By Futurist Thomas Frey
Why Empty Spaces Create Billion-Dollar Opportunities
Every unicorn startup, every breakthrough product, every industry-disrupting service traces its origins to someone asking one deceptively simple question: “What’s missing?” Not what exists that could be improved, but what doesn’t exist yet that should. The voids and empty spaces around us create stampedes once they can be defined and understood, generating entire industries and job-creating opportunities that didn’t exist before someone noticed the absence.
Our future is being formed by epiphanies happening inside the minds of cutting-edge entrepreneurs who’ve trained themselves to see what isn’t there. It’s counterintuitive—our brains evolved to notice what exists, not what’s absent. But the most valuable insights come from identifying the gaps nobody else has named yet.
By combining imagination with systematic observation, it’s not hard to develop a list of what’s missing in our lives—the kinds of things that once we have them, we’ll wonder how we ever lived without. Here are eighteen opportunities waiting for someone to notice them.
Continue reading… “The Most Profitable Question in Business: What’s Still Missing?”