Trends Identified

Settling other worlds
How will space tourism companies make sure their activities are safe? How will we find ways to send humans to Mars or another planet to live there, as Stephen Hawking has urged us to figure out? Space travel might seem like the domain of space agencies and billionaires today, but as it becomes more accessible to everybody else, a whole host of new challenges will emerge. Outer space is increasingly looking less like the final frontier and more like our backyard, and with more money being shelled out to get humans up to the inky abyss than ever before, the logistics, safety and diplomacy behind the challenge all demand serious consideration.
2017
10 grand challenges we’ll face by 2050
The BBC
Learning on the job will never stop
How will our education institutions keep up? Today, there is a disconnect between education providers and employers. In the future, however, technology will enable education and training to respond dynamically to real-time labor market changes. With widespread access to training and courses online and available on-demand, workers can be informed of skill updates while they work, and will regularly top up their education with the skills they need to remain relevant in the workforce.
2014
14 tech predictions for our world in 2020
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Behavioral design
How will insights from psychology improve the partnership between humans and new technologies? The relationship between design and behavior has never been more important than in the era of human augmentation..This link has been increasingly visible in recent years. The launch of Google Glass fizzled partly because of people’s fears of being surreptitiously recorded. Smartphone and social media addictions are rising because manufacturers have designed for irresistibility. Understanding how design motivates behavior will become even more important with human augmentation. As AI, robots and other technologies become increasingly lifelike and enter spaces that have so far been exclusively in the human domain, they will trigger deep-seated human biases. Leaders must attend to the implications of behavioral design for everything, from customer engagement (see Super consumer) to fears about automation to the outcome of elections.
2018
What’s after what’s next? The upside of disruption Megatrends shaping 2018 and beyond
EY
Remapping urbanization
How will cities be reshaped by technology and our greatest challenges? The urbanization of the future could look fundamentally different. Two sets of forces will converge to alter where we build and how we build: 1. How cities respond to sustainability challenges, such as climate change, chronic diseases, aging and affordability 2. How disruptive technologies that are transforming transportation and reinventing work reshape urban centers.
2018
What’s after what’s next? The upside of disruption Megatrends shaping 2018 and beyond
EY
Virtualization
How the shift from physical to logical is moving up the value chain – and setting the stage for a potential (cloud) revolution Virtualization is in many ways a mature capability – with solid adoption across compute, storage, and network layers. It is not a top technology trend because it is new, but because its scope is growing across the stack and expanding to cover facilities, operations, and even business layers. Virtualization is critical to many strategic goals of IT, including IT cost reduction, data center consolidation, architecture rationalization, and the migration from physical to logical that currently culminates in cloud computing. Few other emerging enablers have as much potential to help improve service management, reduce capital expense and ongoing costs, and positively affect every stage of the IT lifecycle.
2010
Depth perception A dozen technology trends shaping business and IT in 2010
Deloitte
Walking a tightrope
How does a business meet the current, acute demands of survival and at the same time ensure its business model is both durable over the long term and positioned to take best advantage of a return to growth? Stephen Green, Group Chairman of the UK-based international banking and financial services organisation HSBC Holdings plc, explains: ‘One of the obvious risks is that current emergencies drive out the longer-term perspective…You cannot rebalance economies overnight. No institution, whether it’s a bank, or a government, or the World Bank or the IMF, has the power to do this. It simply will take time, and it’s a difficult tightrope to walk.’ Walking the tightrope requires CEOs to balance extreme, short-term threats to survival, on the one hand, and on the other, large-scale, global issues that impact long-term success. Many CEOs believe this requires a mindset that is different from the past.
2009
12th Annual global CEO Survey
PWC
Slaves to the algorithm
How do you design a marketing strategy to win over the algorithms — immune to all conventional branding efforts — that sit between brands and their customers?
2018
Fjord trends 2018
Fjord
Adaptive regulation
How could regulation be responsive to rapid change and an unknowable future? Regulation can be a contentious issue. Critics argue — often justifiably so — that it is onerous, inefficient and an impediment to innovation. But, imagine an entirely different approach. Imagine a future in which consumer safety is protected not by monitoring regulatory compliance and penalizing infractions, but by using big data and algorithms to prevent breaches before they can even occur. Imagine regulations that rewrite themselves to keep up with ever-changing market conditions. Imagine regulation conducted jointly by industry and regulators — a collaborative, rather than contentious, exercise. This is where things are headed. The future of regulation is adaptive. The reason for this shift is disruptive innovation. On one hand, disruptive technologies and business models are straining existing regulatory approaches and making them unsustainable. On the other, these technologies are creating opportunities to conduct regulation in an entirely new way.
2018
What’s after what’s next? The upside of disruption Megatrends shaping 2018 and beyond
EY
Growing healthy in a sluggish world
How can Singapore grow more dynamic and resilient as an economy, given concerns about sluggish global growth and the implications for Singapore.
2017
Foresigth
Singapore, The Centre for Strategic Futures
IN B2B, A NEW CULTURE OF BUSINESS IS EMERGING
How businesses do business is changing Let’s get one thing straight — the era of B2Boring is over. Not because most B2B companies have changed the way they do B2B (they haven’t — yet), but because there are forces at play that are changing expectations — for customers, companies and within broader culture. The archetypal price and features-driven B2B buyer is swiftly becoming extinct. Individuals are looking for more than ‘ticking boxes’ and pleasing the ‘higher ups’. Instead, a new generation of both workers and companies have come of age and are changing the way decisions are made, products and services are marketed, and the role business are engaging in broader culture and society. We call this emergent trend the new culture of business.
2019
The Ogilvy Consulting Trends for 2019
Ogilvy