Megatrends – Watch the Web

In the last lecture Henrik Blomgren pointed out that he considers the medical and health industry as one of three business opportunities. I am about one month in Sweden now and I had to go to three different hospitals yet. I am lucky as I have private insurance in Germany, which means I can chose any doctor or hospital and my insurance will cover it. So I was searching for a good hospital with immediate and good service, but I could not find any. I am now used to the opportunity to chose within hospitals competing with each other and I started wondering if I would pay more money for better medical service in case I would not have private insurance. And indeed I would. We all pay for good service in restaurants, we pay for healthy food and many more things. But there is nothing more important than our health. So I am sure people will pay for it. Not just plastic surgery but also any for any kind of treatment. So I am sure if there was an opportunity to visit medics of kind of specializations and all medical devices at one appealing place people would surely spent their money for that excellent service. In Germany dentists give their office a chilled ambience, offering coffee, decent music in the background and
beach chairs for the patients to wait in.






Inspired by the presented Megatrends of John Naisbitt I started some research what people consider as megatrends nowadays. And I have found two interesting sources. The first one is a German business consultancy company called “Z_punkt - the foresight company” and they point out the following 20 Megatrends:

1. Demographic change
2. New step of individualization
3. Boom in the health industry
4. Empowered women
5. Cultural variety
6. New mobility
7. Digital life
8. Learning from nature
9. Ubiquist intelligence
10. Convergence of technologies
11. Globalization 2.0
12. Knowledge based economy
13. Business ecological systems
14. Changes in the work environment
15. New consumption behavior
16. Changes in energy and resources
17. Climate change and ecological contamination
18. Urbanization
19. New political world order
20. Growing global threats to social security

And the second one is an article in ReadWriteWeb written about a year ago and talking about the top ten future web trends for the next ten years:

1. Semantic web
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Virtual Worlds
4. Mobile 5. Attention Economy
6. Web sites as Web services
7. Online video / internet TV
8. Rich Internet Apps
9. International Web
10. Personalization

Although I know the headlines are not all self explaining I do not want to go into further detail as it can be read if you follow the links. But what is really interesting is that we have talked about almost all these trends in class or I picked them up in my blog. And even more interesting is that there is a huge congruence within the web Megatrends and Z_points Megatrends. Does that mean that a big part of our society’s trends can be anticipated from the web?

I think so!

Almost every person in industrialized countries has a web history and profile. We have a second virtual life where we show our behavior. The only difference to the real world is that we do it much faster there and that our behavior can be analyzed. And in the end the result of these analysis again is spread by the web.

So my today’s message is:

If you want to be a trendspotter you have to watch the web! – No web, no state of the art trendspotting

I think it is a great idea to use the blog as a course assignment for a future thinking course.

Schinne