The future is small companies – not small gadgets!
21 September 2010
Still in the mood for celebrations, I was drawn to Cambridge Consultants' interesting technology survey.
As we are still in September, the 30th anniversary champagne corks are still popping regularly in the EPD editorial office (if only!) but we are mere pups compared to Cambridge Consultants, who this year have racked up their half century.
They have celebrated this achievement by conducting a 50th anniversary survey that reveals insights into the future of the technology industry and product design.
Receiving over 1000 responses, the research revealed that two out of three people believe that small, fast-growing companies will be responsible for the most influential technologies in the future. This put them way ahead of large, multinational companies.
The Cambridge Consultants survey also revealed that being small isn’t necessarily important in terms of gadgets – reducing the size of devices was a priority for fewer than 2% of respondents. Making gadgets faster was also a surprisingly low priority for consumers, with less than 5% indicating that it was of high importance. Instead, gadget users would prefer to see technology products capable of solving new problems (with over a third of votes) and become easier to use (27%).
Dr. Brian Moon, CEO of Cambridge Consultants, commented: “In the last few years we have seen the most successful products fully exploit both form and function. Indeed, as the insides of gadgets continue to increase in complexity, paradoxically the exteriors become ever simpler. There clearly also remains a strong demand for new and inventive technologies, something that Cambridge Consultants prides itself in developing.”
Other findings showed that almost two thirds of respondents consider the Internet to be the most life-changing invention of the past 50 years. Moon added: “The Internet, although seen by many as a maturing technology, is actually still in its infancy and we’ve only really scratched the surface on what it can do. The next phase will see the convergence of objects, devices and systems with the Internet – a blurring of the lines between online and offline worlds.”
Cambridge Consultants made a donation of £1 for every completed survey to Macmillan Cancer Support.
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