Macro Trend Notebook

The Macro Trend Notebook reached its 5th edition, populating the Emerging Trend Radar with 17 Macro Trends. This edition saw the entry of the new Macro Trend “Nature and Biodiversity” - first introduced in 2020 as a “topic to watch” - in light of the strong link between biodiversity loss due to climate change and Society, in terms of the impacts on quality of life.

The Macro Trends of the previous editions were all confirmed with some showing strong growth since they were introduced, such as the “Internet of Everything”, which entered the Radar for the first edition in 2015, or the more recent “Space Economy”, introduced in 2020.

The 2024 Notebook focused particular attention, also through its “topics to watch”, on the Macro Trends “Human Society”, given the importance of preparing today for the multiple facets of the demographic transition our country will face tomorrow, “Wellbeing”, in light of the growing relevance of psycho-physical wellbeing, “New Frontiers”, due to the increase in geopolitical tensions, and “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics” for the acceleration linked to generative AI and the importance of “Human-Centric AI” guided by humans to serve humans. The Macro Trends “Climate Change”, “Hybrid Consumer” and “New Skills” remained central, with “topics to watch” including “CO2 web”, for decarbonisation that takes digital technology into account, “Digital twins”, for the great potential starting from the health sector and the management of natural disasters, and “Society-Organism”, as new frontiers for organisational and leadership models to face an increasingly complex and uncertain external context.

In the 2024 edition, we identified “Foresight” as the key word for the next five years, understood as the ability to identify possible developments in a situation, supported by an exceptional ability to prevent or exploit its consequences.

Map of interconnections

Environmental Technological Political

This includes the topics of the Internet of things, focusing in particular on black boxes but also on other devices more related to the home (home automation and smart cities), businesses, people (health and wellbeing) and big data. In the context of threats, it includes the topic of personal data protection (privacy), as well as data security and cyber-crime. It includes new computational frontiers.
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This concerns the need for new skills to respond to changing trends and the evolution of organizational paradigms to cope with contexts characterized by growing complexity and uncertainty. It includes the topics of skills gap, lifelong learning, remote working and organizational agility, resilience, mixture of skills and enhancement of diversity. In this context, it also includes the analysis of how leadership models may evolve.
TO WATCH - Organizations - entities
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This concerns new mobility models, developments in mobility-related technology and its impact on the insurance sector. It includes new mobility behaviours ranging from micromobility to “Mobility as a Service” (MaaS) and the technological evolution of cars, especially driverless cars.
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This includes aspects linked to longevity and population aging (longevity, management of the elderly, silver economy, value of children/fertility) and the progressive generational change with gaps between the various generations and the “power of youth” and dynamics linked to immigration and multiculturalism (cultural and religious mixes), and the evolution of family units and social networks (extended families, co-habiting couples, singles, parent/child relationships, grandparent/grandchild relationships, female empowerment, work-life balance, pet affection).
TO WATCH - Social Relationship Models
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This concerns the hybridization of the relationship with the customer in a seamless customer journey between real life and virtual reality. It includes topics such as: web vitality, mobile Internet, virtual mobility, «onlife», perpetual connectivity, access to “anytime, anyway, anywhere” services, e-commerce, domestic time, access time to financial services, time management/saving, credibility and security of cyber space. This macro trend also analyses the emerging figure of the “prosumer”, in terms of role, behaviour and values. In this context, it focuses on the central value of the customer experience and on the importance of personalization.
TO WATCH - Digital Twins
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This includes the topics: climate change, extreme climate events, greenhouse gas emissions, spread of animal species, insects and microorganisms, spread of new diseases (for the part related to climate change), with a focus on the “climate endgame”.
TO WATCH - CO2 web
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This concerns internationalization with a view to the growth and consolidation strategy of insurance companies and to supporting corporate and SME customers (need to provide protection and risk management services on an international scale and support for the development and internationalization process of SMEs) and retail customers (e.g. education abroad). It includes the risk of contagion, European sentiment, growing political instability and transition to a multipolar order, as well as the spread of diseases resulting from globalization. It focuses on global governance in the face of emerging challenges, including the governance of Artificial Intelligence.
TO WATCH - Wars and Supply Chains
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This includes the topics of fear, sense of vulnerability, unemployment and job precariousness, polarization and social tensions. Social polarization is explored in its many forms, which range from the economic-financial dimension to other more intangible dimensions with impacts in terms of access to opportunities and “enabling the future”. It also includes the topics of downsizing and money management/saving.
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This concerns the topic of the growing importance of health understood in an increasingly holistic sense of psycho-physical wellbeing. It includes the phenomenon of increasingly patient-friendly and predictive health, touching on topics such as developments in biotechnology, omics sciences, «4-P»medicine (personalized, preventive, predictive and participatory), the «self-quantified» phenomenon and, in the area of personalization and prevention, circadian rhythms, lifestyle and eating habits, therapeutic freedom, addictions. It also includes the growing relevance of chronic diseases and mental illnesses, as well as the topic of drug resistance. It addresses the issue of (multi-pillar) public-private integration and the rebalancing of welfare actions between the State, the market and collaborative economies.
TO WATCH - Healthy Aging and Technology | Pollution
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This concerns the phenomenon of transformation of our society into a “smart economy” or an “oracular society”, thanks to predictive algorithms and generative artificial intelligence, with the emergence of new opportunities and new challenges. It investigates ethical dilemmas and the human-machine relationship.
TO WATCH - Human-Centric AI | Quantum Computing
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This concerns the phenomenon of human enhancement through an increasingly symbiotic relationship between humans and machines, explored in various fields: for health care purposes (on both the patient’s and the doctor’s side), work, ubiquity up to the future frontiers of augmented humans due to the enhancement of physical and cognitive functions and the emergence of a cyborg “species”.
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This concerns the dark side of technology which has been increasingly emerging after a phase in which it spread and manifested itself massively and pervasively in multiple forms, from techno-addiction and dangers for young people, to fake news and fake videos, to ethical issues linked to the human-machine relationship and hacking and privacy intrusion risks.
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This includes the metamorphosis of assets from tangible to intangible assets, the evolution of needs from the sphere of security to that of self-realization and the enrichment of valuation and reporting metrics with environmental, social and governance factors (ESG factors) in view of long-term sustainability and with a multi-stakeholder approach. In this context, it focuses on the importance of cultivating foresight and a transgenerational perspective.
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This concerns the transition from linear to circular thinking, the systemic vision as a new way of seeing, understanding and acting by grasping relationships and interdependencies, the paradigm shift from “more with more” to “more with less and better”, the «Cradle-to-Cradle» (C2C) model for a regenerative economy «by design», the principles of biomimicry, the performance economy and the «Product-as-a-Service» paradigm. It focuses on extending the principles of circularity to the social dimension.
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This concerns the space economy, in particular with reference to the creation of innovative enabling products and services (referred to as “downstream” services), such as advanced telecommunications, navigation and positioning, integration of space Big Data with terrestrial data, environmental and climate monitoring, weather forecasts, space tourism, space mining and protection against the risk of asteroid impacts with the Earth and other cosmic threats, such as solar storms. In this context, it focuses on nano-satellite technology and the growing openness to the private sector.
TO WATCH - In-Orbit Economy
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This concerns changes in ecosystem services, in the spread of animal and plant species and microorganisms, spread of new diseases, food production to further understand the exchange relationships we have with nature so as to perform a care and protection role.
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