By 2018, organizations investing in IoT-based cognitive situational awareness or operational sensing will witness improvements of up to 30% in critical process cycle times.
Through 2020, a lack of data science professionals will prevent 75% of organizations from achieving the full potential of IoT.
Most Recent Forecasts (of 269,648) Tracked by “Shaping Tomorrow’s” AI robot, Athena, and sorted by PESTLE Categories – Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Lifestyle and Environmental.
Forecast: Global renewable energy prices will be competitive with fossil fuels by 2019 or 2020.
Trend: Environmental
Sector: Energy
Insight and Source: “The Twin Revolutions of Clean Energy & AI will conflate as investment and innovation cut the cost of renewable energy, the sector is set to boom” by Dr. Nasser Saidi
Related Forecasts:
- “Renewable energy will continue to grow more rapidly than fossil fuels over the next two decades.
- The United States will endeavor to work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently and help deploy renewable and other clean energy sources.
- Renewable transport fuels of non-biological origin, waste-based fossil fuels and renewable electricity will have to be at least 1.5% in 2021.
- Renewables will be cost competitive with fossil fuels by 2020, but long-term targets could drive demand further and accelerate cost declines.
- Fossil fuels will remain a key element of the global energy mix over the coming decades but marginal growth is already coming from an increasing array of renewable technologies.”
Forecast: VMware estimates 50% of operations will be cloud-based by 2021.
Trend: Technology 
Sector: Cloud
Insight and Source: “VMware: Decades of hybrid cloud ahead” Antony Adshead Storage Editor
- “VMware estimates 50% of operations will be cloud-based – public and private – by 2021.
- By 2030 the public cloud will achieve tipping point.
- Gelsinger said VMware calculations indicate a 19%/52%/29% split between traditional, public and private cloud in that year.
- Gelsinger said we face, “the biggest transformation in the history of IT” as businesses embark on digital transformation.
- That may be the case, but by those calculations it’s going to take almost a decade and a half to just about reach halfway.
- So, another way of reading VMware’s vision as explained at VMworld is that the transformation to the cloud will actually be very long and drawn-out and that for the foreseeable future – probably two decades, even by VMware’s projections – the most mission-critical workloads, such as financial transactions, will not be ready for the off-prem cloud.”
Forecast: 90 percent of organizations will adopt hybrid strategies by 2020.
Trend: Organizations, Technology 
Sector: Cybersecurity, Digital Transformation
Insight and Source: “Cylance® Extends AI-Driven Security to Hybrid Environments and Private Networks With CylanceHYBRID and CylanceON-PREM”
Related Forecasts:
- “By 2018, organizations investing in IoT-based cognitive situational awareness or operational sensing will witness improvements of up to 30% in critical process cycle times.
- By 2018, more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies will have deployed IT-supported Google Chromebooks across their organizations.
- By 2021, 50% of large organizations will have integrated disparate business and IT PMOs into enterprise EPMO hubs to enable digital transformation.
- Fifty-three percent of organizations have already started their RPA journeys that’s expected to increase to 72 percent in the next two years.
- In Europe the number of data scientists required by organisations by 2020 is expected to be 346,000.”
Forecast: By 2018, organizations investing in IoT-based cognitive situational awareness or operational sensing will witness improvements of up to 30% in critical process cycle times.
Trend: Technology, Internet Of Things
Sector: Information Technology
Insight and Source: “Digital twins help to reshape manufacturing“. by Ashok Kumar
Related Forecasts:
- “IoT and AI-are expected to have the largest impact on TMT organizations over the next five years.
- Organizations are predicted to spend US$1.5 billion on IoT security in 2018.
- Gartner calculates that organizations will spend $1.5 billion on IoT security products and services in 2018.
- Professional services will account for $946 million of the $1.5 billion in total that organizations will spend on IoT security this year.
- Through 2020, a lack of data science professionals will prevent 75% of organizations from achieving the full potential of IoT.”
Forecast: In 2017, Roche’s orphan drugs market share accounted for 8.2 percent of the world’s market and is expected to decrease down to 5.2 percent by 2024.
Trend: Healthcare
Sector: Pharmaceuticals
Insight and Source: “Top 20 pharmaceutical companies worldwide by orphan drug revenue market share in 2024 compared to 2017”
Related Forecasts:
- “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will require Medicare Part D prescription drug plans to implement a seven-day initial prescribing limit beginning in 2019.
- Yuana Yuana, PhD, in the Department of Biomedical Technology at the University Medical Center Utrecht (The Netherlands) will study Drug delivery strategies using drug-loaded extracellular vesicles generated by microbubble-assisted ultrasound.
- There is widespread speculation that the Amazon joint venture will attempt to cut out the “middle man” in the US drug prescription and reimbursement system.
- The FDA should remove Takeda’s gout drug Uloric (febuxostat) from the U.S. market after findings released this March show significant deadly heart risks.
- The Global Orphan Drug market is estimated at $145.89 million in 2016 and is expected to reach $265.63 million by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 10.5% from 2016 to 2022.”
Forecast: Self-driving cars could save $325 bn by 2020 by avoiding accidents and reducing fuel costs.
Trend: Political, Technical
Sector: Automotive, Autonomous Vehicles
Insight and Source: “Driverless cars: Let technology take the wheel”
Related Forecasts:
- “Coal severance taxes are expected to decline an additional 5.2 percent in FY 2018-19 to $3.6 million and 5.8 percent to $3.4 million in FY 2019-20 as the demand for coal as a fuel for electricity production declines.
- Fuel tax collections in Colorado are expected to grow 1.6 percent and reach $639.3 million.
- Sustainable biofuels could provide 27 percent of the world’s total transport fuel by 2050 and avoid around 2.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year.
- The Trump administration’s decision to weaken fuel efficiency standards could have “serious consequences” for Colorado’s effort to meet its clean energy goals by increasing carbon dioxide emissions from the state’s vehicle fleet by about 1.9 million tons a year by 2030.
- Weakening fuel oil prices as a result of IMO 2020 could see oil competing again in power generation.”
Forecast: Grouping and infectious disease screening market is projected to reach US$ 7,078.3 Mn by 2026 from US$ 3,079.8 Mn in 2017.
Trend: Healthcare
Sector: Healthcare, Disease
Insight and Source: “Global Blood Typing, Grouping and Infectious Disease Screening Market 2016-2018 & 2026” PRNewswire
Related Forecasts:
- “A4NH researchers from LSHTM are working with colleagues from Africa Rice and others to explore how rice intensification can be achieved without increasing the risk of disease.
- Advances and research in congenital heart disease and significant research funding for various projects are creating enormous opportunities for the global congenital heart disease market in coming years.
- Environmental groups said they support the NDP’s criticism of open-pen fish farms and a new requirement for Aboriginal consent, but the 2022 deadline is too far off and threatens to further endanger coastal salmon with the risk of disease.
- The global Polycystic Kidney Disease Treatment market is valued at million US$ in 2017 and will reach million US$ by the end of 2025.
- The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the health of millions could be threatened by increases in malaria, water-borne disease and malnutrition.”
Forecast: The global edge computing market is expected to reach$ 20,495.24 million by 2026 from$ 7,983.61 million in 2017 at a CAGR of 11%.
Trend: Technology
Sector: Information Technology
Insight and Source: “HPE to Invest $4 Billion for Advancement of Edge Computing“.Zacks Equity Research.
Related Forecasts:
- “A substantial portion of the estimated 46 billion industrial and enterprise devices connected in 2023 will rely on edge computing.
- More than 20% of global enterprises will have deployed serverless computing technologies by 2020.
- Yale’s next wave of quantum computing research will get a boost from a $16 million grant from the U.S. Army Research Office.
- Global Cloud Computing market size was 36700 million US$ and it is expected to reach 285300 million US$ by the end of 2025.
- Cloud computing spending is expected to grow at a whopping rate of 6 x the rate of IT spending through 2020 and it is found to be growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009.“
Steps:
6) Anticipate changing circumstances and economic cycles.
7) Persist and pivot to navigate external threats and opportunities.
17) Sketch out your trajectory in 5-year timeframes. Will we fall into another recession? Absolutely. Will you be ready this time with future-proofed strategies?
19) Anticipate the growing shifts in life and business. Nobody wants to swim upstream if the current is moving everything in the opposite direction. Clue your fans in.