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Scan™ Services

Scan™ clients from diverse industries have access to a wide range of services to ensure that we can meet all their needs across functions and disciplines. We provide structured and customized Abstracts, Patterns, and Signals of Change that enable clients to select and combine knowledge easily and quickly to highlight crucial insights for the business need at hand, resulting in a clear road map of action steps to pursue.

Scan™ Research

Participation in Scan provides sponsors with access to past and current Scan research:

  • Abstracts
    Every month, Scan's global, multidisciplinary team provides 100 Abstracts interpreting events that indicate faint signals of change, discontinuities, inflection points, disruptive technologies, outliers, and unconventional wisdom across a comprehensive set of arenas that change can occur in. These arenas include consumer behavior, regulations/politics, organization processes, culture, public opinion, science, and technology.
  • Patterns
    Every month, Scan provides 12 Patterns—sorted and combined Abstracts that cross industries, regions, and disciplines—offering a robust and verifiable set of changes that will affect organizations.
  • Signals of Change
    Every month, Scan provides 6 Signals of Change—distilled and evaluated Patterns—offering actionable insights for clients across all industries, functions, and disciplines.
  • (Strategic) Synopses
    Every month, Scan provides a Synopsis of the Scan Meetings in Menlo Park, California, and Croydon, England. Each Synopsis Outline identifies the current month's Signals of Change and Patterns and highlights major developments of business relevance. The full Strategic Synopsis features additional information:

    • Signals of Change and Patterns feature a short summary and additional descriptions.
    • A sidebar provides information about what broad aspects of decision-making each topic will affect (for example, infrastructure, organization, talent, creation, and/or marketing).
    • The Scan Framework arranges the identified monthly Signals of Change and Patterns on a scale of urgency from short term to midterm to long term, and reflects the degree of uncertainty—from low uncertainty to high uncertainty—surrounding the topic.
    • The Framework also highlights the most relevant aspect of each topic, and provides direct links to the related documents.

Scan™ Meetings

We invite Scan sponsors to attend Scan meetings to participate with SBI researchers and other sponsors in the identification of new Patterns and Signals of Change using the monthly Abstract set. SBI will hold prescheduled meetings throughout the year at its headquarters and other locations around the world. Up to two representatives for each sponsor organization may attend each meeting on a space-available basis.

Scan Meeting Schedule

Customized Services

Our Scan team is also available to support our clients and individualize approaches and actionable insights relevant to specified goals. Individualized next steps include:

  • Scan™ Customized Workshops
    SBI facilitates two customized workshops for each client to optimize the use of Scan in the client's organization. The workshops include staff members from SBI, who prepare required materials and moderate the workshops to identify Abstracts, Patterns, and Signals of Change affecting the client's organization.
  • Scan™ Customized Signals
    SBI provides four Customized Signals to each client so that the client can make an informed triage decision about vital issues that the Scan workshops identify.

In addition, SBI's long-standing experience in project-based consulting can support identification and prioritization of client actions with a wide range of approaches and processes. Contact us to find out more about Customized Workshops, Customized Signals, and consulting projects.