Better and Faster: How To Hunt For Trends

We’ve been avid followers of trendhunter.com for years so we were psyched to get this copy of Better and Faster: The Proven Path To Unstoppable Ideas by their CEO Jeremy Gutsche. As you can see, we typically hunt for trends over coffee, though we know the french press has been outstripped by pour-overs on the trend front these days.

Anyway, the book is a phenomenal read for figuring out what the next big thing is in any industry. There’s not a formula per se, but Gutsche gives you a rubric – essentially, once you get yourself into hunter mentality, there are six potential ways to look for patterns on which you can capitalize:

• Convergence
• Divergence
• Cyclicality
• Redirection
• Reduction
• Acceleration

The book is full of case studies of successful applications of each of these principles, and the latter chapters provide industry-specific ways to strategically look toward the future.

After reading this book, we found ourselves raring to go – we recommend it before sitting down to do any strategic brainstorming especially if you feel like you’re tapdancing all around the next big thing and just not hitting it, as the book provides just enough structure to get you there without being overly rote and formal and forcing you into one of those idea-generation processes that stifles creativity – Gutsche’s foundations here are much more fostering when it comes to idea generation, selection and refinement.