Any kind of work a company does on the future ultimately serves the purpose of recognizing future markets at an early stage, exploring and exploiting them.
 
In order for your company to remain successful in the future, you need to be active in future markets – now, and more importantly, in the future.
 
There are good reasons why many leading large and medium sized companies have their own teams, which work together with external future experts to professionally identify and analyze future markets.
 
A significant number of entrepreneurs and managers who consciously take time out of their daily business for a few hours or days, report that finally concentrating on their key entrepreneurial task again gives them a strong feeling of enjoyment and satisfaction.

A future market is a solution for important future problems or desires of certain people, which develops or will generate significantly more revenue.

Examples of future markets include: exoskeletons for the debilitated, contact lens displays for the police, holistic long term personal financial planning advice for managers or individual medication for those seriously interested in their health.

The difference between a future market and a future trend or future technology is that one can additionally imagine which concrete solution people would actually be prepared to pay for and how you can make a profit out of it. 

You need to answer three key questions in the early recognition, exploration and exploitation of future markets:

• Are your existing markets future markets?
  If there is room for doubt, then you need to adjust your products, services and business model to turn your existing markets into future markets. One frequently waits too long, making the approaching crisis even more severe and threatening.

• Which are your upcoming future markets?
  You need to know and evaluate the future markets that are developing in your competence field, in order to be able to systematically develop the promising markets and compensate for those which will cease to exist. Anyone who now manufactures products out of plastic and metal should already be looking at additive fabrication and "3D-printers". Anyone who is in the conference business, should be investigating telepresence technologies now rather than later.

• Which are your destructive future markets?
  You need to know and evaluate those future markets which generally develop outside of your own business area, yet are possibly threatening to you in order to consciously prepare for the challenge and, if possible, even profit from it. When a well-known manufacturer of shavers was keeping a look out for future markets, they discovered the future factor "photonics" and discovered that a laser shaver could replace shavers using razor blades. After they had got over their initial fears, they even found a manufacturer that was working on exactly this threat and took a stake in the company. The threat thus became an opportunity.