Trends Identified
The ethics economy
Organizations must proactively demonstrate what they stand for, whether they want to or not. People will choose the brands that align with their own beliefs.
2018
Fjord trends 2018
Fjord
The evolution of social media
Social media has complicated the way we communicate for the better part of a decade. And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, given that most people get their news from it now. That’s before we even get into the mess of online harassment, as well. What might social media look like in 30 years, and by that time, what are some threats it might pose?
2017
10 grand challenges we’ll face by 2050
The BBC
The evolution of social ROI
For years, we’ve been predicting the death of short-sighted vanity metrics. In 2018, we’re seeing this long-promised shift finally take place. What’s dfferent? While organizations have traditionally used social media to increase top-of-funnel engagement, many are exploring and discovering the value of social in other phases of the customer journey. In addition to brand awareness, social media is also helping organizations achieve business objectives such as lowering customer service costs, tracking changes in brand perception, mitigating risk, attracting top talent, and even feeding social insights into supply chain analyses. But this evolution requires new metrics—and alignment of social media strategies with your organization’s most urgent business challenges.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
The exploration game
The increasing use of technology to help us discover, imagine and visualise in new and different ways.
2018
2018 trends
Mindshare
The fintech renaissance
While bitcoin and blockchain were grabbing the headlines in 2017, social and mobile payments have fundamentally changed the financial markets. In China, mobile payment volumes now exceed $5 trillion annually.
2017
4 Technology Trends That Will Transform Our World in 2018
Fortune
The Future Is Edge
The edge is where it’s at. Investments will increasingly migrate from the cloud to edge computing. Porsche, Softbank, and Berkshire have already bet big on edge computing start-ups. Watch out for significant application enablement as a result. There’s going to be further movement shifting storage and processing to the edge. In the meantime, a slew of industries—defense and healthcare, among them—will begin to leverage edge computing technologies. And no, I haven’t forgotten about our two missteps from last year. First, our prediction that some tech giants, Apple in particular, would hit the golden $1 trillion valuation mark didn’t quite happen as expected; they did hit the mark but failed to sustain the momentum. Another of our predictions that didn't turn out as anticipated was that a generation of young leaders would spearhead a new brand of politics. Disappointingly, the sheen of poster boys like Emmanuel Macron, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, Kim Jong Un and Justin Trudeau dimmed considerably over the course of 2018.
2019
Top 10 Trends For 2019
Forbes
The future is electrifying
The growing electrification of energy; in 2016, spending by the world’s consumers on electricity approached parity with their spending on oil products.
2017
World energy outlook 2017 executive summary
International Energy Agency (IEA)
The Future of Deterrence
Out to 2040, discouraging conflict will be increasingly important, especially as the strategic balance of military power shifts away from the US to a more multi-polar distribution. Deterrence will remain a vital conflict prevention tool.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
The Future of Foresight in Europe. Beyond Evidence-Based Pessimism to Realistic Hope
A focus on the short term often overemphasises negative, trends of doom and gloom. Developing and using foresight enables realistic hope. It pushes beyond sugar-coated ideology about what the future should be and the evidence-based pessimism that is driving fear of the future. Foresight is a disciplined approach to futures thinking that enables societies to thrive under disruptive changes and to collaborate to create new and better future possibilities for all. It is not about wishful thinking. The aim is not to predict, but to be better prepared. To develop a more explicit, testable, contestable and useful sense of the future that is already emerging in the here-and-now.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
The Future of Leadership in Europe
Leadership matters: hundreds of books are published every month with the word leadership in the title. Yet there no universal theory of leadership or agreement on how good, bad, better or great leadership can be evaluated or measured. One the one hand, societies everywhere are searching for leaders and leadership systems that can deliver realistic hope. One the other hand, advances in education, the spread of democracy, prosperity gains and social media have contributed to a diffusion of power and authority within societies and across the world. The turnover of political and business leaders in democratic societies seems to be occurring at an accelerating pace – shaped by and contributing to structural short-termism.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)