[New] With the global Smart City market expected to grow by about a 20 percent CAGR by 2020, Nokia revealed ‘The Smart City Playbook’, detailing best practices for smart cities.

[New] Smart improvements could provide significant value to rural communities by enabling decentralized generation and manufacturing, improving energy efficiency, and supporting economic development.

[New] As the Smart City market facing slowness in global economic development, the market continued a growth in the past few years and market size will maintain the average annual growth rate by 2022.

[New] Global virtual desktop market in European market is expected to grow at a substantial high CAGR during 2016 to 2022 due to advancement in smart technology.

[New] Worldwide spending on the technologies that enable Smart Cities initiatives is forecast to reach $80 billion in 2018: IDC expects spending to accelerate over the 2016-2021 forecast period, growing to $135 billion in 2021.

[New] The use cases that will attract the most investment in 2019 are: manufacturing operations ($100 billion); production asset management ($44.2 billion); smart home ($44.1 billion); and freight monitoring ($41.7 billion).

[New] IDC expected smart city initiatives to attract technology investments of more than $81 billion globally in 2018, and spending is set to grow to $158 billion in 2022.

A Collision!

The really interesting bit is the graphic “Intensity” vs “Tipping Point” in which all of our challenges, i.e. a number of insight lists, have been arranged.

Intensity — described as the number of insights in a particular challenge relative to our other challenges over the last three years. Our challenges are arranged from relatively lots of insights (bottom) through to few insights (top).

Tipping-Point — described as the likely point in the future where new ideas/insights contained in our challenges are likely to be accepted as “having arrived”. Our challenges are arranged from ‘arriving soon’ (left) to ‘some distance’ away (right).

These two axes form a type of heat map, divided into a nine cell grid — with one additional variable of colour, which indicates when over the last three years most of the insights of a particular challenge have arrived. Bottom left cell of the graphic — the most intense challenge (in terms of insights arriving) and near term (in terms of likely to arrive) is our Smart Cities challenge. There is a lot going on in this space and of all the challenges we’ve identified new insights in this area are probably going to be finding acceptance sooner than many of our other challenges.

Preliminary Thoughts on our Challenges

In this new light, this very interactive (within our Shaping Tomorrow environment) graphic will radically alter the way I cultivate Our Challenges insights.

Where’s the interesting areas of recent insight development; straight to the RED challenges?  What’s my near horizon look like (four cells in bottom left); what’s my far horizon’s first week signals — early warning or looking the wrong way?

Re-calibrate, triangulate, keep reading, keep talking and discussing. Only do it much fast and much much more efficiently than ever before!

What do you think colleagues — give me a shout if you’d like to have a closer look and perhaps get us to help you explore your perceived future challenges.