Trends Identified
Next-Gen Workforce
The retirement of baby boomers and the growth in the millennial workforce requires organizations to create new incentives to attract, develop, and retain a more competitive and flexible labor pool.
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
The riddle of work and income
The revolution of work has long been under discussion, and the industrial world is on the brink of the unknown. The rapid progress of technology that has led to digitisation, robotisation, artificial intelligence and automation is modifying almost all areas of known activity. However, there is currently no clarity as to what the revolution of work ultimately means. Public debate often addresses the significant diminishing of work and traditional workplaces while, on the other hand, welcoming the flourishing of new types of working methods and the creation of workplaces with the aid of new technologies.
2017
Megatrends 2017
Finland, The Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra
The death of ageing
The rich and powerful have long dreamt of the death of ageing, if not of outright immortality. There is now serious money in it. Anti-ageing startup Unity Biotechnology raised US$116 million in 2016 from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and others to further its research in rejuvenation therapy and prevention of senescence (that is, wear and tear with age). Google-backed biotechnology company Calico and biopharmaceutical company AbbVie invested US$250 million each in 2014 to jointly develop drugs targeting diseases associated with old age.
2017
Foresigth
Singapore, The Centre for Strategic Futures
The rise of Asia continues
The rise of Asia is not a new phenomenon; the rise of Japan and South Korea has been witnessed over the second half of the 20th century. The start of the new millennium saw another boom, with many Asian economies recording high growth rates that took their share of global GDP from 26% to 32% between 2000 and 2014. Our extended long-term forecasts suggest that Asia’s rise will continue up to 2050—not quite at the same pace, but by 2050 it will account for 53% of global GDP.
2015
Long-term macroeconomic forecasts Key trends to 2050
The Economist
Populism: From Backlash to Framing the Future
The rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic is one of the defining social, political and economic phenomena of the current era.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Social Media
The rise of social media as a dominant channel/platform for communication has led to new forms of rapid connectivity and interaction across the global landscape (e.g., Arab Spring, the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook groups for Syrian refugees).
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
Autonomous Vehicles
The rise of the automobile transformed modern society. It changed where we live, what we buy, how we work, and who we call friends. As cars and trucks became commonplace, they created whole classes of jobs and made other professions obsolete. We are now on the cusp of an equally transformative technological shift in transportation: from vehicles driven by humans to vehicles that drive themselves. The long-term impact of autonomous vehicles on society is hard to predict, but also hard to overstate. The only certainty is that wherever this technology becomes ubiquitous, life will be different than it was. Google and other companies have been testing self-driving cars for several years now, with good success. These autos process vast amounts of sensory data from on-board radars, cameras, ultrasonic range-finders, GPS, and stored maps to navigate routes through ever more complex and rapidly changing traffic situations without any human involvement. Consumer use of vehicles with autonomous capabilities, however, is just beginning. Adoption will proceed gradually, through the steady implementation of increasingly intelligent safety and convenience features in otherwise ordinary cars. Some models, for example, already offer hands-off parallel parking, automatic lane-keeping, emergency braking, or even semi-autonomous cruise control. Last October, Tesla Motors made available a software package that enables a limited form of self-driving operation for owners of its vehicles to download. This trend is likely to continue as such technology matures and as legal and regulatory barriers start to fall. A half-dozen states have already authorized autonomous road vehicles, and more have plans to do so. Discussions are well underway among auto insurers and legislators about how to apportion liability and costs when self-driving cars get into crashes, as they inevitably will—although it is widely expected that these cars will prove to be much safer, on average, than driver-operated cars are today. There is plenty of room for improvement on that front. In the United States, crashes and collisions claim more than 30,000 lives and cause some 2.3 million injuries annually. Self-driving systems may have bugs—the software that runs them is complicated—but they are free from the myriad distractions and risk-taking behaviors that are the most common causes of crashes today. In the near term, semi-autonomous safety systems that engage only to prevent accidents, but that otherwise leave the driver in charge, will also likely reduce the human cost of driving significantly. Far more profound transformations will follow once cars and trucks can be trusted to pilot themselves routinely—even with no one inside. Exclusive car ownership could then cease to be the necessity of modern living that it is today for so many people. Shared cars and driverless taxi and delivery services could become the norm. This transition might help the aged and infirm—an increasing fraction of the population—to “age in place” more gracefully. Shared programmable vehicles could reduce the need for local parking structures, reduce congestion by preventing accidents and enabling safe travel at higher speeds and closer following distances, and unlock numerous secondary benefits. Like every technology, autonomous vehicles will involve drawbacks as well. In some distant day, commercial driving may no longer be a sustainable career. Shared vehicles raise some thorny privacy and security concerns. In some regions, increased affordability of car access may greatly exacerbate traffic and pollution problems rather than easing them. But the many benefits of self-driving cars and trucks are so compelling that their widespread adoption is a question of when, not if.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Middle-class progress
The rising tide of progress has not lifted all boats equally. Globalization and automation are polarizing the labor market, with more on the way as expanding machine-learning capabilities increase the automatability of a wide range of tasks in developed and emerging markets alike (Exhibit 8). As middle-wage workers are displaced, many are forced to “trade down,” reducing their income and putting pressure on existing lower wage workers. There is also widening earnings disparity. Workers with advanced degrees have generally seen their earnings rise, while wages for those with only high-school diplomas have stagnated, and wages for those who do not hold a high-school diploma have declined. Youth unemployment has reached 50 percent or more in several major developed economies
2017
The global forces inspiring a new narrative of progress
McKinsey
The next billion consumers
The rising wealth of emerging economies will continue to bring a broader range of consumption goods to huge numbers of new consumers. More of them will cross the critical annual household income threshold of $5,000, planting them in the ranks of the “global middle class” and enabling more discretionary spending. Although still considerably poorer than the middle-class consumers in the advanced economies, their vast numbers and increasing ability to devote more income to a broader range of goods and services will create an enormous new market. Estimated contribution to global GDP by 2020: $10 trillion.
2011
The great eight: Trillion-dollar growth trends to 2020
Bain and Company