Trends Identified

API imperative - from IT concern to business mandate
For many years, application programming interfaces (APIs) have made it possible for solutions and systems to talk to each other. But increasingly, companies value these often-overlooked technologies for another capability: They expose technology assets for reuse across and beyond the enterprise. Not only can reuse drive greater ROI in IT investments—it can offer API consumers a set of building blocks for using existing data, transactions, and products in creative ways. As part of the growing API imperative trend, organizations have begun exploring new ways to expose, manage, and control APIs. As this trend gathers momentum in the coming months, expect further innovative approaches to emerge for contracting, pricing, servicing, and even marketing a venerable technology that has become a critical pillar of many digital ambitions.
2017
Tech trends 2018
Deloitte
Advanced Diagnostics for Personalized Medicine - A new generation of tools could help end one-size-fits-all therapeutics.
For most of the 20th century all women with breast cancer received similar treatment. Therapy has since become more individualized: breast cancers are now divided into subtypes and treated accordingly. Many women whose tumors produce estrogen receptors, for instance, may receive drugs that specifically target those receptors, along with standard postsurgery chemotherapy. This year researchers took a step closer to even more personalized treatment. They identified a significant fraction of patients whose tumors possess characteristics that indicate they can safely forgo chemo—and avoid its often serious side effects.
2018
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2018
Scientific American
AI-fueled organizations
For some organizations, harnessing artificial intelligence´s full potential begins tentatively with explorations of select enterprise opportunities and a few potential use cases. While testing the waters this way may deliver valuable insights, it likely won’t be enough to make your company a market maker (rather than a fast follower). To become a true AI-fueled organization, a company may need to fundamentally rethink the way humans and machines interact within working environments. Executives should also consider deploying machine learning and other cognitive tools systematically across every core business process and enterprise operation to support datadriven decision-making. Likewise, AI could drive new offerings and business models. These are not minor steps, but as AI technologies standardize rapidly across industries, becoming an AI-fueled organization will likely be more than a strategy for success—it could be table stakes for survival.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Populism
For the last seven decades, globalization has marched forward uninterrupted. The Bretton Woods Institutions and multiple subsequent free trade agreements ushered in an era of trade liberalization and global supply chains, trends that helped lift more than one billion people out of poverty. In 2016, that inexorable forward-march hit a major roadblock when back-to-back election results gave us Brexit and President Trump, bringing populism and anti-globalization to the forefront. While populism had been ascendant in numerous countries before this — from Poland and Hungary to Bolivia and the Philippines — these elections brought such political philosophies to two of the world’s largest economies.
2018
What’s after what’s next? The upside of disruption Megatrends shaping 2018 and beyond
EY
Tightening central banks
For the last several years, central banks around the world have engaged in quantitative easing, interest-rate reductions and a general loosening of monetary policy. That's already reversing in the United States, which raised its overnight rate three times in 2017, to between 1.25 percent and 1.5 percent, but in other developed nations rates remain at ultralow levels. For instance, Sweden still has a negative interest rate of minus 0.5 percent. That's likely to change in 2018, says Jeff Knight, Columbia Threadneedle Investments' global head of investment solutions and co-head of global asset allocation. Many people expect the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates at some point in 2018, while Bank of England may raise its rate, too. "Other central banks are a year or two behind the Fed in the cycle," he says.
2018
6 global trends that can derail your portfolio in 2018
CNBC
Making globalisation work for all
For the past 20 years CEOs have been largely positive about the impacts of globalisation on their businesses and markets. But, by 2007, they were beginning to express reservations about the short-term effects on society. CEOs are still ambivalent. Today the vast majority believe that globalisation has helped to free up flows of money, people, goods and information, facilitate universal connectivity and create a skilled workforce. Yet a significant number say it’s done nothing to mitigate climate change, promote the development of fairer tax systems or close the gap between rich and poor (see Figure 14).
2017
20th Annual global CEO survey
PWC
Uneven and unequal
For the past three decades, there has been a steady decline in poverty rates in the developing world. This progress is anticipated to continue, not least in countries such as China and India. Yet the contrast between rich and poor remains stark.
2013
Now for the long term - The Report of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations
Oxford Martin School
Private Sector
For the private sector to play its full role as engine of growth in Africa and poverty reduction, African countries will need to create an enabling environment for a vibrant private sector in which micro, small, and medium size enterprises (MSMEs) and labour-intensive activities thrive alongside large firms in both traditional and new areas. This will require improving the legal and regulatory environment for doing business, increasing access to finance, improving corporate governance, strengthening human capital and skills development and fostering entrepreneurship.
2011
Africa in 50 Years’ Time
African Development Bank
21st Century Dialectics: Or How We Can Achieve Prosperity in New Times
For two generations it was plausible that more openness, and more ow (of capital, people, goods or information) contributed to the public good. It became an article of faith that globalisation and more open trade led to general benefits, stridently asserted by leaders and gurus of all kinds. Now, large minorities have seen their income stagnate, and fear that their children will be worse o than them, and probably jobless, thanks to the combination of migration and automation. Technological change continues to be ‘capital-biased’, meaning a declining share of income for labour, and new job and wealth creation continues to concentrate in areas with high levels of graduates. The promise of shared prosperity which underpinned so much economic policy over the last 70 years is now called into question.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Wearable devices
For workforce/customers
2016
Disruptive technologies barometer
KPMG