In Creative Nursing 2012 we studied partnerships: working relationships that promote the very best care, within settings that foster mutuality and excellence in practice. In 2013 we begin a Year of Innovation. To reiterate how I described our 2013 publication year in the final 2012 issue of Creative Nursing, our vision is that our journal's readers will become thought leaders about the nursing profession of the future-the shape of our practice, the forms of our discourse, and the new skills that will be needed to move us to a position of anticipating instead of simply reacting to change.In this first issue for 2013 our guest editor, futurist Joel Barker, proposes an innovative first step in addressing the future systematically: "strategic exploration-what you do before you plan." One way to think about this exploration is "scouting the future," emphasizing the attributes shared by expert scouts of the American West: quickness, thoughtful sampling, and an ability to recognize which qualitative information will enhance the leader's decision making. Monitoring of trends, innovations, and paradigm shifts, along with the use of specific tools, will give thoughtful, future-oriented nursing professionals the information needed to assess the impact of impending changes and understand their potential long-term consequences, in order to have intelligent, meaningful engagement in developing and using new strategies to improve patient care and quality of life.A significant, frightening trend that nurses are positioned to address is the soaring incidence of dementia worldwide. Allison Kostrzewa, a neuroscience nurse at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, advocates for a new paradigm of palliation in the care of these terminally ill patients. Florida Atlantic University nursing professors Marguerite Purnell and Bernadette Lange exemplify Joel Barker's concept of scouting the future in describing the experiences of a pioneering group of graduate students in a newly designed advanced holistic nursing program, who embarked on what they came to call a Covered Wagon Journey. And Letty Piper, a nursing faculty member in Pennsylvania, expands the metaphor in discussing the nurse navigator role; she states, "The role of nurses is to assist patients in adapting to their illness-to guide them on the path back to equilibrium."A trend that has a significant impact on the day-to-day practice of many nurses is the proliferation in the number and complexity of research studies in which our patients are formal or potential enrollees. In "Participant Withdrawal: Challenges and Practical Solutions on Recruitment and Retention in Clinical Trials," Niloufar Hadidi, a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, discusses the practical and ethical challenges inherent in conducting research on patients. Dr. Hadidi states, "As researchers and clinicians, our intention is to treat human beings-to contribute to their overall health and well-being-and thus we must balance caring with maintaining integrity of data."Advances in technology have had long-term consequences for the way we communicate with each other and with our patients and their families. Western Carolina University nursing professors Sharon Metcalfe and Amy Putnam are concerned that "we will become a silent profession, with limited verbal communication in our workplaces, homes, and personal lives." In "The Net Generation of Nursing: Keeping Empathetic Communication Alive," they discuss the impact of technology on care planning and the nursing process, the silent language of non-verbal cues in learning and conveying empathy, and the challenges of designing and implementing nursing curricula for a generation that "has never known a time when the Internet has not been a major presence in our lives. …