HP Innovation Journal Issue 08: Winter 2017 | Page 34

Upcoming Megatrends 2018 Report: When trends converge How new technology innovations and converging trends will reshape our future By Doug Warner, VP and Global Head of Tech Vision & Strategy, HP I n 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 ex- periences, 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 dis- cussed in pre- vious issues, by 2030 there will be an estimated 8.5 billion peo- ple walking the ea r t h . A la rge portion of this population will be made up of the additional 1 billion people joining the mid- dle class, pre- d o m i n a n t ly i n Asia and emerg- ing markets. This new consuming 30 Innovation Journal · Issue 8 · Winter 2017 class will represent $30 trillion in spend- ing power, residing largely in urban epi- centers. 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 con- straints — food, energy, water, rare minerals  —   d eveloped economies will be struggling with the lack of resourc- es needed to drive productivity and fuel future growth, in an effort to bat- tle global power shifts. And emerging economies will look for innovations to help them leapfrog their own infrastruc- ture, government, and business model limitations. To reshape our constrained future into an efficient one, we will need to make radical changes and rely on disrup- tive 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