Trends Identified

People and behaviour: we move in mysterious ways
The notion that individuals are gradually becoming significant drivers of change has been widely reported, particularly in the popular media. In 2006, Time magazine elected ‘You’ (the individual) as person of the year – before the boom in social media and before the Arab Spring revolts, more recent events that reinforce the perception that people, their beliefs and behaviours may increasingly interact with the international and EU landscape. On the one hand, the use of ICTs for censorship in certain states and declining participation level in Western elections suggests that the keynote of this development is divergence. On the other hand, there is a commonly stated expectation that globalisation acts as an integrative and harmonising force and that we should witness a convergence of values affecting how people think and behave as a result. The emergence of a common ethos would influence some of the themes we discussed earlier, including the identity and values of the middle class, declining fertility levels, the diffusion and the use of technologies and migration flows. Yet, the evidence also points to potential divergence in values, as embodied by grassroots populist movements, online activism focusing on specific causes and political or religious extremisms.
2013
Europe's Societal Challenges: An analysis of global societal trends to 2030 and their impact on the EU
RAND Corporation
4G+ mobile communication technology
The next-generation mobile communication technology provides more transmission capacity than 4G mobile communication technology (more than tens of times), efficiently provides various future services including high quality mobile multimedia service, M2M (machine to machine), and direct communication service between terminals, and flexibly accommodates traffic variation of time and place. This technology can contribute to national welfare by linking the various industries such as mobile-based healthcare, education, smart-work, and public safety.
2012
KISTEP 10 Emerging Technologies 2012
South Korea, Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP)
Platform Economy
The next wave of disruptive innovation will arise from the technology-enabled, platformdriven ecosystems now taking shape across industries. Having strategically harnessed technology to produce digital businesses, leaders are now creating the adaptable, scalable, and interconnected platform economy that underpins success in an ecosystem-based digital economy.
2016
Accenture Technology Vision 2016
Accenture
Intelligent Enterprise: Huge data, smarter systems—better business
The next level of operational excellence and the next generation of software services will both emerge from the latest gains in software intelligence. Until now, increasingly capable software has been geared to help employees make better and faster decisions. But with an influx of big data—and advances in processing power, data science, and cognitive technology— software intelligence is helping machines to make even more, better informed decisions. Business and technology leaders must now view software intelligence not as a pilot or a oneoff project, but as an across-the-board functionality—one that will drive new levels of evolution and discovery, propelling innovation throughout the enterprise.
2015
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Accenture
Additive Manufacturing
The next frontier in manufacturing
2017
Top 50 Emerging Technologies 2017
Frost & Sullivan
Physics: 'Within a decade, we'll know what dark matter is'
The next 25 years will see fundamental advances in our understanding of the underlying structure of matter and of the universe. At the moment, we have successful descriptions of both, but we have open questions. For example, why do particles of matter have mass and what is the dark matter that provides most of the matter in the universe? I am optimistic that the answer to the mass question will be found within a few years, whether or not it is the mythical Higgs boson, and believe that the answer to the dark matter question will be found within a decade. Key roles in answering these questions will be made by experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider, which started operations in earnest last year and is expected to run for most of the next 20 years; others will be played by astrophysical searches for dark matter and cosmological observations such as those from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. Many theoretical proposals for answering these questions invoke new principles in physics, such as the existence of additional dimensions of space or a "supersymmetry" between the constituents of matter and the forces between them, and we will discover whether these ideas are useful for physics. Both these ideas play roles in string theory, the best guess we have for a complete theory of all the fundamental forces including gravity. Will string theory be pinned down within 20 years? My crystal ball is cloudy on this point, but I am sure that we physicists will have an exciting time trying to find out.
2011
20 predictions for the next 25 years
The Guardian
Beyond marketing: Experience reimagined
The new world of marketing is personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Increasingly, this world is orchestrated not by outside parties but by chief marketing officers partnering with their technology organizations to bring control of the human experience back in-house. Together, CMOs and CIOs are building an arsenal of experience-focused marketing tools that are powered by emerging technology. Their goal is to transform marketing from a customer acquisition-focused activity to one that enables a superb human experience, grounded in data. In experiential marketing, companies treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behaviors. Analytics and cognitive capabilities illuminate the context of customers’ needs and desires, and determine the optimal way to engage with them. Experience management tools tailor content and identify the best method of delivery across physical and digital touchpoints, bringing us closer to truly unique engagement with each and every human.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
The New Uncertain Normal for Leadership in Politics, Public Service and Corporates. The Need to Think the Unthinkable.
The New Uncertain Normal for Leadership in Politics, Public Service and Corporates. The Need to Think the Unthinkable.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
New organizational structures
The new technologies, new work arrangements and other global change drivers are likely to generate new kinds of organizations. For instance, one can imagine a service corporation where all of the services are provided by AI with fewer human employees. A growing number of modern corporations will have a small management team that contracts out all functions through the entire product life cycle. It is possible that unorganized skilled workers will find people with complementary skills and create informal, temporary teams to take advantage of an opportunity to work together virtually to deliver a good or service.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
Sustainable resource management and harvesting
The new technologies – particularly sensors, data analytics, AI, drones, robots and synthetic biology – could usher in a new era for the sustainable management and harvesting of forest and fish resources. Together, these tools could allow resource managers and government overseers to monitor ecosystem and resource health, to develop more ecological planting and harvesting strategies, and to quickly identify and implement targeted interventions. Being able to see the whole system would improve planning, investment and public accountability.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada