Center for Digital Envisioning

What will happen in the future? what scenarios will enable digital innovations in ten years’ time and beyond? What digital innovations will change the characteristics of our future?

Digital technologies are evolving rapidly, changing our habits, creating new economic and employment segments, influencing geopolitics as well as increasingly shaping government and industrial strategies. The Digital Innovation Observatories have been studying digital technologies and digital innovation in general since 1999. They have been doing so extensively and continuously over time, providing solid empirical evidence to support decisions, developing interpretive models and spreading knowledge among businesses and institutions. Awareness of the past, understanding the present, and identifying short- and medium-term trends is a cornerstone of the Group's research model, but not enough to predict what will happen in long-term scenarios.

Stemmed from this assumption is the Center for Digital Envisioning (C4DE), a center of expertise of the Digital Innovation Observatories to develop and promote the ability to envision future scenarios enabled across the board by digital technologies, knowing how to predict relevant opportunities and risks in the medium, long, and very long term.

Aiming to foster innovation in digital technology research, drive a strategic vision within institutions and businesses, and inspire sector stakeholders, C4DE work focuses on three directions:

Digital technology road mapping: Identify evolutionary directions of digital technologies and new emerging technologies, with the aim of predicting future scenarios in technical, application, and market terms;
Future digital application analysis: analyze digital technology evolution scenarios in regard to diverse vertical application areas as well as possible and/or desirable future scenarios (e.g., sector-specific, social, economic, etc.);
Key digital trend alerting: identify emerging and strategic trends related to digital technologies to be monitored across multiple time frames (3-5 years, 5-10 years, >10 years) to provide strategic suggestions to different stakeholders.

C4DE activities include the following:

Trend intelligence on the international digital transformation scenario with the aim of collecting and processing signals, albeit faint, useful to identify emerging trends that will impact the industry in the medium to long term;
Co-creation of possible or desirable future scenarios related to the use of digital solutions together with the network of experts of the Digital Innovation Observatories;
Understanding and interacting by developing interpretation models, identifying digital solution market evolution directions, and defining strategic action levers for different stakeholders;
Impact Monitoring continued over time with respect to the strategic actions undertaken.

These activities will be conducted through distinctive C4DE research lines as well as in conjunction with individual Observatories, methodologically supporting the implementation of Digital Envisioning exercises on specific analysis areas.

C4DE intends to accomplish:

an annual report on “Top & Emerging Digital Trends”;
an annual digital envisioning public event.

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For further information, collaboration and support requests for the other researches of the Digital Agenda Observatory, please contact Marina Natalucci email: marina.natalucci@polimi.it, Valeria Portale valeria.portale@polimi.it, Luca Gastaldi luca.gastaldi@polimi.it.