Trends Identified

Environment
To stabilise the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm), which was the target set by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will cost $542 billion per year, every year till 2030, according to the World Energy Outlook (WEO).
2012
The future
Steria
Store and process
Today we are seeing an increasing amount of data and computation migrate from our personal devices onto cloud platformsc. Many websites rely on basic cloud service building blocks provided by companies such as Amazon.
2017
Surfing the digital tsunami
Australia, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
User Experience is What matters
Today, business process design is driven by the need for optimization and cost reduction. But tomorrow it will be driven by the need to create superior user experiences that help to boost customer satisfaction. But in the future, great user experiences will require more layered approaches than what is typical today. Leading IT providers are thinking way beyond the next great touch-screen interfaces or gesture-driven devices. They are preparing to address three specific factors: the integrated user experience, with no cognitive cost of switching from one context to another; a compelling experience, which minimizes tedium and boredom; and a natural device interface – one that involves little or no learning time. Apple has mastered all three factors; for instance, its iPhone and iPod products can be used right out of the box, with little need to resort to a user manual.
2011
Accenture Technology Vision 2011
Accenture
Emerging markets increase their global power
Today, emerging markets serve as the world’s economic growth engine, and the far-reaching effects of their spectacular rise continue to play out. But their risks are often downplayed. Therefore, taking advantage of emerging-market opportunities requires careful planning.
2011
Tracking global trends - How six key developments are shaping the business world
EY
Rapid Urbanisation
Today, more than half the world’s population live in urban areas and almost all of the new growth will take place in lesser known medium-sized cities of developing countries. How cities evolve will be determined by the collective actions of city governments, people and businesses. What is critical, is to focus interventions not just on the ‘smart city’, but on the smart town and the smart village, enabling an interdependent ecosystem that counters rapid organisation to the mega city.
2017
Megatrends
PWC
Intelligent interfaces
Today, people interact with technology through ever more intelligent interfaces, moving from traditional keyboards to touchscreens, voice commands, and beyond. And even these engagement patterns are giving way to new and more seamless and natural methods of interaction. For example, images and video feeds can be used to track assets, authenticate individual identities, and understand context from surrounding environments. Advanced voice capabilities allow interaction with complex systems in natural, nuanced conversations. Moreover, by intuiting human gestures, head movements, and gazes, AI-based systems can respond to nonverbal user commands. Intelligent interfaces combine the latest in humancentered design techniques with leading-edge technologies such as computer vision, conversational voice, auditory analytics, and advanced augmented reality and virtual reality. Working in concert, these techniques and capabilities are transforming the way we engage with machines, data, and each other.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Data-driven healthcare
Today, we are already at a turning point in our ability to 3D “bioprint” organ tissues, a process that involves depositing a “bio-ink” made of cells precisely in layers, resulting in a functional living human tissue for use in the lab. These tissues should be better predictors of drug function than animal models in many cases. In the long-term, this has the potential to pave the way to “printing” human organs, such as kidneys, livers and hearts. By 2020, our goal is to have the technology be broadly used by pharmaceutical companies, resulting in the identification of safer and better drug candidates and fewer failures in clinical trials.
2014
14 tech predictions for our world in 2020
World Economic Forum (WEF)
The primacy of purpose
Today’s brands must be purposeful and provide the services customers want while fulfilling steep demands for accountability and transparency. The business model of the future will require giving back—to employees, to communities, and to the planet.
2018
Trend watch 2018: the next five
Landor
What worries CEOs most?
Today’s CEOs are concerned about a wide range of potential and ongoing threats to their business growth prospects. These include catastrophic events, economic and policy threats and commercial threats.We asked CEOs about their organisation’s ability to cope with the potential impact of various disruptive scenarios. The majority thought their organisations would be negatively affected, with major social unrest being cause for the greatest concern (see Figure 3). Indeed, CEOs are far more concerned about this than they are about a slowdown in China, possibly because they’ve already factored the latter into their calculations.
2013
16th Annual global CEO Survey
PWC
Growing in complicated times
Today’s CEOs face a business environment that’s becoming increasingly complicated to read and adapt to. Seven years on from the global financial crisis, the business landscape still hasn’t really returned to what it was. Will it ever? Last year regulation, skills, national debt, geopolitical uncertainty and taxes topped CEOs’ list of concerns about threats to business growth. None of these have gone away this year. In fact, the level of worry is higher today than at any point in the past five years. Concern about over-regulation in particular is still highest, cited by 79% of CEOs – making it the fourth year in a row that it’s risen (see Figure 1). Geopolitical uncertainty, meanwhile, has become the second biggest concern, cited by 74% of business leaders. This comes at a time when terror attacks are increasing and touching every part of the world, many linked to the heightened conflict in Iraq and Syria. Global conflicts are also connected to anxieties about social instability and readiness to respond to crises, named by 65% and 61% of CEOs, respectively. Cyber security is also a worry for 61% of CEOs, representing as it does threats to both national and commercial interests.
2016
19th Annual global CEO survey
PWC