Innovation Journal Issue 8: Upcoming Megatrends 2018 Report | HP® Official Site

In our next issue, we will deep-dive into HP’s third-annual Megatrends report, a global look at how socioeconomic and technology trends are shaping experiences, industries, and markets of the future.

Over the past year, we’ve seen some trends accelerate, new ones emerge, and have started to witness the convergence of a few trends, creating even greater impact and shifts. Simultaneously, new disruptive technologies have come to the forefront that have the potential to significantly reshape some of the Megatrends over the next 15 to 20 years, and transform global value chains and economics.

As we’ve discussed in previous issues, by 2030 there will be an estimated 8.5 billion people walking the earth. A large portion of this population will be made up of the additional 1 billion people joining the middle class, predominantly in Asia and emerging markets. This new consuming class will represent $30 trillion in spending power, residing largely in urban epicenters. To support them, we will need to spend approximately 10% of the global domestic product (GDP) between now and then on new infrastructure.

At the same time, we are going to see tremendous drags on the economy, including human and natural resource strains. A third of the global population will be over 65. This will lead to a decline in the number of workers per retiree, thus putting a strain on productivity and output.

Coupled with growing resource constraints—food, energy, water, rare minerals—developed economies will be struggling with the lack of resources needed to drive productivity and fuel future growth, in an effort to battle global power shifts. And emerging economies will look for innovations to help them leapfrog their own infrastructure, government, and business model limitations.

To reshape our constrained future into an efficient one, we will need to make radical changes and rely on disruptive innovation to pave the way. Efficient productivity will be the golden ticket to drive growth in our resource-constrained world of 2030 and beyond.

So how can we achieve these radically efficient productivity gains? There are three approaches that we believe can have the same revolutionary impact on productivity that we were able to achieve with the inventions of steel and steam in the 1800s, and petroleum, antibiotics, and electricity in the 1900s.

The first is the intersection of biological and computing technologies known as BioConvergence. BioConvergence enables us to make things using the principles, materials, and processes of nature and the advancements in digital technology. Thanks to this blending of cyber, bio and physical, we have the ability to efficiently produce and customize products using local resources in ways never before imagined. We’ve already seen lithium-ion batteries made with alfalfa seeds and pine resin. And we may one day see the entire Internet backed up on a single gram of DNA. The productivity gains across the supply and demand chain are limitless.

Just as cyber and bio technologies can come together to help us produce products more efficiently, they also can help us work and live more efficiently. This type of convergence can allow us to become Beyond Human, augmenting our abilities and helping us overcome limitations and obstacles. We are already augmenting our minds thanks to technologies like Siri and Alexa, and our bodies with the use of exoskeletons and smart pills. But these are just the beginning of what will be possible—allowing us to work and live longer, smarter and more efficiently.

The final approach looks at efficiency gains in how we do business and bring products to market. Frictionless Business combines disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, Blockchain, and the Internet of All Things, to increase transaction efficiency, enabling a more dynamic negotiation across the entire value network—sourcing, design, demand generation, and product delivery. A dynamic supply chain has the potential to dramatically reduce and eliminate points of friction from design through production and sales, reducing what are currently years of production, down to weeks or days.

Taken together, these revolutionary approaches will transform how we make things, how we sell things, and how we work and live. They have the power to reshape some of the trends leading us down a path of resource constraint and limited growth. Instead, they’ll point us to an efficient future, achieving radical productivity gains, creating resource abundance, and improving our quality of life for years to come.