One of the tasks the JISC Observatory has undertaken is to identify trends of emerging technologies and applications from outside the European and N American educational domains that could conceivably be relevant to the UK higher education system. In order to do so my colleague Phil Barker and I carried out a brief literature scan of the major technology forecasting publications from business and other sectors which are available through open access, e.g. PwC Technology Forecast, Gartner’s Top IT Predictions, etc.

Around thirty publications describing emerging technologies predicted to be important to domains other than education, were suggested by members of JISC’s two Innovation Support Centres: Cetis and UKOLN. These are listed on the delicious website. These were read and the technologies they identify summarised in a Google Doc. These technologies were then grouped into themes for discussion. For each theme we provide a brief introductory definition, a short snapshot of relevant technologies and applications in business and the wider world, and its implications for an organisation’s IT and business strategies. The final report is now available for download.

Overall the themes that were identified as being widely discussed in the technology forecast publications came as no surprise, but there were some interesting trends that were picked up by only one or two of the forecast publications that wered new to us, for example, fabric-based computing (a modular approach to computer hardware, Gartner 2010), that might be worth considering further.