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It began with a cartoon - The Jetsons - and ended with a live ukulele performance. Along the way, we were advised to "embrace [our] own uniqueness" if we wanted to succeed in the world to come. Truly, this was the weirdest event ever staged by the London Business Forum. But it was highly thought-provoking too. And definitely a wake-up call for anyone in the audience aged over 30.

Our host, the Swedish futurist Magnus Lindkvist, was a tall man who gamboled on stage like a baby giraffe. He was wearing a kind of military uniform: a navy double-breasted jacket with brass buttons; tight-fighting navy trousers with a red stripe up each leg; and pointy boots. Clearly, this was someone unashamed of eccentricity. And indeed, for the following hour he would attempt to demonstrate that being boring is no longer an option, that businesses must show wild imagination if they are to retain their competitive advantage.

"Whenever we are asked to think about the future, we love thinking gadgets and science fiction, don't we?" Lindkvist asked, as we watched the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons playing on the screen behind him. "What will tomorrow's transportation be like? Oh, cars, flying around... What will tomorrow's mobile telephony be like? Well, you won't hold the device in your hand, it will be embedded in your mouth... The irony, the error when we think of the future this way is that we miss [vital] trends."

He pointed out that, since the 1960s, the most important sociological trend has arguably been the emancipation of women. And yet, when The Jetsons was broadcast, the idea of a woman having her own career, much less an independent income, was unusual. Similarly, there were no single households in The Jetsons and certainly no same-sex marriages. The cartoon was about a typical white-collar salaryman, the dutiful wife who spent all his money and their 2.2 kids. The Jetsons "looks like the 1960s but with flying saucers," Lindkwist said. In reality, he argued, "invisible trends always have a greater impact than visible ones."

A large arrow pointing downwards - this was Lindkwist's symbol for the world as it used to be. He called it "a portrait of power as it used to function, always coming from above... either by means of seniority, which is why an executive would always be older, or by power vested in someone by some kind of religious phenomenon."

The force changing this paradigm is "punk capitalism," Lindkvist said, in which "anybody can play and we want to challenge things." Punk music was all about challenging the establishment and reinventing what music could be, he reminded us. "It could be this big 'Fuck Off!' sign towards society." Equally, anybody could play punk music, because it was based in part on the idea that skill is oppression, and that "you should not prevent me from screaming into a microphone if I want to."

Punk capitalism is underpinned by a broader sociological trend, he added: the redistribution of wealth. In the 1960s, the majority of wealth was inherited but, by the 2000s, the majority of wealth was self-made. In the past, if you asked someone to imagine a millionaire, they would probably describe a fat man. Today, the archetypal millionaire could just as easily be a thin woman, since the number of female entrepreneurs is burgeoning in developed economies, and it's now far less expensive to eat well than to look good.

"The interesting thing is that we see all these new trends and gadgets which come from below," Lindkvist continued. That is to say, consumers are no longer accepting what's made available to them by all-powerful corporations but are demanding greater choice on their own terms. "Probably the best example [of this upward force] is the Internet... It wasn't the executives who said: 'Let's adopt this funky, cool, interesting new thing called the Internet.' It came from below."

We were raised as passive consumers. "You want financial news? Go to the Financial Times. You want a banking service? Go to the bank. You want apples? Go to the grocery store." Now, Lindkwist pointed out, we are in full control of our consumption. "I create my own financial news on my blog, I parallel-import apples because I don't like the ones at my grocery store... We create our own alternatives. That's the other side of punk-capitalism: to challenge things and to do it ourselves. Anybody can play."

As the arrow of power begins to point upward, so established companies must change the way they operate. This dawned on Scandinavian Airlines, Lindkvist said, when he recently asked them: "Who is your future competitor?" "They started saying things such as RyanAir, British Airways and so on," he recalled. "So I showed them one of my friend's companies in Atlanta, Georgia, called 'Mile-High Atlanta'." As its name suggests, this tiny airline charters half-hour sessions in light aircraft containing double beds. "With a partner of your choice, you can spend the time watching the view or other things," Linkvist reported. "He assures me the curtains to the cockpit remain closed. If they're open it becomes more expensive. That service is called 'Voyeur'." The point of the story is that even in the most established industries, you have to be wary of the many tiny competitors who seem insignificant but who, in aggregate, could seriously erode your market share.

The acronym of the new paradigm is BANG, Lindkvist said. This stands for Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes - all the things that canny hackers feel able to manipulate. "Bits was only the first part of the movement - being able to manipulate media: sound, text. Now we see people can manipulate atoms with the same ease."

He called an image onto the screen of a machine about the size and shape of a microwave oven - a so-called "3D printer". Devices like this, which can quickly mill solid objects based on instructions from computer-aided design software, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars only a few years ago. Now you can buy one called the Desktop Factory for $4,995.

"With this, you can with the same ease you use Microsoft Word today, sit and design something and print it out, such as a spare part for your car," Lindkvist pointed out. He added that when he asked the manufacturers how long it would be before their machinery could print circuitry to order, they told him within 10 years. "That was a year ago," Lindkvist said, "so within four to nine years, everyone in here could be printing their own remote control, their own cell phone... products with a market of one."

Neurons are next on the hackers' hit-list, he said. We now know that depression is caused, at least in part, by chemical imbalances. "So what happens when we have this hacking generation tapping into creativity-inducing drugs that will alter the way your brain can work, and the type of thoughts being generated?" If this sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that "we're already doing it, some of us, by drinking Red Bull in order to think better."

Meanwhile, genetic engineering is already steaming ahead. "The human genome has already been mapped and is available for free," Lindkvist pointed out. "Most of us don't know what to do with that, but we wouldn't know what to do with a java script either. But some people - clever hackers - know what to do. What happens when they start hacking genes?"

Instinctively, we're troubled by this prospect, but then so are our grandparents when we fiddle with their electronic gadgets. Our response to the idea of tampering with genes is often "Aargh! Don't do that, something bad will happen!" Lindkvist said. "But for people growing up [the response is] 'Of course we should. Of course we should tailor-make healthcare and so on. Of course we should pimp our own drugs... Of course we should gene-scan unborn children. It's natural now.'"

The future is about precision consumption. It means: "I don't have to settle for someone else's choice, I can get exactly what I want." Citing an anonymous source, Lindkvist suggested that while the 20th Century was about sorting out supply, the 21st Century would be about sorting out demand. Those who generate the most value in this abundant environment will be those who help the customer to find exactly what they're looking for in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost - hence the stellar growth of Google.

Time is fast becoming our most precious commodity. So, whatever you sell, the future of your business will depend on how you "design your customer's time" in a better way - by enriching it or by saving it, to a greater degree than your competitors.

In turn, this requires a new corporate approach to research and development, as companies are forced to look outside their walls for ideas and for help with rapid time-to-market. "R&D should stand for rip-off and duplicate," Lindkvist suggested. He added that a vital piece of advice for aspiring innovators of the future was to be found in the report of the 9/11 Commission, which said: "It is crucial to find a way or routinizing, even bureaucratising the exercise of imagination."

"We have to embrace our own uniqueness," he concluded. "You shouldn't necessarily go to business school and become like other people. You shouldn't necessarily read the same books. You should start doing strange things..." And what better way to illustrate this point than by urging us to sing along to Blitzkrieg Bop, the Ramones' 1976 punk anthem, while he played it on the ukulele?

Lindkvist strummed and sung. We bopped along uneasily. But the point was made: what seems weird today will seem commonplace tomorrow, so if you want everybody to buy your products or services in the future then you have to start behaving imaginatively today.