In Fall 2015, Institute for the Future researchers interviewed 31 different individuals, sets of business partners, and families who were currently or recently engaged in the platform economy, earning at least part of their living through apps and websites that coordinated their efforts in a very different way from conventional organizations. This report presents their voices, individually and through composite profiles, lightly edited for clarity.

The nature of work is undergoing a fundamental shift, one largely brought about by new technologies including but not limited to artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. In the process, jobs will be both eliminated and created. For the United States, this is something of a mixed blessing. With the world’s most innovative economy, the country is well positioned to exploit (in the best sense) the promise of new technologies and their applications. At the same time, it is painfully clear that American society is ill prepared for this technological transformation because educational opportunity and attainment vary widely and work is the basis for much of a citizen’s income, benefits, and, in many cases, self-esteem. The report of this Independent Task Force rightly focuses on the need to rebuild the links among work, opportunity, and economic security for Americans. It puts forward a number of policy prescriptions for government, business, educators, and nongovernmental institutions. Americans will need to reimagine their careers; the average worker will know over a dozen separate jobs during his or her lifetime. Citizens will also need to rethink education, jettisoning the notion of education as something largely completed before they enter the workforce. Instead, lifelong learning and periodic retraining will become the new normal. And Americans, together with government at every level, will need to restructure the relationship between jobs and benefits. With much of actual and projected job growth in part-time, contingent, or gig employment, it no longer makes sense to tie employment benefits such as retirement and sick leave to particular jobs. Rather, portable systems of employment benefits should be introduced that follow the individual from job to job.

During the past decade, research has shown that telework has become a go-to strategy for employers and employees in mitigating work-life conflicts, increasing workforce flexibility, and growing employee productivity and engagement. While the telework trend is increasing, many human capital executives are still confused over what to do about telework or how to enhance programs. Analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and culling current research in the field, this report provides guidance for executives to understand the shifts occurring in telework practices and to start conversations internally about the value and potential for telework. Best practices and lessons learned are also explored. Finally, recommendations are provided for executives thinking of implementing or enhancing telework initiatives to maximize program effectiveness.

Some say that artificial intelligence threatens to automate away all the work that people do. But what if there's a way to rethink the concept of "work" that not only makes humans essential, but allows them to take fuller advantage of their uniquely human abilities?

A mismatch between demand for talent and supply is threatening US competitiveness. Public policies, not just in conventional areas but also in areas such as foreign investment need to be reassessed.

RAPID advances in technology and the liberalization of public policy have shaped a world in which large companies face increasing performance pressure amidst sinking return on assets, intense competition, and changing workforce dynamics. Individuals are taking advantage of lowered barriers to market entry and commercialization to become creators in their own right. As a result, a new economic landscape is beginning to emerge in which a relatively few large, concentrated players will provide infrastructure, platforms, and services that support many fragmented, niche players. In this way, both large players and small will coexist and reinforce each other. Some parts of the economy will be more affected by fragmentation than others, and more quickly, but the fragmentation will be enduring rather than transitory. In this new landscape, much of the world’s economic value will be created by the relationships among participants. Therefore, it is less useful to look at any one company than to consider the dynamics that will develop among the large and small players. This changing landscape will have implications for companies and individuals. Large companies will likely play one of three roles in this new landscape: infrastructure providers, aggregation platforms, or agent businesses. Today’s large companies will need to assess whether the market for their core products or services is susceptible to fragmentation and choose where to focus in the future. The actions they take today can help to position themselves for the role they choose to play in the future. For individuals and small entities, the new landscape offers opportunities to transform the pressures of today into profitable new ventures.

In the face of increasing competition and declining return on assets, companies often turn to short-term, one-time initiatives that (temporarily) improve their bottom lines. While tactics such as cost-cutting may offer temporary relief, they don’t constitute a long-term strategy. We studied more than 75 companies to determine the key strategic operations differentiator and determined that to address increasing performance pressure, companies need to tap into the only resource with unlimited potential—their talent. On-the-job learning and talent development provide an effective and sustainable way to accelerate performance improvement at individual, team, organization, and ecosystem levels.

Some have voiced fears that artificial intelligence could replace humans altogether. But that isn’t likely. A more valuable approach may be to view machine and human intelligence as complementary, with each bringing its own strengths to the table.

In a world of uncertainty and mounting performance pressure, organizations face a significant challenge. On the one hand, more powerful and less loyal consumers demand more value; on the other, more powerful and less loyal workers demand higher compensation and a work environment that supports their development. In this environment, organizations need workers with passion to realize extreme sustained performance improvement. While much work has been done to understand and improve employee engagement, employee engagement is no longer enough. Times have changed. Worker passion—defined by three attributes rather than static skills that rapidly diminish over time—will be critical as we shift from a twentieth-century world characterized by scalable efficiency to a twenty-first-century world amplified by scalable learning. We must figure out how to thrive—and not simply survive—in this new uncertainty, and we believe that individuals with worker passion will be the key. Three attributes characterize worker passion: Commitment to Domain and Questing and Connecting dispositions. Commitment to Domain can be understood as a desire to have a lasting and increasing impact on a particular industry or function. Workers with the Questing disposition actively seek out challenges to rapidly improve their performance. Workers with the Connecting disposition seek deep interactions with others and build strong, trust-based relationships to gain new insight. Together these attributes define the “passion of the Explorer”—the worker passion that leads to extreme sustained performance improvement.