The “emerging technologies” report from The Economist
There are dozens of trends reports every year. Technologies to watch, design trends, etc.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has done the painstaking work of collecting and organizing a huge set of such reports for 2022. You can get Marshall’s overview here, for free.
One of my favorite reports in Marshall’s overview is from The Economist. It’s titled, “What’s next? 22 emerging technologies to watch in 2022”.
I like The Economist’s report because it is very concrete and tangible. For every one of their 22 technologies, it is clear what they mean. Heat pumps, for example, or hydrogen-powered aircraft–one has a clear idea of what these things are.
Our data on related R&D, companies, and markets
At Mergeflow, we decided to use The Economist’s report as a jumping-off-board for a little analysis. The Economist discussed the following 22 technologies:
| 3D-printed bone implants 3D-printed houses Artificial meat and fish Brain interfaces | Container ships with sails Delivery drones Direct air capture Flying electric taxis | Heat pumps Hydrogen-powered planes Personalized nutrition Quantum computing |
| Quieter supersonic aircraft Sleep tech Solar geoengineering Space tourism | The metaverse Vaccines for HIV and malaria Vertical farming Virtual influencers | VR workouts Wearable health trackers |
For each of these 22 technologies, we used our analytics software to discover related R&D, companies, patents, and news.
Interactive overview charts
First, we created interactive charts for all technologies. All data are from Mergeflow’s API. Click on the image below to explore the data.
Snapshots of original R&D and business data
Next, in addition to the overview charts, we compiled snapshots of original data, for each technology. These snapshots are interactive, and you can access some of the underlying original documents. They look like this:
Here is the complete set of 22 emerging technology snapshots:
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marshall Kirkpatrick for his great overview, and The Exponential View for bringing it to my attention.
The article in The Economist doesn’t name the contributors. It does say that it’s the science and technology correspondents of The Economist. So I’d like to thank the correspondents and editors I could find, for their great article: Gilead Amit, Tamzin Booth, Geoffrey Carr, Tim Cross, Hal Hodson, Alok Jha, Ludwig Siegele, Alexandra Suich Bass.
