Conclusions

Abstract

This chapter brings a concise conclusion for the book by presenting the list of 34 emerging technologies, 17 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), countries and number of companies that are included in this book, the distribution of 650 companies in the world, emerging technology use cases per each sustainable development goal, the share of emerging technology use cases and the share of sustainable development goals number of applications. The chapter also includes a brief discussion about the findings of this book.

Tackling climate change, building a sustainable future, protecting economies and creating new jobs are the common desires of academia, industry, business and policymakers. We all know that this is not an easy task. There are numerous challenges and barriers to achieving this radical transformation from a traditional carbon-based economy to a sustainable one. At this point, emerging technologies step forth as remedies for this challenge. On the other hand, entrepreneurs foster innovative solutions and utilise these emerging technologies to create novel products and services to support sustainable development. Some traditional jobs and businesses will be phased out and replaced by these novel ones. At this point, we believe it is imperative to present “a guidebook” to illuminate how all these efforts came true so that others can learn, reflect and even advance in the business development with emerging technologies to help contribute to a sustainable future.

This book first presents an in-depth assessment of the innovation concept, funding and financing, supporting mechanisms for innovation and an impact assessment from various perspectives. The second chapter includes information on 34 different emerging technologies with market diffusion. This means we deliberately excluded the technologies either in the research and development phase or the ones not commercially available in the market. We then continue with the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With each SDG, we present a brief introduction about the concept and then provide a company and use cases table. The tables include companies worldwide that utilise 34 emerging technologies and create economic, environmental and social value to reinforce sustainable development. The 34 emerging technologies and 17 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that we review are listed in Tables 20.1 and 20.2, respectively.

Table 20.1 List of 34 emerging technologies

Table 20.2 List of 17 United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs)

We made a comprehensive review and market scanning and inspected thousands of companies worldwide. Finally, we managed to compile 650 noteworthy and innovative companies from 51 countries. This does not mean that the companies presented here are the only interesting and innovative ones in the world. Indeed, we cannot claim that we reviewed all companies in the world due to time and labour constraints. Moreover, there are many companies, which have similar business models to the ones on our lists. We had to exclude these due to the space of the book. Table 20.3 shows these countries and the corresponding number of companies. Similarly, Table 20.4 gives the SDGs and number of companies that are inspected in each field. Figure 20.1 illustrates the distribution of these companies on a world map. Figure 20.2 summarises the emerging technology use case distribution per each sustainable development goal on a matrix. Figures 20.3 and 20.4 are pie charts showing the distribution of use cases per emerging technologies and sustainable development goals

Table 20.3 List of countries and number of companies

Table 20.4 SDGs and number of companies

Fig. 20.1

Distribution of 650 companies in the world

Fig. 20.2

The emerging technology use cases per each sustainable development goal

Fig. 20.3

The share of emerging technology use cases

Fig. 20.4

The share of sustainable development goals number of applications

The USA turned out to be the most innovative country on our list by far, with 245 companies out of 650. The UK and the Netherlands follow the USA, and Nordic countries also perform exceptionally well. All these countries are well-known for their vivid innovative and entrepreneurial ecosystems. There is no surprise that these countries take the lead in adopting emerging technologies and converting these into business cases. Perhaps we should mention Germany here as one might expect a “better performance” in business and value generation with technology. However, we might state that there is an ongoing debate about Germany’s success with digitalisation in general. Thus, we might claim that Germany could and should do much better, especially with digital technologies. We acknowledge that the distribution of companies worldwide might be “western biased” as most of the use cases are located either in North America or in Europe, especially in Western and Northern Europe. Language could be one of the barriers. For example, we wanted to inspect one Japanese company to see how they work on innovative solutions by using advanced materials and biotech and biomanufacturing. Nonetheless, the company’s website does not provide sufficient information in English; thus, we did not include any of the products or services from them.

The matrix shown in Fig. 20.2 summarises our findings in this book. We can see each technology’s number of use cases per SDG here. Artificial intelligence (AI) tops as the most utilised emerging technology with 473 use cases. Similarly, SDG-9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure is the most preferred field with 240 applications. On the other hand, Internet of Behaviours and SDG-17: Partnerships for the Goals have the least number of use cases. This matrix shows which technology is concentrated in what field and which technologies have no application in what fields. To better articulate these findings, we prepared the following figures.

As seen in Fig. 20.3, more than one-third of all use cases are done with AI, IoT (Internet of Things) and big data. One might argue that these technologies are no longer emerging ones; instead, they are mature technologies. However, we should remember the definition of emerging technologies: “development and application areas are still expanding rapidly, and their technical and value potential is still largely unrealised”. We are positive that AI, IoT and big data’s application areas are still expanding rapidly, and their technical and value potential is still largely unrealised. We will be seeing fascinating and promising developments with these 34 technologies, some of which are still at their initial stages of market diffusion.

Figure 20.4 shows us that some SDGs are popular among technology companies, whereas some have limited applications. These are SDG-7: Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG-9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, SDG-12: Responsible Consumption and Production and SDG-13: Climate Action. Of course, it is unrealistic to expect an even number of applications at each SDG. However, we hope that the technology providers will focus more on SDG-5: Gender Equality, SDG-10: Reduced Inequality and SDG -16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions.

This book attempts to compile as many relevant innovative business models as possible in employing emerging technologies to create value for sustainable development. However, it is impossible to present all valuable companies and use cases here. Besides, our aim is not to advertise technology companies. Instead, we solely focused on the value captured by technologies rather than the companies’ revenue models. This way, entrepreneurs and other companies who wish to expand their businesses into one of the sustainable development goal fields can check and inspect how emerging technologies create value for fostering sustainability in general. We hope that this book will be helpful as a guide for those interested in innovation, emerging technologies, new business models, value creation and sustainable development.