The Tech Trends You Need To Know For 2016

Mapping the future for your organization begins with identifying early signposts as you look out on the horizon. In order to chart the best way forward, you must understand emerging trends: what they are, what they aren’t, and how they operate.

2016 Trends

My 2016 trends offer early warnings and opportunities for managers across all industries. This year's report offers 81 trends and features more than 100 companies and startups to watch. The full report is available now:

How I Forecast Tech Trends

My forecasting model helps me to analyze consumer behavior, microeconomic trends, government policies, market forces and emerging research within the context of the continually evolving tech and digital media ecosystem in order to understand how the future is taking shape in the present. I start at the fringe and look for patterns and attributes that help us to identify a set of possible trends on the horizon.

A cipher is a helpful analogy for understanding how to decrypt patterns that emerge in the fringe. After many years researching how technology evolves, I have refined a model with a set of pattern identifiers that help to surface trends. Those identifiers are the basis for what I call CIPHER: Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, Rarities.

• Contradictions. Two or more things succeed or fail simultaneously, when usually they would track in opposite directions. Or, things track in the same direction when typically the reverse would be true. Additionally, a node––an organization or individual––becomes connected to another node, when typically that connection has been shunned or prohibited in the past.

• Inflections. When something happens to catalyze a great acceleration in emerging research. This might include: a sudden round of fundraising; the acquisition of a new company, product or team; the passing or defeat of legislation; an unanticipated natural disaster, market crash or act of terrorism.

• Practices. When a new technology threatens the established orthodoxy. This might be a long-standing design exemplar (all phones have buttons), a mindset (people value their privacy), or a certain way of doing things (watching TV only on a television).

• Hacks. When consumers or other companies are creating off-label uses for something such that it becomes more useful. Or, when someone finds an experience related to technology or digital media so frustrating that she builds something smarter, more intuitive and easier to use.

• Extremes. When people are truly pushing boundaries in an attempt to break new ground. In many cases, they are pursuing research no one has ever attempted. Or they are theorizing new ways to build/ explore/ see/ manipulate/ replicate something that already exists.

• Rarities. When something––a social movement, an object, a community, a business practice, a policy, etc.––is so unusual and unique it seems like a meaningless outlier, but it actually solves a fundamental human need. It could also be something that seems out of place but is succeeding, even if it is not the cause of disruption or transformation itself.

CIPHER helps me to identify patterns in order to surface a possible trend, however I continue to investigate it by asking practical questions, mapping the trajectory, developing scenarios for action and pressure-testing the final result.

At the end of each year, I apply that forecasting model to surface the most important emerging tech trends for the year ahead.

Amy Webb is an author, futurist and founder of Webbmedia Group, a strategic forecasting and strategy agency.