Key Links

• Get inspired. Check out more about the future at www.InspireTheFuture.com.  

What is retrofuturism? The future as seen from the past? The past as seen from the future? Or perhaps just nostalgia for a time when innovation was looked on with romance and optimism. In nearly every aspect, the world today is a better than at any other time in human history. And our future? Our future is in the hands of today’s youth …

The Retrofuturist Chronicles center on a 12-year-old girl named Miranda who is affable and bright but disempowered because of her age. Each episode begins with Miranda expressing concerns about something in her life. 

In turn, those concerns always remind Miranda’s kind-of-crazy retrofuturist spinster Aunt Natalie of some extraordinary absurdist exploit that she’s had. Aunt Natalie’s tall tales are never constrained by time, place, logic, or even laws of physics. She often invokes historic people and incidents and makes outrageous claims. But she inspires Miranda with fantastic tales of past innovations that have just enough truth in them to be intriguing and uplifting.

Our host, SAP’s Global Vice President of Marketing for the Intelligent Enterprise and Industries, Helen Dwight, provides commentary at the conclusion of each story, separating the patently nonsensical from the nearly unbelievable reality.

Finally, we’re joined by SAP’s Futurist Martin Wezowski and VP of Industries Pradeep Amladi who, together, explore the future of innovation, industry by industry.

Produced by SAP. 

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New season coming early 2021!

Key Links

• Get inspired. Check out more about the future for the consumer products industry at www.inspirethefuture.com/consumer-products.

Twelve-year-old Miranda looks to the future with trepidation. On the verge of maturity, she enjoys the new-found freedom of being able to make some of her own choices. However, making even small decisions at that age can be intimidating and facing an undetermined future can be overwhelming. 

Recently, Miranda has been staying with her beloved Aunt Natalie, who always has a great story to tell and a taste for adventure. Aunt Natalie claims to belong to a secret sisterhood of retrofuturist innovators called CRISIS. As you will learn, retrofuturism examines how the past imagined the future, and how the future can be informed by the past.

In this episode, Miranda decides to become a social media influencer. This prompts Aunt Natalie to tell how the secret sisterhood to which she belongs once spearheaded a rescue mission to Antarctica to find a group of researchers who got lost looking for the lost city of the Elder Things. The rescuers included a waddle of 300 penguins.

The episode concludes with SAP executives discussing how online shopping and social media have impacted the consumer products industry. And how all of these things ultimately are about two subcategories: your being the protagonist of your own innovation story, which is your purpose, and how consumer products companies build lasting relationships in the market.

Produced by SAP.

Follow us on Twitter

New season coming early 2021! 

Key Links

• Get inspired. Check out more about the future for the consumer products industry at www.inspirethefuture.com/consumer-products.

In this episode, young Miranda finds herself upset due to a group robotics project that seems to be in jeopardy due to lack of follow-through on the part of her teammates, only to learn that they had not let her down after all. This is doubly important to Miranda as the “project” concerns someone dear to her. 

In an odd twist (pun intended) in our tale, Miranda’s struggles with this robotics project triggers Aunt Natalie’s memories of a battle for pretzel supremacy, where (let’s be honest), the real winners were the pretzel-munching public. Keep in mind that Aunt Natalie’s story took place in a golden age, well before the Atkins diet and its global war on carbohydrates.

In addition to the project not being in jeopardy, Aunt Natalie takes the opportunity to teach her niece an important life lesson: Sometimes group projects are a pain, but when you have the right people all working toward the same goal, the results can be amazing.

The episode concludes with SAP executives discussing how innovation often requires more than the implementation of new technology and software; it requires an enterprise dedication to doing things differently.

Produced by SAP. 

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New season coming early 2021!