Trends Identified
User Engagement
Empowering business by focusing from the “user down,” not the “system up” Software engineering has typically emphasized technical architectural “-ilities” – reliability, scalability, security, maintainability and flexibility. At the same time, low expectations were set for the other “-ilities” – namely, “usability” or employee interactions with enterprise technologies. While people grumbled about the systems they relied on for daily tasks, there were few examples of any better systems, and little impetus for corporate solution developers to implement change.
2011
Tech Trends 2011 The natural convergence of business and IT
Deloitte
Engineered Empathy - Human engagement in an EI-expectant world
Emotional intelligence – an ability to empathise and engage on a human level – will become a core and advocacy-building consumer expectation, as well as a valued everyday life skill demanded by workplaces and personal relationships alike.
2018
Trending 2018
Foresight Factory
Nanostructured Carbon Composites
Emissions from the world’s rapidly-growing fleet of vehicles are an environmental concern, and raising the operating efficiency of transport is a promising way to reduce its overall impact. New techniques to nanostructure carbon fibres for novel composites are showing the potential in vehicle manufacture to reduce the weight of cars by 10% or more. Lighter cars need less fuel to operate, increasing the efficiency of moving people and goods and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, efficiency is only one concern – another of equal importance is improving passenger safety. To increase the strength and toughness of new composites, the interface between carbon fibres and the surrounding polymer matrix is engineered at the nanoscale to improve anchoring – using carbon nanotubes, for example. In the event of an accident, these surfaces are designed to absorb impact without tearing, distributing the force and protecting passengers inside the vehicle. A third challenge, which may now be closer to a solution, is that of recycling carbon fibre composites – something which has held back the widespread deployment of the technology. New techniques involve engineering cleavable “release points” into the material at the interface between the polymer and the fibre so that the bonds can be broken in a controlled fashion and the components that make up the composite can be recovered separately and reused. Taken together, these three elements could have a major impact by bringing forward the potential for manufacturing lightweight, super-safe and recyclable composite vehicles to a mass scale
2014
Top 10 emerging technologies for 2014
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Digitalized ecosystems
Emerging technologies in general will require support from new technical foundations and more dynamic ecosystems. These ecosystems will need new business strategies and a move to platform-based business models. “The shift from compartmentalized technical infrastructure to ecosystem-enabling platforms is laying the foundation for entirely new business models that are forming the bridge between humans and technology,” says Walker. For example, blockchain could be a game changer for data security leaders, as it has the potential to increase resilience, reliability, transparency, and trust in centralized systems. Also under this trend are digital twins, a virtual representation of a real object. This is beginning to gain adoption in maintenance, and Gartner estimates hundreds of millions of things will have digital twins within five years.
2018
5 Trends Emerge in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2018
Gartner
Digitalized ecosystems
Emerging technologies in general will require support from new technical foundations and more dynamic ecosystems. These ecosystems will need new business strategies and a move to platform-based business models. “The shift from compartmentalized technical infrastructure to ecosystem-enabling platforms is laying the foundation for entirely new business models that are forming the bridge between humans and technology,” says Walker. For example, blockchain could be a game changer for data security leaders, as it has the potential to increase resilience, reliability, transparency, and trust in centralized systems. Also under this trend are digital twins, a virtual representation of a real object. This is beginning to gain adoption in maintenance, and Gartner estimates hundreds of millions of things will have digital twins within five years.
2018
5 Trends Emerge in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2018
Gartner
Geopolitical dimension of resources
Emerging technologies and the exploration opportunities availed by climate change may allow the discovery of mineral and energy resources in previously inaccessible and possibly disputed regions as the High North
2017
Strategic foresight analysis
NATO
Challenges to governance
Emerging powers are increasingly challenging establishedglobalgovernanceinstitutionsandrequestinggreaterroles.Existing governance structures, particularly in weak and failing states, are not sufficiently addressing the requirements of the broader population.
2017
Strategic foresight analysis
NATO
IoT software
Emerging platforms, standards & analytics
2018
Corum Top Ten Disruptive Technology Trends 2018
Corum
Neurotechnologies
Emerging neurotechnologies offer great promise in diagnosis and therapy for healthy ageing and general human enhancement. However, some neurotechnologies raise profound ethical, legal, social and cultural issues that require policy attention.
2016
OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2016
OECD
Growth and risk management in emerging markets
Emerging markets, with populations that are young and growing, will increasingly become not only the focus of rising consumption and production but also major providers of capital, talent, and innovation. This will make it imperative for most companies to succeed in emerging markets. However, no more than 40 percent of executives at companies headquartered in developed economies expect a quarter or more of revenues over the next five years to come from emerging markets—and 10 percent expect none.
2010
Five forces reshaping the global economy: McKinsey Global Survey results
McKinsey