BSR Insight | The Future of Well-Being: Cities as Living Laboratories
“Urban wilderness is increasingly at the forefront of change.” These opening remarks at the Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) annual Health Horizons conference last week captured the notion that cities are living laboratories where ideas, imagination, and people gather to find solutions to resource constraints and global imbalances threatening the well-being of people and the planet.
IFTF presented its “Map of the Decade: Ecosystems of Well-Being,” a tool that describes the forces shaping the future of well-being not as individual experiences, but as “interconnected ecosystems.” These forces, which IFTF believes will shape health and health care in the next decade, are:
- Optimizing: maximizing quality, not just length, of life
- Participatory: co-creating conditions that produce well-being
- Anticipatory: previewing future states to inform well-being
- Adaptive: generating flexible responses that reshape well-being
Business leaders can engage with this idea by imagining how these issues will unfold where their organization operates, and identifying how their industries and markets can create new practices for well-being.
About the Author(s)
Linda Hwang, Former Manager, Research
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