Annual Preview/Review of Scan's Watch List of Defining Forces
The December issue of
Scan™ Monthly provides a quick review of each of the defining forces on Scan™'s watch list and a preview speculating about how each force may continue to evolve in the coming year. We also take the opportunity provided by the annual review to assess the past year's defining-forces watch list in light of the more than 1200 Scan abstracts that we've accumulated and analyzed during the year. Although the majority of the topics remain in place for the coming year, we have chosen to modify several of them to reflect better the Signals of Change we've seen during 2004. We are modifying last year's Globalization topic to indicate the
importance of the role that we expect China and India to play during the coming year in transforming the global economy. We are expanding last year's Health Care topic to encompass Health and Wellness. We are combining two of last year's categories, Wireless Technologies and Pervasive Computing, into a single domain for 2005 that we call Connectivity. The number of Scan abstracts on sensors that have turned up during 2004 indicates a significant level of development in that arena, and the number of abstracts clustering around robotics indicates that years of investment in robotic technologies are finally paying off in increasing levels of commercialization. So we are adding categories for Sensors and Robotics this year. The abstracts from 2004 that clustered around last year's topic Attention Economy/Experience Industry indicate that companies are getting down to the nuts and bolts of dealing with the Attention Economy through meeting new challenges that digital media present. Our replacement category for 2005 will therefore be Challenges in Marketing. The new array of defining forces appears in the figure to the right.
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