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From Autonomous Cars To Green Hydrogen, Here Are The Top Techs For 2021

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The world of technology moves fast, as Lux Research’s annual list of the top technologies to watch over the next decades proves.

After a tumultuous 2020, 10 of last year’s 20 technologies don’t appear on this year’s list, showing how dynamic changes in the innovation landscape have been over the past year. Notably, 5G networks, the top-ranked technology in last year’s report, are absent from this year’s list because, as the 5G rollout begins, they are now firmly established on everyone’s radar.

The new report, Foresight 2021: Top Emerging Technologies to Watch, identifies and ranks 12 key technologies that will reshape the world. The top three technologies cited in the report are:

Autonomous vehicles: All levels of vehicle automation are seeing improvements in safety and efficiency, benefiting both consumers and commercial operations. Level 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles will transform mobility and logistics by removing the need for a driver behind the wheel of a vehicle.

This will create opportunities in areas like sensors, high-definition mapping and connectivity for autonomous vehicles but it will also have a significant impact on mobility businesses more broadly, with many drivers being replaced in areas from ride-hailing services to trucking.

Natural language processing: Powering devices like voice assistants, machine translation, and chatbots, natural language processing (NLP) patents have grown by 44% CAGR over the past five years, to more than 3,000 publications annually.

Plastic recycling: Concern about plastic waste is nothing new, but major consumer product brands have committed to increasing recycling rates and innovations that can convert waste into higher-value products. Over the past decade alone, 155 startups addressing plastic waste have been founded. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules mean that materials collection must increasingly be validated, leading to a need for advances in tracking and sorting

This will create opportunities in areas such as waste collection and for companies that can use plastic waste as a feedstock. Innovations such as designing for recyclability and techniques to convert plastic waste into valuable products, enabling a circular economy and avoiding pollution, are likely to emerge in coming years.

Unsurprisingly, a number of technologies aimed at fighting the Covid-19 pandemic have also made the list. “Technologies from our lists like digital biomarkers and AI-enabled sensors can help bring businesses back to work,” explains Michael Holman, vice-president of research and lead author of the report. “But for all the changes that the pandemic has brought, the key megatrends shaping the future are still in force. Technologies that support these transitions, such as autonomous vehicles, alternative proteins, and green hydrogen, will maintain their momentum as a result.”

A technology new to the Lux leader board is AI-enabled sensors, which are enabling developers and operators to extract more value out of sensors, create new products and improve internal processes by generating deeper insights off existing hardware. Sensors of all kinds now can provide more impactful insights when coupled with machine learning and AI, across a huge range of industries. They also form a powerful combination when coupled with automation technologies such as 3D printing and robotics. More than $1.8bn has been raised by companies developing or using AI-enabled sensors.

Along with autonomous technology, they are helping to automate the workplace, and enhance the capabilities of workers that remain.

Green hydrogen, which is produced using water and renewable electricity, is another key technology – less in the much-hyped field of hydrogen vehicles and more in helping to clean up otherwise hard-to-decarbonize industrial processes in industries such as steel and cement. It will also play a key role in energy storage to increase the use of renewable technologies. Hydrogen can be the basis for making chemicals from electricity and CO2, as a path to distributed manufacturing, in a process known as power-to-chemicals.

One of the key trends of 2020, aside from the pandemic, has been the growth of alternative proteins, driven by concerns about climate change, animal welfare and population growth. Companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are showing that there is a massive opportunity to cater to sustainability-minded consumers and to the demand for protein choice in general.

Animal meat is known for its resource-intensive nature; alternative proteins provide a pathway to similar but sustainable food experiences. Beyond Meat’s shares rose by 112% between the start of the year and the end of August, despite the coronavirus slowdown.

Of the technologies on last year’s list that don’t make this year’s list, some are still represented through other categories, such as last-mile delivery, which is still represented through options like autonomous vehicles and enablers like AI sensors.

Others have not yet created sufficient use cases, such as blockchain, or the economics remain unfavorable, such as vertical farming.

Battery fast charging will still be a key enabler for electric vehicles, but for now, innovation momentum in battery swapping is higher, Lux says, while graphene and other 2D materials continue to drive research and  patenting, but integration and manufacturing challenges will slow adoption.

Lux warns that while it is important to keep up with what is going on in your own industry, you should cast a wider net as well. “The top techs in each industry are  essential to be on top of, but the next great innovation to impact your industry might come from well outside it as well,” the report says. “Most innovation organizations are fairly adept at monitoring innovations from within their own industry, but a wider view is critical as well.”

These are Lux’s Top Emerging Technologies to Watch for 2021

#1 Autonomous Vehicles

#2 Natural Language Processing

#3 Plastic Recycling

#4 AI-Enabled Sensors

#5 Bioinformatics

#6 Green Hydrogen

#7 Shared Mobility

#8 Alternative Proteins

#9 3D Printing

#10 Materials Informatics

#11 Precision Agriculture

#12 Synthetic Biology

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