Trends Identified
Master the new logic of competition
Internet and mobile technology ushered in the information age and profoundly affected technology-intensive and consumer-facing industries such as electronics, communications, entertainment, and retail. But the emerging wave of technology—including sensors, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence—will turn every business into an information business. The combination of an exponential increase in data, better tools to mine insights from that data, and a fast-changing business environment means that companies will increasingly need to, and be able to, compete on the rate of learning. Scale will take on a new significance in the learning economy. Instead of the “economies of scale” that today’s leaders grew up with—based on a predictable reduction of marginal production costs across a relatively uniform offering—tomorrow’s leaders will pursue “economies of learning,” based on identifying and fulfilling each customer’s changing needs by leveraging data and technology. The arenas of competition will also look different in the 2020s, requiring new perspectives and capabilities. The familiar picture of a small number of companies producing a common end product and competing within well-defined industry boundaries will be replaced by one where competition and collaboration occur within and between ecosystems. Because ecosystems are fluid and dynamic, and not perfectly controllable even by the orchestrator, companies will need to be much more externally oriented, to deploy influence indirectly through platforms and marketplaces, and to coevolve with ecosystem partners. Orchestrators of ecosystems can leverage the assets of other participants, and ecosystem-based competition tends to have a winner-take-all nature. These factors are already causing rapidly rising valuations relative to tangible assets for the top companies, as well as an increasing gap between the profitability of high and low performers. But there is not yet any playbook for how to harness this premium: practice is racing ahead of theory, and pioneers who can crack the code on ecosystems will be greatly advantaged. Finally, companies will increasingly compete on resilience. Accelerating technological change, political gridlock, a shifting geopolitical power map, the increased scrutiny of business, and the polarization of society all point to an era of protracted uncertainty, in which corporate life cycles are likely to continue shrinking. Companies will therefore need to worry not only about the competitiveness of their immediate game but also about the durability of that game and their ability to weather unanticipated shocks. Most of today’s incumbents—designed for relatively stable, classical business environments—are not well adapted for this more dynamic environment. Therefore, today’s leaders need to fundamentally reinvent the organizational model in order to become future winners.
2018
Winning the ’20s: A Leadership Agenda for the Next Decade
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Mass Migration
Immigration, border migration, demographic changes, and increases in the number of refugees are causing massive demographic shifts, affecting cultural assimilation, integration, and economic development.
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
Marketplaces Everywhere
Get ready for marketplaces everywhere. The fourth generation of marketplace business models will be focused on the service sector. Three converging trends will drive their rapid expansion. Firstly, the over five billion connected devices and nearly 230 billion app downloads expected in 2019 will lead to an increase in mobile based marketplace models for services. China and India will lead the way here, primarily because of their growing app economy. Secondly, technologies like blockchain will transform online payment systems. Thirdly, a surging on-demand economy will fuel the expansion and diversification of digital service marketplaces. Watch out for a series of niche service marketplaces—adult and child healthcare, vehicle ride-hailing services or vehicle after sales spares & services, for example—as a result of the focus on personalization and customization.
2019
Top 10 Trends For 2019
Forbes
Marketing platforms
Digital media, advertising platforms
2016
Disruptive technologies barometer
KPMG
Marketing and HR: unlikely allies
Brand marketers and HR join forces to drive greater value from the inside out, from employee to customer.As demand for more connectivity increases across all touchpoints in our lives, the push for end-to-end experience design will require closer relationships between people and product. Employee engagement, employee satisfaction, and employee retention are key to those relationships. Marketing and HR departments that partner together and blur traditional functional siloes are better positioned to attract, engage, and outperform their competition.With the rise in demand for innovative, creative, and branded employee experiences, leaders from HR and marketing will be 2019’s most critical power team. This new emphasis on the integration between customer experience and employee experience will require diversifying and attracting new types of talent to those roles.
2019
The top trends for brands to watch in 2019
Landor
Mapping the microbiome will protect us from bad bacteria.
Within five years, food safety inspectors around the world will gain a new superpower: the ability to understand how millions of microbes coexist within the food supply chain. These microbes—some healthy for human consumption, others not—are everywhere –in foods at farms, factories, and grocery stores. The ability to constantly and cheaply monitor the behaviors of microbes at every stage of the supply chain represents a huge leap in food safety.
2019
5 in 5 - Research predicts five innovations that will change our lives within five years.
IBM Research
Manufacturing may be more local and efficient
When it comes to light manufacturing, synthetic biology and 3D printing have similar characteristics: they both support the local production of a “product” from a digital file using simple low-cost equipment; they enable very low-cost replica on of a small or large quantity; and they allow the user to easily experiment and customize the product. Currently, 3D printing uses close to 30 different materials with growing complexity (e.g., Boeing prints 22 000 different airline parts). Soon this will include clothes, many consumer goods and electronic gadgets, to name a few. Synthetic biology will likely produce liquids, solids and industrial chemicals for pharmaceuticals, medicine, paper
and building supplies and other goods yet to be imagined, in small or large quantities, and may produce raw materials on-site for local manufacturing plants.
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
Managing man and machine
Some worry that globalisation will take away their jobs and they’re even more nervous about the impact of technology. Twenty years ago, there were fewer than 700,000 industrial robots worldwide; today, there are 1.8 million, and the number could soar to 2.6 million by 2019.9 Manufacturing output has simultaneously risen, but employment in the sector has fallen in various advanced economies.10 Technology has been one – although by no means the only – cause of these changes. Robots are now entering the services arena; 3-D printing can be used to make cars and aircraft; biotechnology will change the way we grow crops, produce food and manufacture medicines; and nanotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) will affect numerous industries. All this could happen much more quickly than we expect. Just look at the advent of self-driving trucks to make deliveries, or Amazon’s new Go store, which uses technology to track what customers put in their shopping carts and bill them automatically when they walk out, eliminating the need for human cashiers.11
2017
20th Annual global CEO survey
PWC
Managing Global Natural Disaster Strategies
Hurricanes, mudslides, earthquakes and floods battered the world with unprecedented frequency and ferocity in 2017. As the social and economic toll mounts, prepare for consortiums of businesses, municipalities and insurance companies working together in 2018 to take more aggressive steps and employ innovative strategies to minimize the impact of these natural disasters.
2018
Top 10 Tech Trends For 2018
Forbes
Managing by Anticipation
Decision-makers have always been faced with the tasks of addressing crises, leading change and responding to the unexpected. Recently, however, unexpected and constant change has become the norm, while the interconnections between separate and distinct crises are more tightly knit than ever. Technological innovations have amplified these trends to an unprecedented degree in terms of pace, scope, complexity and impact. And, while some crises are already loud and visible, others are less easy to spot or to predict, although they may potentially be more toxic in the long run.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)