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10 trends that will drive the next revolution

The year 2015 was filled with disruptions. Social media went commercial with buy buttons on Facebook and Twitter. Tesla’s Powerwall changed the energy power game (despite Opec’s prediction that 94% of cars will still be oil-powered in 2040), and a burger was lab-grown to “bleed”.

At the same time 52 of the largest companies in China signed the China Accord to reshape the global built environment on green principles; driverless cars hit the road (Google is only one of 25 brands that want to occupy this space); and Nasa confirmed that there is water on Mars (and that astronauts ate food they grew in space).

In 2016, we will transit through one of the most disruptive, turbulent times in human history.

As new concepts accelerate in every direction (like an outwardly accelerating universe), new constellations of trends will redefine the way we live, work, play and learn across various fields.

Over the past three months, the team of trend researchers, futurists, ethnographers and inspiration writers at consultancy Lacuna, have debated and mapped drivers to connect these dots for our clients and unpack our latest 2016 Trend Map across 10 areas.

1. The natural environment

For the first time, we are in agreement that mass extinction is a trend. It is no longer Mother Nature, but us humans who are governing the flow of our ecosystem.

With the recent adoption of the Paris Agreement, multinational brands are looking at ways to keep global temperature rise at less than two degrees and become more innovative around water, energy, supply chain and land issues.

Trends on the rise are e-waste, climate-resilient design, smart homes and cities, clean shipping, electro-mobility and renewable energy.

We see water (and protein) becoming a luxury and the concept of waste food recycled into imperfect produce.

The key question: What will be different in your business by 2020 if the global temperature rise is kept below 1.5 degrees? What can you do to anticipate and facilitate the shifts?

For Philips, an opportunity was to venture into home farming with the goal of enabling everyone to reconnect with the natural process of growing food in the home (and office) kitchen.

With the growing consumer-as-maker trend, it may not be improbable for homes to become micro-retailers in the future, leaving supply chains to cater for the farm-to-table needs of the hospitality, tourism, healthcare and education sectors in more localised ways. 

2. Banking and financial services

The more Millennials and members of Generation Z (those born in the late 1990s or early 2000s) get their way to meet rising aspirations, the more Fortune 500 brands are being thrown into a mid-life crisis. Nowhere is this more evident than in banking and financial services.

Among the new trends are virtual banking, data ownership, m-commerce, loyalty schemes, wearable payments and the decentralisation of architecture through blockchain technology.

While technology is changing the mechanisms by which we create, store, transact and protect value, the tenet of transactional transparency remains central to enhancing trust, risk and security necessary for the common good.

As the year began, MasterCard took a leap to strategically reposition itself for the Internet of Things (IoT) and launched the Grocery app, which is pre-loaded on Samsung’s Family Hub Fridge.

This put the bank in the kitchen, enables the home to become a micro-retailer, opens a new way of customer engagement via home appliances and has made Samsung a customer of retail brands as well as a data analytics company of the future.

With personal data rising as a currency and driving force of the knowledge society, protecting one’s digital DNA is a growing democratic issue and transparent ethical frameworks are needed especially to protect the underbanked population in emerging markets.

3. Food and nutrition

With new food trends such as 3D printing, veganism, flexi-diets, traceability and imperfectionism, companies need to balance the modern consumer’s desire for novelty with a commitment to ethics, transparency and health.

In an ideal world, Lacuna’s innovation architects would only help companies find ways to produce products that are natural and organic, using sustainable ingredients, with natural plant extracts and clean labelling.

But food production will have to be increased by at least 75% in the next two decades – while at the same time becoming a medicine that helps curb non-communicable diseases that result from the interplay between our genetics, lifestyle choices and environment.

Biotechnology and nanotechnology innovations are needed to restructure food and food ingredients by manipulating matter at the atomic, molecular and supramolecular scale.

On the horizon, we see new creative, synthetic food concepts to give final products new chemical properties.

With the recent announcement of four new elements to the periodic scale, the permutations for nanotech may be infinite.

4. Healthcare

Nanobiotech and bionanotech present a $117bn opportunity in healthcare. Coupled with the IoT, wearables and robotics, these advancements are driving a Copernican revolution in life science.

Some tech trends, like DIY health, are enabling a power shift to enable patients to have more control and access to information.

At the same time, consumers are re-evaluating their lifestyle choices in more mindful ways.

More affluent consumers are switching off from their digital devices to avoid contracting the Digital Obesity disease. They are compartmentalising their day to experience more of the real, rather than Digital Self.

With leading scientists such as Stephen Hawking warning that artificial intelligence (AI) poses a real threat to humanity, we believe technology should be used to augment rather than replace human capability.

There are ways to ensure that AI does not supersede biological intelligence – we could use chip implants to increase our brain power beyond its 5% average, chemically enhance biological neural networks and incorporate mind expansion programmes from early childhood.

5. Information technology

This year, we will see the IoT accelerate as more than 2bn smartphone users connect to wearables and virtual assistants.

Conversational commerce is growing as AI is becoming more anticipatory and responsive especially in retail, media and financial services.

2016 will see the rise of the use of virtual reality, 3D holograms, haptic technology, biometrics, 3D printing and home robots. 

6. Media and entertainment

This year we may say goodbye to the TV set as we know it. Video-quakes (a phenomenon that has seen consumers abandoning traditional satellite and cable services altogether) and multi-channel fluidity have turned the box into a dinosaur.

Sharp has already sold its North American TV business to Hisense, Panasonic is closing its TV factories and Sony is thinking about getting out of television altogether.

Meanwhile, Samsung is enabling its high-end smart TVs to double as hubs for its IoT technology dubbed SmartThings.

With the launch of on-demand internet streaming, such as Netflix, YouTube will have more competition in 2016 for the attention span of Millennials and Generation Z.

7. Marketing and advertising

As today’s youth consumer is more creative, curious and expressive, they value novel, sensorial and immersive experiences and are willing to pay a premium for it.

The notion that humans are spiritual beings having an embodied experience (as if our life is a video game), is part of a growing global worldview.

The most popular video games, like Minecraft, are embedded with trends such as broadcast self, personalisation, collaborative consumption, and crowdsourced communities.

By using a trends-based approach to gamification, the experience becomes more rewarding, engaging and fun.

In 2016, we are seeing gamification moving into education as experiential education and experiential marketing become mainstream.

This will open a multiverse of innovation opportunity spaces for new, experiential, multi-channel engagements, especially when combined with virtual reality.

Brands are embracing transmedia storytelling as a way of telling stories across a variety of platforms using live experiences and mediated campaigns.

8. Retail and the supply chain

To adapt to constantly evolving consumer demands and unmet needs, retailers are embracing technology, sustainability, multi-channel personalisation and growing the experiential value of bricks-and-mortar stores.

With business-to-business (B2B) online retailing projected to grow to $6.7tr by 2020, how brands create new connections across digital channels and devices with customers and business partners will be key as the virtual and real spaces feed off each other.

And with 3D printing proliferating into a cheaper way to manufacture anything from food to appliances and cars – every home of the future may become a maker space serviced by roving drones (especially with Amazon moving into this space).

9. Society

Rising social trends include consumer slacktivism, big brother, too much choice, women redefined, multi-generational living and flexible workplaces.

While Lacuna is deeply concerned about the growing plight of refugees displaced due to rising conflict, we are hopeful of a social renewal by Generation Z – and welcome the rise in identity pluralism, gender fluidity and slow living.

We certainly need more sustainable innovations inspired by green trends, conscious living and the goal of creating a more inclusive world.

10. Transport and energy

In transport, rising trends include drones, e-mobility, smart cars, intermodal devices, bike culture and connected mobility.

Now that the bank is in the kitchen and drivers are able to talk to their cars while cooking (or talk to their fridge while driving), Lacuna’s concern is that humans may lose any chance of staying in control as the probable future of a Singularity is becoming real.

Already, the Nevada department of motor vehicles in the US has issued the first licences for driverless cars for three Mercedes Benz models to drive themselves, passenger drones are in prototype and intelligent materials are opening new forms of mobile media through car interiors, windows and lighting systems.

By 2017, we might reach the tipping point when new-world leaders – such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple – kick-start the global economy into a steady upswing.

This article originally appeared in the 10 March 2016 edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here

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