2015_Spring_TheFutureofEducation

Trend Report Spring 2015

The Future of Education

Education is undergoing radical changes. While education used to be mainly frontally held lectures, digital technologies today allow for a wide range of new possibilities. Given the impact of education on society and considering recent developments and open questions, the importance of shedding some light on the future of education becomes obvious. This can be done by addressing three key questions: What are recent developments and key trends that shape the future of education? What could the educational world look like in the future? What are new educational products and services that can be introduced in the future, both in a commercial or non-profit context? The three sections of this report address these questions.

Trend Report Fall 2014

The Future of Individual Premium Mobility

Traditional concepts of mobility are increasingly affected by digitalization. The amount of connected devices is growing exponentially and mobile broadband internet has become standard. Car manufacturers are facing the rise of software-based mobility services that go beyond the car itself. The increasing connectivity of vehicles may disrupt their traditional business model. In addition, driving becomes increasingly automated, allowing for a better utilization of driving time.

This report analyzes how individual premium mobility may look like in the future, describes future scenarios and potential business ideas.

Trend Report Spring 2014

Sensor-based Authentication

Numerous authentications take place in our everyday lives: From the use of passwords to access an email account, fingerprint scans to grant access to buildings to the confirmation of a product’s origin to prevent counterfeits. Sensor technology at the same time has advanced tremendously over the last decades. Not only are sensors making things increasingly smart (e.g. smart homes, smart cars), sensors are also increasingly included in consumer products, such as cell phones or digital cameras.

The balance between security and convenience, however, is hard to find. This represents a huge business opportunity for new business models. This report analyzes how sensor-based authentication may look like in the future, describes future scenarios and potential business ideas.

Trend Report 2013/2014

Data Marketplaces in Smart Cities

Devices and infrastructure are increasingly interconnected and exchange their data. The evaluation of the data allows for higher automatization and for improved centralized and decentralized decision-making based on an overall picture. In Smart Cities of the future, many agents will communicate: facilities, street infrastructure (e.g. parking spaces, road signs, traffic lights), vehicles, weather stations, energy providers – just to mention some of them. There is a huge business opportunity for those that are able to collect the relevant data and interpret it. This gives rise to completely new products, services and business models. This report analyzes how data marketplaces in Smart Cities may look like in the future, describes future scenarios and potential business ideas.

Trend Report 2013

Human-Machine-Interaction in Individual Mobility

Mobility continuously needs to respond to the new opportunities arising through digital technologies. In fact, approximately 90% of innovations in the automotive industry are coming from Information Technology. At the same time, usage patterns are changing, allowing for new and potentially disruptive business models. The automotive industry will need to interpret mobility in a much broader sense. Entirely new products and service offerings as well as revenue models need to be investigated. This report analyzes how Human-Machine-Interaction in individual mobility may look like in the future, describes future scenarios and potential business ideas.

Trend Report 2012/2013

The Future of Real-Time Communication

Modern communication in the private as well as business segment has undergone tremendous change since the introduction of digital technologies. This change is still going on and leads to disruptive new technologies, tools and behaviors. One of the key trends in this area is real-time information exchange in all imaginable forms. With email and telephony still being the dominant communication and interaction means today this report analyzes how further real-time communication means may look like in the future and how they could change our lives.

Trend Report 2012

The Open-Closed Spectrum

The Open-Closed-Spectrum addresses the changing boundaries of and within business systems. That means there are closed (i.e. controllable by a certain entity) – and open (i.e. not controllable) elements of a business system. Traditionally, most parts of a business (e.g., innovation, development and production) happened in a quite closed environment (i.e. confidential and hidden from external views). Recently, we experience a tendency towards opening up and connecting with partners, customers and even competitors. In this report you find thoughts about new ways of collaboration among the stakeholders of a business, new business models and changes of eco systems due to new boundaries.

Trend Report 2011/2012

Ambient Assisted Living

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) refers to all kinds of innovative products based on information and communication technologies (ICT) that can be integrated into one’s environment – often going unnoticed or being almost “invisible”. They shall improve quality of life, autonomy, active participation in social life, and employability for a better, healthier and safer life, often at the same time reducing the costs of health and social care.

Trend Report 2011

Urban Mobility Concepts

Four mega trends are shaping the world today: demographic change, climate change, globalization and urbanization. Consequences can most clearly be seen in cities: a steadily growing demand for energy, rising water consumption and a need for affordable healthcare are just some of the challenges that municipalities all over the world face already today. How to assure affordable and reliable mobility? How does the future of individual transport look like? How will future transport build on existing infrastructure? What role will central systems play to smartly connect transport, traffic and personal information? The first part of the report consists of a basic analysis of trends in technology, market, society and customer needs, political and legal frameworks as well as emerging business models. The second part provides an outlook on the future and analyzes identified drivers. As a result, possible business solutions in various future scenarios are deduced and analyzed.

Trend Report 2010/2011

Smart Grid Infrastructures

Smart Grids are on everyone’s lips. They represent the convergence of the electricity system with information and communication technologies forming a complex cyber physical system. The aim of all the efforts within this area is to increase energy efficiency and to allow for a stable integration of fluctuating distributed renewable energy sources into the electricity system. This new so-called “Internet of Energy” is one very important step on the way to a sustainable energy system. Smart grids will affect not only the energy industry, but stakeholders of various industries as well as private households. Thus, this report examines possible future scenarios and matching product or service ideas from five perspectives. Ideas like these that take different future scenarios into consideration need to be found for all participating players of a future smart grid.

Trend Report 2010

Developer Platforms and Communities in the Telecom Industry

Even though the Internet has turned into something that virtually no one today would want to miss, infrastructure operators are uneasy about it. The majority of their revenues does not come from the Internet access business, but from the steadily declining phone business. Even mobile revenues are subject to the change, as voice communication services turn into just one variant of traffic the IP protocol is capable of carrying. Although Telcos understand these developments and prepare to migrate their networks to IP, there are further challenges to their business. Growth takes place on top of the networks but doesn’t yield a share to the bit-pipe operator automatically, asking operators to look for alternative revenue sources.

Trend Report 2009/2010

E-Energy

The demand for energy in today’s world is ever increasing. At the same time, fossil resources are rapidly depleting and the climate change that was long regarded as nothing but a scientific theory has become an accepted fact. This situation creates one of the greatest challenges of present times.
Energy efficiency is a must at all levels, a transition to renewable energy sources must take place and greenhouse gas emissions have to be reduced. The push towards sustainable energy supply includes a decentralized, intelligent energy distribution system that will rely heavily on communication and information technology.

Trend Report 2009

The Service Centric Car in 2020

Today, 80% of all automotive innovations are realized in its electronic components. Those are bringing new capabilities to every part of the vehicle. The car of today is equipped with satellite navigation, HD based infotainment systems, voice-activated communication and telemetric systems for safety, security, and remote diagnostics. It can be seen as a service platform which satisfies diverse consumer needs for mobility and safety as well as communication, information, and entertainment. These developments have been fuelled by advancement in embedded systems and advanced communication technologies.

Trend Report 2008/2009

Technologies and Services in the Light of Demographic Changes

Demographic change has become a recent buzzword for the ongoing and upcoming challenges of a society that is increasingly changing in terms of its social integrity. Besides changes with respect to migration, population aging will become a dominant factor in demographic change. According to DeStatis and Eurostat the mean-age in Europe is expected to grow from age 39 in 2007 to 43 in 2020 with a fertile rate that is already below replacement levels in many EU member states, i.e. the population and especially the share of young people is shrinking.

Trend Report 2008

The Future of the Web and its Value Creation for Telcos

The telecommunications market is confronted with unprecedented changes. The World Wide Web and its open technologies allow for a plethora of services – from simple phone calls to complex location-based multi-layer software applications. Telcos face the threat of becoming a mere bit-pipe for web services without taking part in the value creation for the user and the respective revenue streams. New players such as Skype, Google and Apple enter the market – further intensifying the competitive environment for telcos. At the same time, telcos possess invaluable assets: an customer base of billions of customers, fixed-line high-speed telecommunications networks, customer-specific data such as the customer’s location, frequent contacts or other phone numbers belonging to the same account. Telcos need to leverage these and other competitive advantages for a more opportunity-driven future that allows telcos to enter new, more service-oriented markets.

Trend Report 2007/2008

The Future of Social Commerce

Social commerce is a special form of electronic commerce in which customers participate actively in the buying experience. In this respect the word ‘social’ indicates the integration of your social network.
Typical means of participation in social commerce are sharing product reviews and recommendations, promoting products within a social network, or even collaborative shopping. We are just about to tap into the widespread possibilities that social commerce offers for e-Commerce and even for traditional brick and mortar businesses.

Trend Report 2007

Effective Collaboration in Dynamic Communities with Service-Oriented Architectures

The ways people interact and collaborate have been rapidly changing in the last years, due to great advances in technology and the increasing impact of technology on our everyday lives. Globalization and the recent technological and social developments require increased business agility from companies, therfore placing high demands on the support for ad-hoc collaboration. To better support the requirements of collaborative software, we first need to understand the ways people work together as teams, groups and communities. In this book we examine different aspects of collaboration with a special focus on dynamic communities, and their implications for the social interaction patterns that need to be supported by future collaboration tools.

Trend Report 2006/2007

The Future of Publishing. Trends for the Bookmarket in 2020

Books are haptic goods which can hardly be substituted by digital media in certain scenarios of utilization. Although this appraisal is still correct today, the book branch as a subsector of the media industry is faced with digitization-induced changes. The meanwhile established selling of books on the internet is accompanied by the proposition of additional services. Besides these valuable developments digitization nevertheless comprises risks for the book branch.
On this account referring to their own statements many established publishers and bookstores are looking for strategies that can cope with these changes and prepare them for conceivable future evolutions.

Trend Report 2005/2006

Seamless Context Aware Services in Converged Mobile- and Enterprise-Networks

Mobile- and Enterprise Services and their convergence are becoming increasingly important in the near future. Context-based services are the next evolutionary step concerning location-based services. They rely on special information derived from basic sensors and network technology or even presence information.
This trend report focuses on currently available location- and potential “simple” context-services to be seamlessly available in both “fixed-line” enterprise and mobile networks, building upon existing application frameworks and architectures making use of readily and easily available context information derived from sensor and other network interfaces. Apart from their technical feasibility, potential application scenarios and corresponding business models, hence market applicability and window of opportunity are pointed out in this CDTM trend report.

Trend Report 2005

RFID – Leveraging Global Commerce With Tracking & Tracing Technologies

Emerging tracking & tracing and ubiquitous computing technologies, most notably RFID, promise to change today’s business and society in various ways. These new technologies hold powerful potentials to boost process efficiency in logistics, security, health and many other areas by reducing errors and counterfeiting, superseding media breaks and accelerating processing speed, going far beyond the boundaries of existing barcode based applications. The gap between the real world of physical objects and the virtual information space is more and more diminished, the flow of goods and the flow of data approach parallelism, enabling companies to get a more precise view of their internal assets to better control and manage their processes. The connection between a physical good and its manufacturer through the whole product life cycle enables enterprises to sell interlocked services and solutions, increase customer lock in and follow new business models.