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With its “Pictures of the Future” approach, Siemens takes a long look into the future: 10, 20 or even 30 years, depending upon the area of activity. The goal is to identify promising technologies and future consumer wishes and to discover new business possibilities. The result is a coherent vision of tomorrow’s world.
Here are the important future trends:
- Information & Communications
- Globalization, individualization, mobility and self-organization are the driving forces in the field of information and communications technology. Today’s business processes require real-time availability of information coupled with an end-to-end security philosophy across all processes. In the future, all objects of daily life will be able to communicate, thus enhancing user comfort and fulfilling other needs regarding design and emotional content. In turn, entertainment and communication will converge, with applications being accessible from anywhere at any time via, for example, mobile devices featuring intuitive user interfaces.
- Energy
- In the decades to come, power will be supplied by a well-balanced mix of central, distributed and renewable-resources power plants. With fossil-fired power plants, a cost-effective way to cut carbon-dioxide emissions is to increase efficiency – and over the long term, the separation and storage of CO2 offers another approach. Highly efficient, low-emission and fault-tolerant gas and steam turbines will remain the central components of these power plants. Power generation processes and syngas based processes within the oil and gas sector are converging, while the operation of electrical networks is becoming more global, flexible and focused on distributed components. Market mechanisms and a real-time impact on processes are becoming the forces that dominate liberalized markets.
- Automation & Control
- Three trends in particular will determine developments in industry, trade, logistics and building systems in the coming years: the further penetration of information and communications technologies into these sectors; the expansion of global networks; and customer demand for tailor-made products. The illustration on this page offers an example of this phenomenon with respect to the development, production and delivery of a piece of “intelligent apparel” by a fictitious company known as “Intelligent Clothing” (IQ-C). Integrated into the clothing are a mini-computer, cell phone, health-check system, and a powerpack with antenna for operating the devices.
- Transportation
- In the future, the automobile will remain the dominant form of personal transportation. The worldwide growth in freight shipments will be absorbed primarily by road and ship transport, and major investments will be made in products for traffic telematics and highway construction.
- Health
- Information and communications technologies are among the strongest forces driving the health-care market. Tomorrow’s innovative IT and communications solutions will be more powerful than their predecessors, and they will be an important tool for physicians and medical personnel – as well as for health insurance providers and pharmaceutical companies. Home-based care (i.e., medical care of patients in their own homes) will become more widespread. With new procedures and processes for diagnosis and therapy, the vision of medical care customized to a patient’s individual needs will become a reality.
- Services
- Highly developed information and communication technologies have cleared the way for services performed by humans and machines that can be optimally fine-tuned to meet time demands, local conditions and special user contexts. Remote maintenance and automated services will become an everyday element of professional and private life in the future.
- Impact of Materials
- Innovations in materials hold the key to new and improved products. Normally, though, high-performance materials are invisible to the user as the following example shows
Sources
Via Putting People First Blog