Trends Identified

Contextual Workspace – Driving Insights And Decisions
The need for faster and better innovation and improved productivity, and the shift towards high-value work will drive the evolution of improved workspaces. They will allow professionals to quickly create (virtual) project teams according to the project needs and the individual capabilities across any structural and organizational hierarchy. For now, siloed data sources, classical hierarchies and missing innovation and knowledge cultures are barriers for a more value- and project-driven work. Knowledge work will be more consumer like with contextual interfaces and new, social and open collaboration infrastructures and individuals will be able to identify the right people across all silos, networking with them more easily. The user experience will be a seamless one across devices, locations, and context. Machine learning based technologies such as immersive technologies, digital assistants and conversational bots will help with the handling, extraction and representation of data and generate new insights based on the individual roles and projects. Information and recommendations will be presented in a context- sensitive way and increase the user efficiency. The individualization of information will be used to understand knowledge and project management needs, and to support learning on the level of teams and individuals. Security and identity and access of information will be organized people-centric, to make it easier to get to information resources. Vendors are now bundling work stream collaboration with their productivity and unified communications products, which will a push towards even more unified and smart solutions. Contextual workspace will start around challenge-oriented and self-organizing project teams in research, innovation, design and engineering, and education as well as any knowledge and research heavy tasks and real-time data work such as pricing, logistics, supply-chains, maintenance etc.
2018
Trend Report 2018 - Emerging Technology Trends
SAP
CEOs will work hard to become more inclusive leaders — or leave.
The new generation of workers expects a different kind of leadership and has now reached the critical mass where their opinion is corporate law. “We were primarily led by 'my way or the highway' type leaders and that does not work with this environment,” says Carla Harris, vice chairman and managing director at Morgan Stanley. “I think you're going to see more leaders looking for leadership development or leadership guidance on how to be more collaborative, how to spur innovation, how to teach people how to fail and how to innovate. I think you're going to see far more money spent on speakers and resources around that.” Not immediately, but over time executives who don’t make that effort and pivot will be pushed out, she warns.
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
You’ll learn the term “fallen angels.”
The new subprime crisis will come from America’s corporate debt, especially in BBB-rated companies, warns Danielle DiMartino Booth, author of "Fed Up." Those companies’ combined debt is now north of $3 trillion, just like the subprime loans market back in 2007, she points out. “I think that the term ‘fallen angel’ is going to come into the accepted vernacular for investors, and that means when a company crosses from investment grade into being junk,” she explains.
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Dwindling resources
The new tech and devices that characterise the 21st Century all require rare earth metals to make – an average smartphone has over 60 “ingredients”. That’s putting a strain on the planet’s natural resources: in China, where 90% of the world’s rare earth metals are found, it’s estimated that its mines will run out in the next two decades – and good substitutes for those materials are hard to come by.
2017
10 grand challenges we’ll face by 2050
The BBC
Sustainable resource management and harvesting
The new technologies – particularly sensors, data analytics, AI, drones, robots and synthetic biology – could usher in a new era for the sustainable management and harvesting of forest and fish resources. Together, these tools could allow resource managers and government overseers to monitor ecosystem and resource health, to develop more ecological planting and harvesting strategies, and to quickly identify and implement targeted interventions. Being able to see the whole system would improve planning, investment and public accountability.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
New organizational structures
The new technologies, new work arrangements and other global change drivers are likely to generate new kinds of organizations. For instance, one can imagine a service corporation where all of the services are provided by AI with fewer human employees. A growing number of modern corporations will have a small management team that contracts out all functions through the entire product life cycle. It is possible that unorganized skilled workers will find people with complementary skills and create informal, temporary teams to take advantage of an opportunity to work together virtually to deliver a good or service.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
The New Uncertain Normal for Leadership in Politics, Public Service and Corporates. The Need to Think the Unthinkable.
The New Uncertain Normal for Leadership in Politics, Public Service and Corporates. The Need to Think the Unthinkable.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Beyond marketing: Experience reimagined
The new world of marketing is personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Increasingly, this world is orchestrated not by outside parties but by chief marketing officers partnering with their technology organizations to bring control of the human experience back in-house. Together, CMOs and CIOs are building an arsenal of experience-focused marketing tools that are powered by emerging technology. Their goal is to transform marketing from a customer acquisition-focused activity to one that enables a superb human experience, grounded in data. In experiential marketing, companies treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behaviors. Analytics and cognitive capabilities illuminate the context of customers’ needs and desires, and determine the optimal way to engage with them. Experience management tools tailor content and identify the best method of delivery across physical and digital touchpoints, bringing us closer to truly unique engagement with each and every human.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Physics: 'Within a decade, we'll know what dark matter is'
The next 25 years will see fundamental advances in our understanding of the underlying structure of matter and of the universe. At the moment, we have successful descriptions of both, but we have open questions. For example, why do particles of matter have mass and what is the dark matter that provides most of the matter in the universe? I am optimistic that the answer to the mass question will be found within a few years, whether or not it is the mythical Higgs boson, and believe that the answer to the dark matter question will be found within a decade. Key roles in answering these questions will be made by experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider, which started operations in earnest last year and is expected to run for most of the next 20 years; others will be played by astrophysical searches for dark matter and cosmological observations such as those from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. Many theoretical proposals for answering these questions invoke new principles in physics, such as the existence of additional dimensions of space or a "supersymmetry" between the constituents of matter and the forces between them, and we will discover whether these ideas are useful for physics. Both these ideas play roles in string theory, the best guess we have for a complete theory of all the fundamental forces including gravity. Will string theory be pinned down within 20 years? My crystal ball is cloudy on this point, but I am sure that we physicists will have an exciting time trying to find out.
2011
20 predictions for the next 25 years
The Guardian
Additive Manufacturing
The next frontier in manufacturing
2017
Top 50 Emerging Technologies 2017
Frost & Sullivan