Trends Identified

The economic outlook

The economy and the future economic setting remain perhaps the most critical factor in determining to a large extent which family and household groups are affected, and how. Long-term stable growth, ample employment opportunities, sound public finances, etc. will clearly affect family/household outcomes differently to a long-term unstable economy with high structural unemployment and poor public finances. In either case, some households and families will thrive, while others will see their vulnerability grow. Policy can mitigate such inequalities and ease the situation especially of those who are the most in need. But just as the future economic setting will affect families/households dif- ferently, so it will also affect the scope and resources available for policy action.

2011

The Future of Families to 2030

OECD

The disruptive decade

The global economic outlook is certainly enough to test even the strongest enterprises. The eurozone is still mired in recession and the US economy is forecast to expand by just 2.2% this year.1The situation in some of the growth markets is also getting harder, as the slowdown in the BRIC economies demonstrates. While market conditions in many countries are still very difficult, CEOs are more positive about the prognosis than they were last year: 52% think the global economy will stay the same for the next 12 months and only 28% believe it will shrink. In 2012, by contrast, 48% were convinced the global economy would contract.But economic plateaux aren’t exactly grounds for cheer. That’s why short-term confidence about the prospects for revenue growth has continued falling (see Figure 1). CEOs in Western Europe are especially nervous. Only 22% feel very confident they can increase their company’s revenues in the coming 12 months, compared with 53% of CEOs in the Middle East and Latin America.

2013

16th Annual global CEO Survey

PWC

The Death of Trade

Bilateral trade wars cascade and multilateral dispute resolution institutions are too weak to respond

2018

The Global Risks Report 2018

World Economic Forum (WEF)

The death of ageing

The rich and powerful have long dreamt of the death of ageing, if not of outright immortality. There is now serious money in it. Anti-ageing startup Unity Biotechnology raised US$116 million in 2016 from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel and others to further its research in rejuvenation therapy and prevention of senescence (that is, wear and tear with age). Google-backed biotechnology company Calico and biopharmaceutical company AbbVie invested US$250 million each in 2014 to jointly develop drugs targeting diseases associated with old age.

2017

Foresigth

Singapore, The Centre for Strategic Futures

The dawn of the coded brand

Brands will hardwire behaviors into their actual coding in unprecedented ways. This will offer customers a consistent experience no matter when or where they meet a brand.

2018

Trend watch 2018: the next five

Landor

The Darker Side of New Technologies: How A New Global Security Order Has Arrived

Understanding the impact of new technologies on global security has never been more urgent – but responses are falling behind and there is no framework on the table to get back on track.

2016

Shaping the future

European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)

The dark side

Progress thrives on openness, and openness almost by definition means exposure. The Internet, for example, has brought critical dangers even as it has unleashed a business and social miracle. Everyday acts, such as connecting your phone to your car via Bluetooth, create vulnerabilities most of us do not yet consciously consider. The costs of fighting cyberthreats are rising into the trillions. Meanwhile, rogue states continue to frustrate the global community, and the strains from combating terrorism are reverberating worldwide. The number of terrorist incidents and casualties remains relatively small but has been rising; global terrorism death levels by the end of 2015 were more than five times higher than they were in 2001.

2017

The global forces inspiring a new narrative of progress

McKinsey

The crystal ball internet

For around 20 years, starting in the 1980s, the political scientist Philip Tetlock sought predictions from people considered knowledgeable. His experts, 280 of them, were the kind of folk who, in their work as TV pundits or government advisors, opined on matters such as the rise of China or security in the Middle East. As time passed, he checked their forecasts. The results were dismal. “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world… are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys,” wrote one reviewer of Tetlock’s work. Not so for a powerful new method of forecasting called “text mining”. It draws on the vast amount of data available online. By sampling the sentiments expressed in the torrent of blog posts, tweets and Facebook updates, you can gain unprecedented insights into the mood of the world and use it to predict what is to come.

2011

Seven technologies to disrupt the next decade

NewScientist

The cow-free burger

Both lab-grown and plant-based alternatives approximate the taste and nutritional value of real meat without the environmental devastation. The UN expects the world to have 9.8 billion people by 2050. And those people are getting richer. Neither trend bodes well for climate change—especially because as people escape poverty, they tend to eat more meat. By that date, according to the predictions, humans will consume 70% more meat than they did in 2005. And it turns out that raising animals for human consumption is among the worst things we do to the environment. Depending on the animal, producing a pound of meat protein with Western industrialized methods requires 4 to 25 times more water, 6 to 17 times more land, and 6 to 20 times more fossil fuels than producing a pound of plant protein.The problem is that people aren’t likely to stop eating meat anytime soon. Which means lab-grown and plant-based alternatives might be the best way to limit the destruction. Making lab-grown meat involves extracting muscle tissue from animals and growing it in bioreactors. The end product looks much like what you’d get from an animal, although researchers are still working on the taste. Researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who are working to produce lab-grown meat at scale, believe they'll have a lab-grown burger available by next year. One drawback of lab-grown meat is that the environmental benefits are still sketchy at best—a recent World Economic Forum report says the emissions from lab-grown meat would be only around 7% less than emissions from beef production. The better environmental case can be made for plant-based meats from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods (Bill Gates is an investor in both companies), which use pea proteins, soy, wheat, potatoes, and plant oils to mimic the texture and taste of animal meat. Beyond Meat has a new 26,000-square-foot (2,400-square-meter) plant in California and has already sold upwards of 25 million burgers from 30,000 stores and restaurants. According to an analysis by the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, a Beyond Meat patty would probably generate 90% less in greenhouse-gas emissions than a conventional burger made from a cow. —Markkus Rovito

2019

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2019 - How we’ll invent the future, by Bill Gates

MIT Technology Review

The conversation economy

Social computing has brought about substantial change in how people connect, how they converse, and how they get and share information. The social network itself is fast becoming a primary information channel for many people. Any object of attention—rumors, novels, recipes, petitions—can explode in importance and visibility if it taps into the right social channels at the right time. But information can also travel in the opposite direction: social networks are emerging as a rich source of information about consumer sentiment, preferences and desires. One clear implication of all this is that the conversation between organizations and individuals is changing, and customer relationships are being remade. We see three major “discontinuities” in the patterns of business-consumer communications. • Episodic communications are being replaced by continuous interactions;• "Talk at you" broadcast messages are making room for "talk with you" conversations; and • With a powerful media device as close as the nearest phone, companies—and individuals—have a new, powerful ability to “show” instead of “tell.”

2010

Accenture technology vision

Accenture