In the context of the research topic GameChanger, the Forseight team identifies developments that have the potential to completely change the rules of existing markets and companies.
The world continues to evolve – new technologies are discovered, political decisions are taken, and social trends emerge. To prepare Evonik for these changes, Foresight has made “GameChanger” its focus topic 2017/2018. On the basis of extensive criteria, Foresight has identified 24 game changers and developed action areas through which Evonik can prepare itself optimally for future developments. This enables the company, for example, to recognize negative market influences at an early stage, to protect itself from these influences, and to make optimal use of opportunities in new growth markets.
For Foresight to identify a change as a game changer, the following criteria must be met: The change must reasonably be expected to occur within 25 years and it must have a visible effect on humans, the planet, or entrepreneurial profits. It must also have long-term effects and not be just a temporary phenomenon. For the Foresight team, game changers can also be events, developments, or technologies. They do not include people or companies. Examples from the past include the steam engine, the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the internet including social media—in some cases, these developments caused lasting changes to entire societies.
Designed Genes: Gene editing defeats diseases and brings species back to life
The age of the genomics is about to start. Process automation by new machines and the help of advanced data analytics have achieved faster and cost-effective genome sequencing rates. Scientists are now able to analyze a person's entire genome for less than USD1,000. Within the next five to ten years, costs are expected to drop to below USD10.
The first successful mapping of the human genome in 2003 has already triggered a breathtaking technological revolution in the field of health care. Over the next decades, health care could change from a treatment-oriented system to a prevention-oriented system with personalized diagnostics and treatments. Swift and cheap DNA analyses will make it possible to diagnose susceptibilities to diseases long before they have established themselves in a person's body. Consequently, treatments can be based on a unique genetic information.
Revolutionary gene editing tools (especially the CRISPR/Cas-system) allow researchers to edit, remove or switch-off genes with unprecedented precision, efficiency and flexibility but clearly also raise ethical issues. This could enable scientists to develop new types of drugs and cure genetic diseases, engineer new synthetic organisms, bring extinct species back to life or eliminate them. Potentially even including bringing back to life.
FUTURE FACT
In 2015, Chinese researchers created an extra-muscular beagle through genome engineering. Miniature pigs are also on sale as pets, for USD 1,600 each.
Cash is Going Virtual: More convenience or just more surveillance?
Cash is losing relevance as a payment method. This development can for example be seen in countries like Sweden where bills and coins just represent 2 % of GDP compared to the Euro area where it accounts for 10 %. The ongoing elimination of large-value bills worldwide underlines this development, e.g. the planned issues stop of the 500 Euro bill.
Key drivers of the change towards a cashless society are opportunities to lower costs, to improve convenience and possible crime prevention effects. Cost savings arise from a reduction of the logistics of cash, specifically transport and safe storage. New convenient payment methods, such as mobile payments and contactless card payments are also rising, making it easier to let go of cash. The crime prevention effect comes from the fact that without cash some crimes, such as tax evasion, illicit work, drug transactions and bribery, are more difficult and expensive to commit.
Differences in adoption of cashless payments are large. The reasons range from lacking financial services and technology, to the fact that some cultures place a high value on notes and coins as such. For instance, in Japan cash is an important cultural symbol, with an important role in religion. Thus 86 % of payments are made in cash compared to 75 % worldwide. Moreover, the rise of cash less societies brings concerns for privacy as transactions become traceable.
FUTURE FACT
In January 2016, Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan predicted that cash will be eliminated within 10 years.
Energy Everywhere: Energy becomes available whenever and wherever needed
New ways of storing energy more efficiently and cost effectively not only transform mobility and electronics, but also the energy sector as such; changing power mix, consumption patterns, business models, and market mechanisms.
Currently battery technologies are rapidly progressing. The establishment of an optimized production eco-system for Li-ion batteries has enabled the age of communications, information and portability. Looking ahead, alternative battery technologies (e.g. printed thin-film metal free) will unlock many more new applications, e.g. wearable devices, sensors or smart packaging.
Batteries are increasingly discussed for stationary energy applications, too.Grid-scale batteries either integrated on-site or as in dependent plants could allow buffering supply-demand-inequalities, and pave the way for 100 % renewables. In turn, storage in home battery systems could increase self-consumption and drive overall decentralization. Utilities´ current business models might become less profitable, while new models, e.g. based on smart tariffs, will been abled.
Power-to-Hydrogen represents another progressing storage concept. Electricity is used to convert water into hydrogen by electrolysis, which can then be stored and eventually re-electrified. Long-term heat and cold storage as well as less expensive chemical storage mediums are also advancing.
FUTURE FACT
Energy storage cost could decrease by up to 70% in the next 15 years. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects battery storage to cost USD 120 /kWh by 2030 compared with more than USD 300 in 2016 and USD 1,000 back in 2010.
That´s it – Maybe: A number of critical resources might run short
The rapidly growing demand for specific finite resources, particularly phosphorus, sand and rare metals, could soon bring about supply bottlenecks.
Phosphorus is critical as a fertilizer, currently retrieved from concentrated natural mineral deposits expected to be depleted soon. The intensification of agriculture is accelerating already emergent supply short ages. Since 2002, fertilizer consumption per hectare of arable land has increased by 20 %. Thus, establishing recycling systems and identifying alternative sources is critical.
Despite being a common material, it is feared that supply of high-quality sand (suitable for construction) will not keep up with future demand. The construction industry is expected to grow 85% by 2030. New, more efficient recycling techniques, as well as substitutes, are needed.
Rare metals (e.g. antimony) might also run short in the next decades. Supply bottlenecks can slow down advances of renewable energy and electronics making substitutes necessary.
Certain animal species that are crucial for the ecosystems are being endangered by pollution and harmful substances. Since 2006, loss rates of honey bee colonies in the U.S. have doubled. A further decrease could have devastating effects on cropyields. New protection measures could stabilize populations. Otherwise, artificial pollination is needed, with some methods already tested.
FUTURE FACT
Supposing that current phosphorous production rates (191 mn tons per year) remain constant, the production of high-grade, easily-acquirable phosphate rock reserves will peak before the year 2040 and decline afterwards.
Batch Size One: Mass production and individualization become best friends
Changes in consumer demands, the economics of production as well as the availability of new production tools cause a fundamental shift in the way companies produce. Due to greater global connectivity and reach, the time to scale-up a new business shortens drastically. Production, including that of chemicals, is shifting from a predominantly scale-driven operation to a more flexible kind of industrialized craft activity.
More and more, customers are demanding products that are personalized and customized to fit their individual needs, also in B2B. Producers will have to manage higher levels of complexity due to more product variations. As buyers shift away from main stream products and markets, niche markets emerge. The accelerating technological change meanwhile leads to shorter product life cycles. Product versions often become obsolete as they are replaced by the next or updated version. Flexibility and faster time-to-market become imperatives under these circumstances.
New tools like additive manufacturing play a key role in the transition. In combination with the industrial internet of things, they make it possible to cost-effectively produce smaller and smaller batches potentially up to a batch size one. Overall, the production landscape will be characterized by a larger variety of concepts, such as time-variant, local, and modular production.
FUTURE FACT
Sports-shoe firm Adidas tests a small manufacturing facility staffed by robots (called Speedfactory). The idea is to bring production closer to where the consumers are, to be able to adapt to demand changes while cutting logistic efforts.
Progress through Openness: Sharing and collaboration replace secretiveness and patents
The sharing movement is about extracting value from shared resources. No matter if it is skills, software, data or physical assets, it challenges the business logic of keeping valuable assets proprietary, in favor of an asset-light economy. The sharing movement has its origins in the open source philosophy of universal access and free redistribution. But it is also manifested in the emerging sharing economy that enables consumers to easily share underutilized resources.
The half-life of knowledge is shrinking and costs for setting up startups declining. Thus, patents and traditional R&D gets less effective and collaborative forms of innovation and crowd-based concepts gain. Business leaders, such as Tesla, Apple, and Samsung, have embraced it by starting to share code and patents, accelerating the progress of technology. The increasing relevance is also reflected in recent political activities. Open Science is one of 3 priority areas for EU research policy. U.S. agencies are required to release 20 % of new software code.
Successful actors of the sharing economy (e.g. Uber, Airbnb) use technology to enable large-scale peer-to-peer sharing. In 2014 the international sharing economy reached USD 15 bn, and it is expected to grow to USD 335 bn in 2025. B2B actors are now starting to adopt the business model, for instance with sharing schemes for equipment and logistics.
FUTURE FACT
“Technology leadership is not defined by patents… but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world´s most talented engineers.” – Elon Musk
Basic Income, No Strings Attached: What would you do?
With an Universal Basic Income (UBI), all citizens would be guaranteed a basic income, no strings attached. There are different proposals on how much income would be given and how it would be financed, but commonly mentioned financing means are tax increases and welfare reductions.
The concept has been discussed since the 60s, and is now gaining momentum. In 2016, a first referendum was held on the topic in Switzerland. Even though supporters lost, they gained more support than anticipated and created a lot of new attention. A side from Switzerland, there are pilots planned in Finland, Canada and the Netherlands as well as in Oakland , U.S., by the “Y Combinator” incubator in Silicon Valley. Recently pilots have also been run in India and Namibia.
UBI has gained attention from the full political spectrum. It is seen as a way of dealing with the growing income inequalities as well as reducing welfare bureaucracy. The discussion is also triggered by the risk of automatization which threatens an increasing number of jobs. Recent estimates suggest that up to 47 % of jobs in the U.S. could be replaced in only two decades.
Critics of UBI often mention that the cost would be prohibitively large. An annual grant of USD 10,000 to all U.S. citizens would cost 13 % of the GDP. Moreover, labor market effects are still unclear; both increases and decreases of labor have been seen in past pilots.
FUTURE FACT
64% of EU citizens would vote for basic income in a referendum according to a poll performed in April 2016.
Electrification of Everything: Cost of electricity generation approaches zero
Thanks to rapid progress of power generation technologies first and foremost photo voltaics but also nuclear fusion and energy harvesting – cost of electricity will literally approach.
The dramatic cost reductions of solar power in recent years are expected to continue, making it the cheapest source to produce power in many regions in the years to come. Economics of scale and new technologies (e.g. flexible thin-film foils) and materials with higher efficiencies (e.g. perovskite) will further decrease cost and enable new applications, e.g. power-producing facades as well as more off-grid solutions.
The generation of energy by nuclear fusion (four atoms of hydrogen-1 are fused into a helium-4 with the release of a tremendous amount of energy) is still regarded as being at least two decades away. However, recent advancements could trigger rather sudden breakthroughs, which could, basically overnight, change industries and solve the energy problems.
Micro-harvesting devices, which for instance capture translational kinetic energy, could help to reduce energy demand and cost significantly. New extraction and exploration technologies (e.g. fracking) might trigger a boom of certain fossil fuels, as it was the case with shale gas. Cheap power might enable new ways of producing afford able water and food.
FUTURE FACT
Costs for electricity generated from photovoltaic systems are expected to drop to an average of around USD 0.04 / kWh worldwide by 2040. By 2050, they could be as low as USD 0.02 / kWh.
Now on SALE: Next generation materials with superior properties become available for mass applications
Progress in material sciences drives new developments, e.g. in the areas of light weight construction or energy generation. Before a material is broadly used, there are generally two major hurdles to take: firstly development/discovery of the new material, and secondly its mass production/broad availability. Many new materials have been discovered in the last years and decades. Several are now on the edge of a possible mass production, making them affordable for various new applications.
- Graphene, being extremely strong, transparent as well as an excellent electrical conductor.
- Aerogels, having an extremely low density, while being extraordinary thermal insulators.
- 2D materials (e.g. Silicene), possessing extraordinary electrical and mechanical properties.
- Functionally Graded Materials, having multiple advantages over materials with a step wise transition
(e.g. inhibition of crack propagation, enabling of high thermal gradients,). - Functional Fibers & Fabrics, playing a key role in the realization of next generation wearables, making electronics
flexible and bringing them closer to the body. - Meta Materials, having novel artificial mechanical, electromagnetic, or acoustic properties.
FUTURE FACT
According to the Research and Innovation Department of the European Commission, about 70% of all new product innovation is based directly or indirectly on materials with new or improved properties.