McKinsey Global Institute Ranks Most Disruptive Technologies to 2025

Wireless Medicine

I'm a member of The World Futures Society which is always a source of excellent information and when this great insight into what disruptive technologies to watch for leading up to 2025 crossed my desk I thought it was worth re sharing. It warns business leaders not to wait until the time that these new technologies are exerting their influence as by that stage it will be too late to respond. 

Healthcare as we know is traditionally a laggard sector in terms of uptake of technology so there are some critical warnings to those who want to wait and adopt the we will see approach. The Internet of Things offers some vital clues: and the role of the patient as a partner in their care will change the sector forever. Healthcare consumers want to be more involved, want more education and access to this information will be the key.

Here's the McKinsey Report in a snapshot:

 What technologies will most radically transform human life in the next twelve years? The McKinsey Global Institute looked at more than a hundred possible candidates across a variety of technology fields and narrowed the most potentially disruptive down to a dozen. They are, in order of size of potential impact:

• Mobile Internet defined as "increasingly inexpensive and capable mobile computing devices and Internet connectively."
• Automation of knowledge work or "intelligent software systems that perform knowledge work tasks involving unstructrured commands and subtle judgments." An example might be IBM’s Watson system.
• Internet of Things or "networks of low-cost sensors and actuators for data collection, monitoring, decision making and process optimization."
• Cloud Technology or "use of computer hardware and software resources delivered over a network or the Internet, often as a service."
• Advanced Robotics or "increasingly capable robots with enhanced senses, dexterity, and intelligence used to automate tasks or augment humans." This category is perhaps most famously personified by the Baxter robot (profiled in the May-June issue of THE FUTURIST magazine).
• Autonomous and Near-Autonomous Vehicles.
• Next Generation Genomics or "fast, low-cost gene sequencing, advanced big-data analytics, and synthetic biology."
• Energy Storage.
• 3D Printing
• Advanced Materials defined as "materials designed to have superior characteristics." Much of what we today call nanotechnology would fall within this category.
• Advanced Oil and Natural Gas Recovery
• Renewable Energy

Of the above, the Mobile Internet, which could change the lives of more than 5 billion people around the globe, the automation of knowledge work, and the Internet of Things would have by far the largest economic impacts, according to McKinsey. All together, the above technologies could generate $14 to $33 trillion. But the authors caution that much of that growth will be at the expense of older technologies and even entire industries falling into obsolescence.

"When necessary, leaders must be prepared to disrupt their own businesses and make the investments to effect change," the report’s authors write. "By the time the technologies that we describe are exerting their influence on the economy in 2025, it will be too late for businesses, policy makers, and citizens to plan their responses. Nobody, especially businesses leaders, can afford to be the last person using video cassettes in a DVD world."

Source: Mckinsey Global Institute