Growing Technologies into 2011 and Onward

The past few years have seen some challenges in terms of innovation as big firms have all but cut their product development funds and instead focused on cost saving initiatives. As a result, small firms and start-ups have been left to fill the innovation void with new product and service offerings. However, like with every innovation, clients have to be the ones to adopt these products and bigger marketing budgets from these larger firms usually help with technology adoption. As such, large firms will chose best of breed strategies to buy small innovative companies instead of developing them on their own, resulting in slow user adoption of new products. Thus, 2011 doesn’t hold much hope for paradigm shifts but there is momentum for change and adoption of new technology in the long run. Looking at past technologies and their current adoption rates, there are a few fields that seem to emerge as focal points for 2011 and onward; healthcare, education and childcare services, computers and information technology, telecommunications, and media.

Mostly it is in the service industries locally and abroad. In particular, healthcare and educational services were identified from the fastest growing job markets, while computer/IT, telecommunications and media information was taken from Deloitte’s TMT prediction reports, sourced from experts in the tech fields, on trends starting in 2011 and onward.

Healthcare

• Baby boomers are starting to retire creating greater demand for healthcare services; in particular, for remote healthcare services. In general, baby boomers have also tried to avoid retirement in order to continue their lifestyles, which has also manifested in terms of how healthcare services will be delivered. As such, baby boomers will demand, and hospitals will also search for, health services that are convenient and can accommodate clients with more transparency and customer care.
• Some services may include remote doctor appointments, remote surgeries, and devices to constantly monitor and report health status remotely to a doctor, hospital or health monitoring software.

Education and Childcare Services

• Globalization has led to increased competition beyond borders,  forcing citizens to become more educated to compete as resources, both locally and abroad.
• Projects are becoming more common rather than operational work in companies resulting in teams that can be assembled, disassembled and reassembled easier for new ventures, and sourced from global multi-site locations.

Computers and Information Technology

Business week has reported  ‘Amid the worst recession for tech jobs since the dot-com bubble burst, companies are eagerly adding workers in such fields as cloud computing, computer security, business analytics, and IT services for government and health-care providers, ‘You’re going to see a resurgence happening with smaller, privately owned companies first because the larger publicly traded companies are going to have to report and be accountable to shareholders’… A lot of companies want candidates with experience in IT services that customers view as money saving, such as cloud computing, software delivered over the Internet, and so-called virtualization, which helps companies make more efficient use of existing hardware. Down the road, Thibodeaux expects demand for jobs in green IT.”

• Educational and entertainment software, business-to-business applications and computer security.
• Green Tech for power consumption and better efficiency in food distribution, etc.
• Information access helps to influence purchase decisions (free in-store wifi access).
• Tablet use in businesses.
• New technology doesn’t necessarily become a substitute for old ones and channels but can be complimentors.

Telecommunications

• Mobile connectivity, convergence of tech, media and telecom: more devices per person and merging of capabilities between them.
• Telecommuting and VPN for cloud computing to reduce security concerns.
• Web 3.0 integration for a semantic web and integrated with social networking.
• Content is key! Companies have to focus on providing high content and diverse high content platforms.
• No convergence of platforms so companies have to select which ones to devote resources and develop products for, increased security concerns, and supplier impacts to source them.
• Mobile banking in developing countries with large non-banked populations,as well as in North American and European markets.

Media

• Social networking ads growing but still huge unused potential.
• Media profits mostly coming from live events, especially for music.
• Increase in freemium games and social games, cannot be pirated, more diverse profit streams and products with different licensing models.

Summary

The summary time frame represents the time needed for mass adoption or commercialization of these areas, as all of them are currently already under development or already commercialized.

2-5 years:

• Computer services that increase companies efficiency; from CRM and cloud computing migration to allow seamless integration and platform standardizations along with the evolution towards the semantic web.
• Mobile banking and security;  new smartphones currently will have chips to allow financial transactions similar to credit or debit cards.
• Business models changing towards licensing and pay as you go (Cloud computing, SaaS) as users become more mobile.
• Green tech from improved power use (energy saving devices) and efficiency (i.e. improved servers).
• Increased use of teleconferencing and boundary-less human resources for project style business initiatives and healthcare monitoring/services.

5-10 years:

• Green tech; for power generation and smart grids, as nations will start responding to threats from global warming.
• Telecommuting: initial hurdles will be reduced as currently businesses are risk adverse to the security implications and a prevalent old-school work mentality where co-location is necessary to stimulate peer pressure or constant manager surveillance. Additionally, increases in bandwidth affordability and better VPN security are needed in order to accommodate teleconferencing among team members and monitoring by managers if security and privacy hurdles are overcome.

Recommendations

• Teleconferencing and security are areas that will always be of concern now and in the future: now for mobile banking and healthcare; later for telecommuting.
• Cloud computing and VPN companies for integration services allowing for platform standardizations.
• CRM useful for client focused knowledge to structure an organization around and can be useful to apply within entrepreneurial ventures.