Business Magazines Peek into the Future

By Jennifer Hopfinger
March 27, 2006 01:52 PM

Business magazines report from the future this month - and the prospects for the next 10 to 20 years look exciting and full of promise.

Fast Company celebrated its 10th anniversary in March. While the magazine looks back at its decade in existence, including a gallery of its 102 covers to date and a brief telling of how the publication came to be, the bulk of the issue focuses on what's ahead in the decade to come. The cover story, "Fast 50," profiles "people in business, technology, government, the arts, and beyond who are writing the history of the next 10 years."

The issue takes a look at other trends that show where the business world is headed. For instance, the story, "The Population Hourglass," by Andrew Zolli, looks at the demographics of the future and the massive social changes it will bring. "Green Gets Going," by Chip Giller and David Roberts, examines how businesses are becoming increasingly environmentally conscious - and making money at it, while "Bulletproof," by Ramez Naam, reports on the amazing progress and potential of gene therapy. The dot-com crash may have been a bitter pill, writes Adam Penenberg in "Boom, Bust, and Beyond," but the tech sector is better off for it. Also, staffers predict six jobs that likely won't exist in 2016, while they study failed business ideas from the past 10 years that seem to be making a comeback.

Business 2.0 explores the ultimate frontier of the future - space - in its March cover story, "The Entrepreneur's Guide to the Galaxy." In a collection of stories, the magazine prepares readers for a liftoff into incredible new opportunities in a space business that may take off sooner than we think.

"The Apollo era was heroic, but beating the Soviets to the moon never provided a compelling economic reason to return. ... The shuttle and the international space station continued this record of dismal return on investment," reporter Chris Taylor writes. "Small wonder, then, that most private-sector investors have focused instead on more earthly pursuits. Only one thing will prod us into the cold, hard vacuum of space, and that's the prospect of earning cold, hard cash. Fortunately, there's now a lot of that to go around."

According to the magazine, "Worldwide government spending on space is soaring to $50 billion a year, a 25 percent jump over 2000. NASA represents only $16 billion of that total, but during the next 20 years, the U.S. space agency is likely to sign contracts totaling as much as $400 billion to launch a human mission to Mars."

Commercial spending on space applications has exceeded government spending since 1998 and at a rapidly widening rate ever since. "A critical mass of entrepreneurs - some with familiar names like Bezos and Branson - have been backing space-related companies for years. In the coming months, their efforts will reach blastoff stage (quite literally)."

The magazine looks at "new technologies that are opening up new possibilities" - from conceivable satellite businesses to more far-fetched suborbital tourism - and the companies jockeying for a position on the launch pad.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism