HP Innovation Journal Issue 02: Spring 2016 | Page 5
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Two-thirds
of the
population
Two-Thirds
of the
Population
will live
in cities
2050
Will Live
in Cities
by by 2050
1950
2050
=10% of the
world population
There’s so much change happening around
us these days that it’s easy to forget the
speed at which things are changing.
We now have more computing power in
our pocket than all of NASA had in 1969
to put the first man on the moon. India
sent a spacecraft to Mars for less money
than it took Hollywood to make the movie
Gravity. 1 It took Uber a mere four years to hit
$10 Billion in gross revenue. 2 And Artificial
Intelligence took just 42 hours to solve the
100-year-old mystery of how flatworms
regenerate body parts. 3
This pace of change will continue to accel-
erate at warp speed, with more change
expected in the next 15 years than in all of
human history to date.
So how does a company like HP stay ahead of
all this change, to innovate, adapt, reinvent
and engineer experiences for a future that
promises to look very different from today?
While we can’t know what the future will
hold, we can look to the major socio-eco-
nomic, demographic and technological
trends occurring across the globe to help
guide us: megatrends that we believe will
have a sustained, transformative impact on
the world in the years ahead - on business-
es, societies, economies, cultures and our
personal lives.
At HP, we’ve identified four major meg-
atrends: Rapid Urbanization, Changing
Demographics, Hyper Globalization, and
Accelerated Innovation.
Rapid urbanization
By 2030 there will be 8.5 billion peopl e
walking the earth. 4 97% of that population
growth will be in emerging economies, 5 and
most of these people will choose to call
cities their home. By 2025, 5B people will
live in cities, 2.5B of them in Asia. 6
And as people move to cities, our cities
will get larger, and we’ll have more of
them, including megacities in places many
of us have never heard of today. In 1990
there were only 10 cities with more than
Rural
Population
Urban
Population
Rural (%)
Urban (%)
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050
70
66
63
61
57
53
48
44
40
37
34
30
34
37
39
43
47
52
56
60
63
66
World Urbanization
Prospects:
Revision,
United
Nations
Population Division
DIvision
Source: Source:
World Urbanization
Prospects:
2014 2014
Revision,
United
Nations
Population
10 million people, 7 but by 2030 we will
have 41 such megacities. 8 Meanwhile, the
area of urbanized land could triple globally
from 2000 to 2030. This is equivalent to
adding an area bigger than Manhattan
every single day. 9
With bigger cities come major economic
growth. By 2025, urbanization will welcome
an additional 1.8B consumers to the world
economy, 95% of them in emerging mar-
kets. 10 And consumers in emerging markets
are forecast to spend $30T in 2025, up from
$12T in 2010. 11 However, urbanization is
not only driving economic growth, it is also
changing how we buy and consume prod-
ucts and services, propelling the sharing
economy and convenience-based services.
But urbanization is also having a toll on the
environment. If nothing changes by 2030,
mankind would need the resources of two
planets to sustain its current lifestyle. 12
And so sustainability becomes an even
more important theme, for consumers and
businesses alike.
How can HP address some of the oppor-
tunities and challenges posed by rapid
urbanization? Given that city economies are
becoming as big as country economies,
should HP consider putting in place City
Managers for top tier cities of the future?
How can we reduce the energy used across
the lifetime of our products? How can we of-
fer people living in cities more convenience
through new services?
Changing demographics
Simultaneously, changing demographics will
dramatically shift the tapestry of our society.
As fertility rates decline and life expectancy
increases, the composition of our popu-
lation, and our workforce, will shift older.
By 2060 we’ll have 3B more people over
the age of 30 than today. 13 More and more
countries are becoming super-aged, mean-
ing that more than 20% of their population
are over the age of 65. 14 And by 2030 we’ll
have twice as many people over 65, nearly
1B. 15 China is a perfect example of this phe-
nomenon. Today 26% of their population is
over the age of 55. By 2030 that number will
grow to 43%. 16 To deal with this shift they
recently rescinded their one child policy
after 35 years.
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Innovation Journal Issue 2
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