skills/horizon-scan/SKILL.md

---
name: horizon-scan
description: Discover overlooked industries, growth bottlenecks, and emerging economic opportunities through a structured global horizon scan. Use for candidate discovery and shortlisting before detailed forecasting.
---

# Opportunity scan

Read [operating instructions](../horizon-forecast/references/operating-instructions.md) and stages 1–4 of [research procedure](../horizon-forecast/references/research-procedure.md). If delegated, use the director's established scope and produce only the assigned memo. If standalone, write a brief plan before research and use global 5–10-year defaults unless instructed otherwise.

1. Define the relevant buyer, activity, and market boundary. For a broad scan, seek 12–20 distinct segments; cover multiple economic drivers, regions, mundane services, and physical complements. Adapt the count to evidence and scope.
2. For each candidate, identify a causal growth mechanism, current evidence, a plausible inflection, a binding constraint, and an observable contrary signal. Label speculative candidates.
3. Seek overlooked complements of popular trends and transformations inside large existing industries. Distinguish low attention from low economic viability using a concrete comparator.
4. Record a first- and second-order dependency map. Prioritize material tangents; maintain a watchlist for distant weak signals.
5. Screen for paid demand, practical deployment within the horizon, economically meaningful scale, and distinctness from overlapping candidates. Use a known mature comparator to prevent a list comprised solely of exciting narratives.
6. Return candidate cards, evidence URLs and dates, scope exclusions, a shortlist with research priorities, and discarded hypotheses with reasons. A preliminary shortlist is not a validated growth ranking; route full forecasts to [horizon-forecast](../horizon-forecast/SKILL.md).

Card fields: segment; geography; buyer/budget; growth mechanism; observed signal; timing trigger; bottleneck; overlookedness comparator; best counterargument; baseline availability; evidence confidence; next decisive check.