Technology is only one of many forces shaping the future so test how these forces below impact your plans:-

  1. The Tech Invasion
  2. The Evolution of Money
  3. The Wealth Landscape
  4. Eastern Promises
  5. Accelerating Technological Progress
  6. The Green Revolution
  7. Shifting Human Geography
  8. The Trade Paradox

Read the full article to help strategic thinking; for here just consider this.

The Tech Invasion

Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have supplanted traditional blue chip companies that build physical things.

The tech invasion is leveraging connectivity, network effects, artificial intelligence, and unprecedented scale to create global platforms that are almost impossible to compete with. The tech invasion has already taken over retail and advertising – and now invading forces have their eyes set on healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and education.

Eastern Promise

China has over 100 cities with more than 1,000,000 inhabitants. These cities, many of which fly below the radar on the global stage, each have impressive economies – whether they are built upon factories, natural resource production, or the information economy.

As one impressive example, the Yangtze River Delta – a single region which contains Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Nantong, Ningbo, Nanjing, and Changzhou – has a GDP (PPP) of $2.6 trillion, which is more than Italy.

Accelerating Technological Progress

New products can achieve millions of users in just months, and the game Pokémon Go serves as an interesting case study of this potential. The game amassed 50 million users in just 19 days, which is a blink of an eye in comparison to automobiles (62 years), the telephone (50 years), or credit cards (28 years).

As new technologies are created at a faster and faster pace – and as they are adopted at record speeds by markets – it’s fair to say that future could be coming at a breakneck speed.

Shifting Human Geography

By the end of the 21st century, this animation shows that Africa alone could contain at least 13 megacities that are bigger than New York:

By this time, it’s projected that North America, Europe, South America, and China will combine to hold zero of the world’s 20 most populous cities. What other game-changing shifts to human geography will occur during this stretch?

The Trade Paradox

To get a sense of how important trade can be between two nations, we previously documented the ongoing relationship between the U.S. and Canada, in which each country is the best customer of the other:

With the recent USMCA agreement, the two countries seem to have sorted their differences for now – but the trade paradox will continue to be an ongoing theme in economics and investing at a global level for many years to come, especially as the trade war against China rages on.

Conclusion

Digital Transformation is but a part of these changes and unless you account for that will fail as you forget to take culture, organisation, structure, politics, international change and Black Swans in to account