‘Understanding the future is also about knowing how to blend and blur past and present words, ideas and insights in ways that define and drive future opportunity,’ says The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Chris Sanderson.
‘We refer to it as ‘calling the future’ as in creating frameworks, building data sets and contextualising words and phrases that encapsulate a new sector rising, a disruptor brand emerging or a consumer group challenging the status-quo.’
Consider trends such as Bleisure, Phygital and Longevity.
We called the future of Bleisure as far back as 2008 (indeed, we coined the term), nailed Phygital as a category changer in 2011 and reported on Longevity as a cross-sector disruptor in 2013.
Bleisure
Phygital
We even coined terms such as The Optimised Self and Resilience Culture in 2015 and 2019, respectively, when both were niche concepts sitting far down the corporate mainstream’s profit and positioning agendas – if they sat on them at all!
Now the biohacking market – whereby we can optimise our body’s performance by artificial and supplementary enhancement – is set to rise to $56bn by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights.
And the UK government – never a body to be on trend – now issues its yearly Annual Statement on National Resilience, as the word ‘resilience’ itself becomes one of the most prominent of 2026 across all categories – from climate change and mental health to household products and HR manifestos.
And, finally, we come to longevity – a word as old as the Romans themselves – but now a category and an industry that Markntel Advisor predicts will grow to $69.3bn by 2032, despite the fact that it hardly figured as growth market opportunity less than a decade ago.
Our point? When it comes to the future, portmanteau words and pre-zeitgeist phrases matter. This is how investments start and where profits catapult from – a word that’s called out before its time, a concept or portmanteau phrase created to encapsulate that moment when innovators and early adapters become societal disruptors. This is what we do at The Future Laboratory: call the future out, name the concepts, define the markets – and do so before they go mainstream.
As Sanderson says, ‘We do this by calling out the future when it’s still upstream – working with innovators, early adopters, experts and cultural disruptors – to ensure that you’re hearing it before it flows too far into the mainstream, and becomes too competitive to invest in. Imagine if you invested when we called it first – Bleisure, Phygital, Longevity – where would you be now?’
Longevity