Trends Identified

The great leveller?
New information technologies are reaching the world’s poor much faster than food and toilets. A recent UN report suggested six billion people have access to mobile phones, while only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets. Technology offers great potential to enhance education opportunities, dramatically improve health outcomes, promote free speech and democracy, and offer greater access to global markets. The Internet is the key driver of global connectivity and opportunity, but different bandwidth speeds, limited access, and contrasting levels of openness can mean that
the Internet exacerbates rather than offsets inequality.
2013
Now for the long term - The Report of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations
Oxford Martin School
Double-edged sword
Whilst technological advances have revolutionised our lives, and offer profound possibilities for tackling challenges, they also maximise vulnerability.
2013
Now for the long term - The Report of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations
Oxford Martin School
Big data and analytics
In an Industry 4.0 context, the collection and comprehensive evaluation of data from many different sources—production equipment and systems as well as enterprise- and customer-management systems—will become standard to support real-time decision making.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Autonomous robots
Robots will eventually interact with one another and work safely side by side with humans and learn from them. These robots will cost less and have a greater range of capabilities than those used in manufacturing today.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Simulation
Simulations will be used more extensively in plant operations to leverage real-time data and mirror the physical world in a virtual model, which can include machines, products, and humans. This will allow operators to test and optimize the machine settings for the next product in line in the virtual world before the physical changeover, thereby driving down machine setup times and increasing quality.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Horizontal and vertical system integration
With Industry 4.0, companies, departments, functions, and capabilities will become much more cohesive, as cross-company, universal data-integration networks evolve and enable truly automated value chains.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
The industrial internet of things
Industry 4.0 means that more devices—sometimes including unfinished products—will be enriched with embedded computing. This will allow field devices to communicate and interact both with one another and with more centralized controllers, as necessary. It will also decentralize analytics and decision making, enabling real-time responses.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Cybersecurity
With the increased connectivity and use of standard communications protocols that come with Industry 4.0, the need to protect critical industrial systems and manufacturing lines from cybersecurity threats increases dramatically. As a result, secure, reliable communications as well as sophisticated identity and access management of machines and users are essential.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
The cloud
More production-related undertakings will require increased data sharing across sites and company boundaries. At the same time, the performance of cloud technologies will improve, achieving reaction times of just several milliseconds. As a result, machine data and functionality will increasingly be deployed to the cloud, enabling more data-driven services for production systems.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Additive manufacturing
Companies have just begun to adopt additive manufacturing, such as 3-D printing, which they use mostly to prototype and produce individual components. With Industry 4.0, these additive-manufacturing methods will be widely used to produce small batches of customized products that offer construction advantages, such as complex, lightweight designs.
2015
Nine Technologies Transforming Industrial Production
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)