drive profitability over the next decade. Much of this opportunity lies in tech-driven areas like Connected Devices, 5G/6G, and AI, but there’s also huge potential in markets shaped by the global energy transition and in an ageing society.

As weak signals grow and spread, they can become trends - visible patterns of directional change – or enablers. The latter are underlying forces or innovations that enable, accelerate, or shape new developments. For example, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision are enablers driving the rise of digital agents, which can reason, interact, and adapt intelligently to users and environments.

Finally, we look at how trends can combine to form mega trends or mega themes, which are global in scale, cross-industry and often interconnected. Some of the mega themes our team has been looking at include , where everything that moves in the future could be autonomous, as well as Connected Living, where everyday environments - like homes, workplaces, vehicles, and even cities - are becoming intelligently intertwined through networks of devices, sensors, and platforms.

On top of that, Foresighting should include assessment of the geopolitical landscape — especially in the new world order of tariff wars and rising uncertainty. In the automotive industry, for example, tariff wars can significantly increase the cost of imported parts and finished vehicles, leading to higher prices for consumers and squeezed profit margins for manufacturers. In the energy and power sector, the overall uncertainty can dampen long-term investment decisions in an industry (e.g. Hydrogen) where projects often require decades-long planning horizons.

At MnM, we believe that every disruption is inherently a source of game-changing business opportunities. But how these disruptions impact companies is very context-specific.

Foresight helps businesses understand how these changes could reshape their industries and, more importantly, how they can position themselves to capitalize on the shifts and drive growth.

In MnM we use a Macro-to-Micro approach that helps identifying large-scale global trends and their sub-trends to then identifying the specific implications of these trends for their industry..

Considering that the average lifespan of an S&P500 company has dropped from 61 years in the 1950s to under 20 years today, we see foresight as essential. It enables to build agile, resilient organizations that can navigate unexpected changes.