Navigating New Horizons

The Future of Packaging team is building plans now for our next Future of Packaging Program, coming in 2022.

We stand at a moment of fast-emerging transformation. Broad forces in technology, society, economics, and the marketplace were already aligned to drive us to a changed world. The Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated those forces. Packaging can meet the challenge of this sweeping change if its leaders harness the power of foresight, understand emerging change, explore future challenges and opportunities, and concretize plans to arrive at a successful future. That future will look different, and succeeding in it requires Horizon 3 – transformational thinking.

Right now is the time to start.

What is the Future of Packaging?

The Future of Packaging (FOP) is a triennial multi-sponsor program that explores the long-term future of packaging with implications for action today. PTIS and Leading Futurists LLC have offered this program in collaboration since the late 1990s, serving dozens of organizations as sponsors, with many joining the program in multiple years. (Here is a brief slideshow about the program: About the Future of Packaging Program). And here is an FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions.

Executives from across the packaging sector, from raw materials suppliers to converters to CPGs and retailers, guided by packaging foresight experts, explore and discover emerging and future challenges and opportunities.

We are now offering our next program, to commence in early 2022. As you build into new opportunities for the 2020s in a changed world, the work of FOP is only more critical for packaging organizations.

A meeting of the minds

You’ll join with colleagues from other leading packaging sector organizations and explore how the marketplace is transforming. The FOP team will share forecasts and scenarios for the future impacting your interests, with a spirit of opportunity amidst challenge.

What’s the same this time, what’s different?

FOP will be like its seven predecessor programs, in that it brings together thought leaders and leading packaging executives to explore the future for and of the sector.

But it will also be different. We have passed through an unprecedented wave of change, and the focus now is on navigating a transformed marketplace. We see now how wild cards may be the norm and are ever more impactful – how do we deal with them? One key is preparedness and leadership.

Our promise is to equip you with the insights and ways of thinking so you can do that not just successfully, but so that you can thrive.

With so much uncertainty, what can you do now?

  • Start your journey to your future success by envisioning your preferred future
  • Build plans to withstand alternative possible futures. Assumptions of a return to pre-Covid normality and continuity with the past are dangerous
  • Build plans that are robust and successful against multiple post-pandemic outcomes

Or, wait until you know more, but that strategy will leave you playing catch up, and for most organizations that won’t be ideal or even sustainable

FOP – Navigating New Horizons will cover

The power and potential of:

  • A post-covid society and economy — legacies for packaging of the 2020 pandemic
  • Building a truly circular economy
  • AI and machine learning
  • Virtuality across work, play, commerce
  • Virtual work styles
  • Digital and smart everything
  • Retail and e-commerce prospects
  • Industry 4.0 – rescaling production, localization, demand economy, bio-based production
  • Society, culture, values, attitudes, and the generations
  • A new economics of family life
  • The global economic and political landscape
  • Packaging integrating with the supply chain – moving to Design-to-Value
  • Next Gen story telling
  • In depth global/regional consumer understanding and insights
  • Next Gen collaborations and what they provide

In sum, what is next for the world of packaging and how to get there

WHAT YOU WILL GET—The clearest available view of the future of packaging

  • Comprehensive analysis and forecasts for critical areas of change and opportunity for the packaging value chain.
  • Insights on emerging change in and for packaging across the value chain and marketplace
  • A look beyond current trends at the potential for Horizon 3, transformation change
  • Scenarios for the world packaging will serve in 2030

Here is a brief slideshow about the program: About the Future of Packaging Program.