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Motivation

2020 Media Futures is an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-platform Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how our firms and organizations can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

2020 Media Futures brings together researchers, creators, policymakers and other professionals representing the cultural and digital media industries to support these “Creative Cluster” industries, as outlined by the project funder, Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC)(external link):
  • Book
  • Film
  • Interactive Digital Media
  • Magazine
  • Television
  • Music
Across this entire spectrum an interconnected array of changes, driven in large measure by the uptake of new technologies, is rapidly altering the structure, dynamics, and traditional patterns of consumption, production, and business activity in the Cluster. The result is a new set of patterns representing serious challenges and unprecedented opportunities, including:
  • Disintermediation
  • Disruption of value chains
  • Migration of advertisers
  • Downloading and file sharing
  • Proliferation of screens
  • Abundance of consumer choice
  • Blurring of boundaries
  • New forms of interactivity
  • Evolving user demands
  • Business model innovation
These patterns are evolving and in many cases accelerating, through increasing interactions between the various forces and agents in the system.

The purpose of the 2020 Media Futures project is to build capacity and drive innovation in Ontario’s Creative Cluster by helping companies and organizations to ‘future-proof’ themselves, preparing for opportunities and challenges brought on by the rapid evolution of media.

Through the practice of “strategic foresight,” a highly collaborative and participatory process of experiential learning, the project will enable stakeholders to better manage uncertainty through deeper understanding and anticipation of change, leading Cluster companies to make improved strategic decisions and to develop new initiatives, models, alliances and relationships.

This project aims to provide Ontario’s cultural media companies with:
  • Methods for better understanding the challenges the future may bring, and for managing increased levels of uncertainty
  • Opportunities, ways and means to gather and develop critical knowledge, structures and ideas in support of strategic planning and partnering
  • Insights together with avenues to articulate and share these, to positively influence policy and market conditions.