Trends Identified
Smart cities and homes
Known technical solution areas which require innovation to realise their potential and enable scale of deployment: Connected homes, High-efficiency heating, cooling, lighting, and appliances, High-efficiency windows and insulation, Building energy storage, Technology- enabled urban planning and building design, Next-generation commercial building management.
2017
Innovation for the Earth - Harnessing technological breakthroughs for people and the planet
PWC
Smart and transparent land use management
Transparency of real-time land use practices enabled by 4IR technologies including IoT sensors, cloud and big data, drones and advanced satellites, will be a game changer for implementing climate smart land use practices, and driving accountability in agriculture and forestry value chains.
2017
Innovation for the Earth - Harnessing technological breakthroughs for people and the planet
PWC
Slow shift in the types of resources that are scarce, and the areas that are at risk
Resource scarcity is a potential source of conflict. Advances in synthetic biology could reduce pressure on some scarce natural resources by increasing the security of energy, material and food sources. In parallel, new and different minerals may become scarce. For example, lithium reserves may come under pressure as the demand for batteries grows. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change anticipates that food and water scarcity driven by climate change will be a growing issue and a potential source of conflict and population displacement. Cheaper solar energy would lower the cost of desalination, which could increase food production and reduce the number of refugees forced to leave some drought-prone food-growing areas. This could be bolstered by the development of hardier crops and more adaptive farming methods using new technologies.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
Slaves to the algorithm
How do you design a marketing strategy to win over the algorithms — immune to all conventional branding efforts — that sit between brands and their customers?
2018
Fjord trends 2018
Fjord
Skill imbalances
The skills and capabilities businesses require are rapidly evolving. Even as automation may yield a surplus of unskilled and semiskilled labor, the digitalization of products and services is creating an enormous demand for skilled digital talent. By 2020, 30% of tech jobs will go unfilled because of talent shortages.
2017
Twelve Forces That Will Radically Change How Organizations Work
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Single-Cell DNA Sequencing
“In our body we have millions of normal cells and then we have the ones that aren’t normal,” Kocher says. “And if you don’t sequence the abnormal ones, you don’t know about the problems. So this notion of being able to do single cells versus just the average of when they break up all the cells in the blood, is an important nuance. That’s going to become an important clinical tool in the future. Today we’re just testing average DNA sequences, so you miss stuff.”
2018
The Most Important Tech Trends Of 2018, According To Top VCs
Fast Company
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)
Simplicity in complexity
Organizations tend to respond to new challenges by adding teams, functions, and departments. As organizations grow, their structure becomes increasingly complicated. New silos develop, the number of stakeholders involved in decision making increases, and interdependencies between functions multiply. The plethora of stakeholders, decision rights, processes, and policies slows down every decision and hinders collaboration across departments, reinforcing the silo effect. 74% of managers say that company complexity is hurting business performance
2017
Twelve Forces That Will Radically Change How Organizations Work
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Silencing is golden - A new era of medicine will come into view
Medical historians of the future will describe 2018 as the year that “advanced” medicines started to become a reality. It is hard, without the benefit of hindsight, to appreciate fully the long-term significance of any individual development. Nevertheless, it is clear from a pattern of expected events during 2018 that the world is on the threshold of an exciting medical future.
2018
The world in 2018
The Economist