Trends Identified
Over-regulation
42% of responding CEOs answered that they were 'extremely concerned'
2018
Global CEO survey
PWC
Outsourcing
As we gain in confidence in being able to collaborate effectively with outside firms and individuals, we are letting go of functions and processes that were once considered essential to retain in-house, increasingly outsourcing them to others to manage for us. Innovation and creativity are two areas where we will invite others to help us more and more, through means such as Engineering R&D outsourcing or through crowdsourcing, where we invite many people to help us discover our next product or service offering.
2012
The future
Steria
Outside-in Architecture
Finding the sweet spot between ‘need to share’ and ‘need to own’ For decades, businesses have typically been rewarded for consolidation around standard processes and stockpiling assets through people, technology and goods. Operations were assumed to be confined within organisational boundaries, with transactions viewed as short-lived events following well-defined steps. Systems were built primarily to enhance execution within their own self-contained scope of control. Conventional wisdom about these principles is changing, and it’s changing fast. Flexibility in operating and business models today is emerging to be a key differentiator. Markets and business conditions are shifting rapidly, necessitating new capabilities that can adapt to changing players, rules and desired outcomes. Sustaining innovation, both inside the organisation and within broader ecosystems, is emerging as a top priority. Many companies are discovering they need a new kind of leverage – capability leverage – to mobilise third parties that can add value. As a result, the traditional need to own is colliding with the emerging need to share, shifting solution architectures away from a siloed, enterprise-out design pattern. These new architectures are designed to anticipate service and people dependencies from the outside – and to require that data and systems be encapsulated for external consumption. Outside-in, not inside-out, is becoming the standard.
2012
Tech Trends 2012-Elevate IT for digital business
Deloitte
Other dimensions of inequalities
Although overall gender gaps in education, employment and political representation have narrowed globally, women continue to face disadvantages in access to work, economic assets and participation in private and public decision-making.
2017
Global trends
UNDP
Other commodities
Demand for food will rise due to growing population and growing per capita food consumption. However, the growth rates in world agriculture1) will fall to 1.5% p.a. by 2030, compared to 2.1-2.3% p.a. over the past four decades. The world's food production is even threatened to fall by 2030 as a result of the projected changes in the ecosystem due to climate change. Agricultural efficiency is at risk due to water scarcity and limited sources of phosphate, an important component of mineral fertilizer. Conflicts will arise over the use of agricultural products as food or energy. Price will determine use
2011
Trend compendium 2030
Roland Berger Strategy Consultants
Organs-on-chips
Outside of Hollywood special effects shops, you won’t find living human organs floating in biology labs. Set aside all the technical difficulties with sustaining an organ outside the body—full organs are too precious as transplants to use in experiments. But many important biological studies and practical drug tests can be done only by studying an organ as it operates. A new technology could fill this need by growing functional pieces of human organs in miniature, on microchips. In 2010, Donald Ingber from the Wyss Institute developed a lung-on-a-chip, the first of its kind. The private sector quickly jumped in, with companies such as Emulate, headed by Ingber and others from the Wyss Institute, forming partnerships with researchers in industry and government, including DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. So far, various groups have reported success making miniature models of the lung, liver, kidney, heart, bone marrow, and cornea. Others will certainly follow. Each organ-on-a-chip is roughly the size of a USB memory stick. It is made from a flexible, translucent polymer. Microfluidic tubes, each less than a millimeter in diameter and lined with human cells taken from the organ of interest, run in complex patterns within the chip. When nutrients, blood, and test compounds such as experimental drugs are pumped through the tubes, the cells replicate some of the key functions of a living organ. The chambers inside the chip can be arranged to simulate the particular structure of an organ tissue, such as a tiny air sac in a lung. Air running through a channel, for example, can then very accurately simulate human breathing. Meanwhile, blood laced with bacteria can be pumped through other tubes, and scientists can then observe how the cells respond to the infection, all without any risk to a person. The technology allows scientists to see biological mechanisms and physiological behaviors never before seen. Organ microchips will also give a boost to companies developing new medicines. Their ability to emulate human organs allows for more realistic and accurate tests of drug candidates. Last year, for example, one group used a chip to mimic the way that endocrine cells secrete hormones into the blood stream and used this to perform crucial tests on a diabetes drug. Other groups are exploring the use of organs-on-chips in personalized medicine. In principle, these microchips could be constructed using stems cells derived from the patients themselves, and then tests could be run to identify individualized therapies that are more likely to succeed. There is reason to hope that miniature organs could greatly reduce the pharmaceutical industry’s reliance on animal testing of experimental compounds. Millions of animals are sacrificed each year to such tests, and the practice provokes heated controversy. Ethical considerations aside, it has proven to be immensely wasteful—animal trials rarely provide reliable insights into how humans will react to the same drug. Tests done on miniaturized human organs might do better. Military and biodefence researchers see the potential for organs-on-chips to save lives in a different way. The simulated lung, and other devices like it, could be the next big step in testing responses to biological, chemical or radiological weapons. It isn’t possible to do this today, for obvious ethical reasons.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Organised Civil Society and Governance: Trends and Challenges
Advances in technology, wealth and income concentration, shifting demography, migration flows, under employment and climate change are transforming our societies. The (dis)empowered citizen, as introduced by the World Economic Forum 2016 Global Risks Report, describes the tensions between the growing cyber connectivity empowering citizens with more information and means of communications against the increasing feeling of exclusion from meaningful participation to decision-making among citizens and civil society.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)
Organic electronics and photovoltaics
Organic electronics – a type of printed electronics – is the use of organic materials such as polymers to create electronic circuits and devices. In contrast to traditional (silicon-based) semiconductors that are fabricated with expensive photolithographic techniques, organic electronics can be printed using low-cost, scalable processes such as ink jet printing, making them extremely cheap compared with traditional electronics devices, both in terms of the cost per device and the capital equipment required to produce them. While organic electronics are currently unlikely to compete with silicon in terms of speed and density, they have the potential to provide a significant edge in cost and versatility. The cost implications of printed mass-produced solar photovoltaic collectors, for example, could accelerate the transition to renewable energy.
2013
The top 10 emerging technologies for 2013
World Economic Forum (WEF)