What’s New – 6 June 2019

Athena triples her power in one fell swoop!

In probably the most important development release since Athena was born in September 2013, we have tripled her capabilities as follows:

Centre panel: a new mixed research method page allows you to instantly see driving forces on any topic. The associated radar chart and a word cloud allows you to switch view between the organizations, sectors, countries etc most influencing, or being influenced by emerging change. You can drill down at will.
Causes: you can immediately view the causes of change for any topic.
Solutions: you can instantly uncover potential, next practice solutions being worked on by others.

Netflix-style design: we’ve replaced the existing center panel grid with just four entry buttons above leading to Athena’s existing capabilities in image button form.

Other

Custom navigation: we’ve simplified the left-hand navigation to the vital few with a new Personalize button now allowing you access to Reports, Decisions, Members and Activities. This and the above changes have reduced page noise by ~60%.
Search speed: we’ve obtained a 3-fold increase in search speed with ability to view ten times more content at the same time. Unfortunately, the new software to make that happen needs a small change to your Boolean searches. You no longer should surround a wild-card asterisk with inverted commas.
Content extraction: we have added 3x more future keywords to Athena’s brain and will shortly add these to her sources too. We’ve also continued to clean up her forecast’s findings reducing human editing time and allowing us to do more with the same resources.
Trend Waves: you can now see how your interest topic looked one to four years back and track direction of the trend through the years as Athena saw them at the time.
Metrics: in most Metrics you can now add your own notes and save these to your own customized report.
Dashboard: you can now create your own Dashboard report of Metrics to include in your publications. This is in beta mode right now. We expect to improve on this in the coming months.

Hypothesis method: we’ve added a new hypothesis method to the Toolkit that can test your theories against our robot’s findings in a few minutes.
Other services: we’ve promoted our other services to be visible whenever you need, experts, workshop facilitators, keynote speeches and shallow and deep dive research.

Happy futuring,

The Shaping Tomorrow team