The world is entering a very exciting period in history with predictions of unprecedented economic growth. Here are some headline predictions of the brave new world we are hurtling towards
- The global population growth, is decelerating, however, it will still peak at around 9 billion people around 2050.
- Cities are going to boom with the number of people living in cities doubling to over 6 billion within the next thirty years
- All of this sounds like bad news, however, it is not. Fortunately and due mainly to explosive growth in many emerging markets, the world will experience its largest economic growth ever, and global real purchasing power will have quadrupled by 2050.
- The number of elderly will explode, and perhaps surprisingly, 90% of this growth will take place in emerging markets.
- It is predicted that due to advances in medical technology and robotics, the first person to live to the age of 150 has already been born.
- More than half the people over the age of eighty, ever born, are still alive today!
- By 2020 computers will have the same data processing capability as the human brain and soon thereafter they will begin matching the best scientific and artistic minds in terms of creativity and intuition. The won’t be able to have emotions although computers will do a good job of mimicking emotions.
- Global knowledge and innovation will continue to evolve exponentially, and by 2050, our combined commercially/technically useful knowledge will be 40-50 times as large as in 2010.
- We have enough commodities, but they are just not in the right places. This will lead to temporary shortages due to the explosive growth in emerging markets.
- New technologies will provide the solutions to environmental problems and we will create cleaner more efficient energy techonlogies over the next thirty years.
There are great opportunities for brave leaders to position their businesses for the coming up swing in the global economy, however, before they do they need to understand the 5 disruptive forces, the TIDES of Change, changing almost every industry and every business in the world today. You can discover more by watching this short interview of Dean van Leeuwen speaking at the Sea Asia Conference in Singapore.