31 Jul, 2014

12 Mega-Trends in Focus at Frost & Sullivan Conference in New Zealand

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AUCKLAND, New Zealand, July 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Mega trends are defined as transformative, global forces that define the future world with their far reaching impact on business, societies, economies, cultures and personal lives.

Frost & Sullivan’s report, ‘World’s Top Global Mega Trends To 2025 and Implications to Business, Society and Cultures’ identifies 12 of these trends that will drive growth and innovation in the world; Urbanisation Bricks & Clicks, Future Infrastructure Development, Smart is the New Green, Innovating to Zero, Health, Wellness and Wellbeing, Social Trends, New Business Models: Value for Many, Future of Mobility, Connectivity and Convergence, Beyond BRIC :The Next Game Changers, Future of Energy.

Manoj Menon, Senior Partner and Asia Pacific Managing Director, Frost & Sullivan (PRNewsFoto/Frost & Sullivan)

Manoj Menon, Senior Partner and Asia Pacific Managing Director, Frost & Sullivan says, “Society as the centre of all businesses, and how the society in turn is a driving force in shaping businesses today. Mega Trends have diverse meanings and impacts for different industries, companies, and individuals. Analysis of these mega trends and their implications forms an important component of a company’s future strategy, development, and innovation process, and impacts product and technology planning. It is important for any company or stakeholder in the market to understand and perceive changes that would arise from these futuristic forces of development and identify opportunities.”

Urbanisation and economic development are pushing the growth of megacities, particularly in developing economies. The top 25 cities in the world today account for half of the world’s wealth. By 2020, we will see the vast development of ‘Mega Cities’, ‘Mega Regions’ and ‘Mega Corridors’. Over 60% of world’s population is will live in cities that are networked and integrated. Smart Cities will create huge business opportunities with a market value of USD1.5 trillion by 2020. Smart city market participants will assume one or more of the four main roles in the ecosystem: integrators (the end-to-end service provider); network operators (the M2M and connectivity providers); product vendors (hardware and asset providers); and managed service providers (overseeing management/operation).

The ‘Bricks and Clicks’ concept will change the face of the retail industry by compelling retailers to transition from having a single/multiple channel to an integrated cross-channel model, merging the digital, virtual and physical into a single model. Menon elaborates, “This integrated channel will become the norm of the future, likely to be deployed by every retailer by 2025. Brick and mortar retailers are already enhancing IT infrastructure and logistics to widen their online presence to tap this growing market. Frost & Sullivan forecasts that online retail revenues will account for nearly 20% of total retail and reach a value of $4.3 trillion by 2025.”

Future Infrastructure Development examines areas such as high speed rail, deep sea mining, water and transport infrastructure, whilst ‘Green” will be replaced with “Smart” concepts that bring together smart cities, products and technologies.

Innovating to Zero is a radical future concept where the focus and development will shift toward products and technologies with a vision and target of “Innovate to Zero”; bringing social innovation to the forefront. This “Zero Concept” world will have cars with zero emissions, zero accidents and zero fatalities. Cities and buildings will want to be carbon neutral, whilst emerging technologies will strive toward innovating to zero beaches of security, zero accidents, zero fatalities.

Health, wellness and wellbeing are a vital mega trend as public health is becoming unaffordable. “The definition of healthcare will change as economies struggle to afford healthcare costs, which will affect 20 percent of a nation’s GDP in a developed world. Focus will shift to mass prevention and diagnoses and to wellness aspects of the mind, body and soul. The age-old model of treating symptoms will give way to more holistic solutions that involve early diagnosis of disease, methods that can predict future ailments, efforts to prevent disease in the first place and ongoing monitoring of patients to ensure medical intervention takes place at an early stage when it is generally cheaper to do so. Private health insurance schemes will change to reward individuals who stay healthy, and the private sector will increasingly sell gadgets, drugs and services that help them do so,” explains Menon.

Social trends that are anticipated to effect deep socioeconomic changes in our future society include a heterogeneous society, Generation-Y, women’s empowerment in for a She-economy, the rise of the middle class, an aging population and reverse brain drain.

The emergence of a global middle class of 5 billion people by 2020, interconnected via the internet is resulting in the creation of new “value for many” (VFM) business models. Entrepreneurs and businesses will be able allowed a “make one, sell many,” concept that will help drive economic growth in the coming decade. The concept implies that businesses can produce and sell the same product or service to the masses in both the developing and developed worlds using either a platform like the internet or through developing an affordable products strategy. The “value for many” business model drives innovation across a whole spectrum of industries, from low-cost flights to low-cost affordable healthcare products for the masses, to selling and scaling your business to the global market from day one.

The future of mobility will see city planning, energy and ICT coming together to define the future. “By 2020, over 90% of cars sold will be connected, car sharing will have 26.2 million members globally and 44 million users will subscribe to telematics based insurance worldwide, states Menon.

By 2020, there will be over 5 billion internet users, with over half of them accessing the internet over handheld tablet devices and 80 billion connected devices worldwide. This connectivity will spread to our daily lives bringing the three silos of work, home and our surrounding environment into one seamless experience termed as ‘connected living’. Through the ‘Internet of things’ in the home, work, and city environments, this Connectivity and Convergence brings about huge opportunities for growth in an eco-system estimated to be worth $731.70 billion by 2020. This market potential offers immense opportunities to telecom, M2M and software vendors; and existing player and new competitors alike will be experimenting with different types of New Business Models to capture a piece of this lucrative pie.

The future of energy will see the energy industry converge with several related industries to develop efficient and environment friendly solutions. Key trends will be the Smart Grid, the future ‘Energy Internet’, the contribution of shale gas in the U.S. gas supply to surpass 40 percent in the 2030s, deep sea drilling for oil to account for 20 percent of global oil production and technology for deep sea exploration to expand to deep sea mining. Micro grids and energy storage technologies will leverage second life from electric car batteries, and space-based solar power satellites may beam electricity to earth for the first time ever.

“Mega Trends are transformative global forces that will define our future world and its increasing pace of change with their far-reaching impact on business, economy, society, cultures, and personal lives. A critical element of Frost & Sullivan’s programme is the ‘Macro to Micro’ exercise, which entails taking each Mega Trend, creating scenarios, analysing impact to your business, and designing your future strategy for product and technology planning. In this way, the entire ecosystem of the Mega Trend can be understood, and the most important segment of your value chain can be identified, which will redefine businesses’ competitive position in the market” finishes Menon.

Manoj Menon presents these visionary insights showcasing the impact of these new Mega Trends as well as highlighting case studies of companies and a roadmap of global opportunities to 2025 in his GIL Keynote session on at GIL 2014 New Zealand (http://gil-events.gilcommunity.com/events/new-zealand/agenda/) at Villa Maria, Auckland on 28^th August, 2014. To enquire or register, please email djeremiah@frost.com directly with your full name, designation and company details.