Jeremy Gutsche

History

Gutsche was born in Calgary, Alberta where he was raised to be an entrepreneur. In his book, Better and Faster, he describes an upbringing that involved scouring hundreds of magazines each month with his father, in the search of ideas they would turn into prototypes and inventions. This activity would later lead to the concept behind Trend Hunter, a crowdsourced community that enables people to similarly scour for ideas to find inspiration.

Prior to starting Trend Hunter, Jeremy Gutsche was a management consultant with the Monitor Group and was Capital One's Director of Upmarket in Canada. At Capital One, he led his team to grow a $1 billion business.

Education

In 2000, Gutsche graduated with a BCom (With Distinction) in Finance from the University of Calgary, which would later award him Graduate of the Last Decade. In 2005, completed his Chartered Financial Analyst designation and graduated with an MBA from Queen's University. In the year that followed, he studied innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Trend Hunter

In 2006, Gutsche launched Trend Hunter, an online trend community and trend research firm. The research is crowdsourced by a global network of 156,000 contributors who identify and submit emerging ideas as articles. Staff editors curate the most compelling articles for editing before publishing the articles on the front page. The company then uses big data and statistics from its audience to score each idea on metrics such as popularity, activity, freshness and demographics. The purpose is to use the wisdom of the crowd to identify opportunities and patterns.

Although many of Trend Hunter's articles are provided free on the website, premium research requires a subscription. Certain brands like Samsung, Kellogg's, Nestle and Crayola pay for a Trend Hunter Dedicated Advisors to help them use big data to accelerate research.

By August 2012, the company passed one billion total page views. In the third quarter of 2014 TrendHunter.com surpassed two billion page views.

Keynote speaking

Jeremy Gutsche is an innovation keynote speaker with roughly 400 client dates since 2007. His speaking categories relate to: creating a culture of innovation, thriving through chaos, implementing change and idea generation. His early work was based on his book, Exploiting Chaos. The most popular video of this speech received over 1,000,000 views on YouTube. His latest keynote speech, ‘Better and Faster,’ is based on his second book. As a video, the speech received over 4,000,000 views on YouTube.

Books

Gutsche's first book, Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change, is a Gotham title (a Penguin Group subsidiary). Exploiting Chaos was released in September, 2009. The book was named one of Inc Magazine's Best Books for Business Owners and ranked #1 Most Popular at 800 CEO Read from September to December 2009. In paperback, it is published in seven languages, including Cantonese, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Korean, and English. In 2012, Gutsche re-released Exploiting Chaos as an interactive video ebook.

Gutsche’s second book, Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas, was a New York Times Best Seller and a CEO Read Select pick . The book is intended to help readers get 'better' at adapting to change and 'faster' at finding opportunity. It is structured in three parts with the first part illustrating the neurological traps that hold successful people back. The second part provides six patterns of opportunity, suggesting where to look for ideas. The third part provides a framework about the pace of change and how to build a plan for taking advantage of change. The book was released in March, 2015.