WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Technology is a blank slate, but when it is combined with human or machine based creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship it is a tool that can help us transform the world, and as new powerful emerging technologies become increasingly affordable and democratised our ability to use them to disrupt and transform global business, culture, and society at speed accelerates.
THE 2017 GRIFFIN EMERGING TECHNOLOGY STARBURST
WELCOME TO the Griffin Emerging Technology Starburst 2017 Edition, which is part of our overall 311 Institute Emerging Technology Starburst Collection, and which is complimented by the companion 311 Institute Exponential Technology Codex which explores the future and deep future and all of the technologies listed on our Starbursts in greater detail.
Firstly, I’d like to thank everyone who supported me during 2017 to make it my most enjoyable year yet, and here’s wishing you all a prosperous 2018.
Building on the firm foundation of past Griffin Emerging Technology Starbursts this year’s 2017 Starburst, which has been completely re-designed, is the culmination of years of ceaseless investigating, monitoring, and tracking the appearance and development of hundreds of new emerging technologies from every corner of the globe. It’s also clear that, year on year, the volume of new emerging technologies appearing is still increasing, and that their impact, power, and sophistication, and ergo their ability, to disrupt and transform global culture, industry and society, especially as many of them become increasingly democratised, with a pace and voracity never seen before, is also increasing.
In this year’s Starburst, which displays 169 of the world’s most promising and coveted emerging technologies, each with an addressable market value of at least $500 Billion spread across 11 categories, I have expanded the horizon timeline to 2035, giving you a clear 17 year view of what’s coming, and promoted 38 new emerging technologies that weren’t in last years’ Starburst.
While the Starbursts might look visually appealing they have a more practical purpose which is to help governments, individuals, and organisations alike envision and predict new disruptive threats to their countries, industries, and companies. And, furthermore, when used in conjunction with our How to Build Exponential Enterprises Codex and our first of a kind ExPLORER Innovation Framework, they can be used to help organisations accelerate the development of innovative new policies, products, and services.
By creating and publishing these Starbursts I also hope they help spark people’s imagination, and demonstrate to us all, young and old, rich and poor, that nothing is impossible.
The world around us is changing, and quicker than many of us realise, with disruption increasingly becoming an omni-present stalking horse. And from new technologies that let us stream movies directly from people’s brains and nano sized “submersibles” that patrol our blood streams looking for the first signs of Cancer to the rise of interstellar space travel and new technologies that, one day, could make death a thing of the past, whichever way you look at it, slowly but surely, the things that society once thought of as “Magic” or as science-fiction are quickly becoming real.
The upshot of all this is, of course, that increasingly the word impossible is two letters too long, and that for the first time in human history individuals have the power to change the world in new and previously unimaginable ways, and disrupt the status quo at a scale and speed we’ve never seen before. All of which surely means that we are now living in one of the greatest era’s of human history.
Explore more,
MATTHEW GRIFFIN.
Founder
[…] in its ninth year, and building on the firm foundation of the previous 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 Griffin Annual Emerging Technology Starbursts this […]