Page 32 - May 2018 Disruption Report Flip Book

EXPONENTIAL CHANGE IN 2018 JANMUAAYRY20128018
2. While Silicon Valley leads, both innovation and scaling increasingly occur across the globe.
Europe and Central America lead the way in decarbonizing their energy chains. China is making huge strides in large-scale electrification of its urban transport systems. Its focus on AI, supported by the state and its homegrown tech giants, will show up as novel methods and large-scale implementations. And not just in personal surveillance.
The U.S., with its declining health and social outcomes and turn inward, will become less appealing to some entrepreneurs. And its business culture, focusing solely on corporate profits, will lack the motives to innovate in areas that affect the social fabric (for the collective good). Curiously, the European Union will provide room for innovation because of its ability to bring broader groups of stakeholders together than competition alone can foster. In particular, watch the innovation around open banking and privacy in Europe this year.
Leapfrogging in other innovation hubs will continue as well. We may not see an African firm to rival America’s tech giants anytime soon, but we will see meaningful innovation in fields like ag-tech and distributed power generation.
However, the largest firms in the world will hail predominantly from Silicon Valley, and one, most likely Apple, will exceed $1 trillion in market cap this year.
3. More money will flow into technology but it will be concentrated at later stages.
Following Softbank’s lead, funds bigger than $5 billion will abound now that the investment case of platform monopolies is well understood. These will seek to back emerging winners at a regional and global level (look at Careem and Didi Chuxing in ride sharing, for example). This may create funding gaps at earlier stages in the market, as already evidenced by the seed capital slowdown in Europe and the U.S.
4. The AI software stack will continue to diverge from traditional software. This will include:
• • Novel interface mechanisms. One will be voice, both as an input and as the output. The second will be images, where embedded cameras will provide large-scale inputs to machine-learning systems. (One example will be the growth of affective computing applications.)
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