The 2022 trends for Digital Innovation

To celebrate the beginning of this new year, I have reserved a special episode of Digital Innovation Weekly full of ideas for you, ready to go? Street!

2021 was a chiaroscuro year for many, the normality at 75% that we managed to win thanks to the vaccination process allowed a restart but not definitive, since 2022 we finally expect to leave uncertainty behind and regain full freedom.

Optimism for a recovery

Let's analyze some data provided by the IPSOS survey on the Global Trends of 2022 to understand a little the public opinion's expectations for this new year.

An Ipsos survey reveals that the majority of the population is optimistic for 2022 and expects an economic and also personal restart. The majority of the population believes that 2021 has not been a good year for themselves, their affections and their country, despite the progress made in this, the sacrifices will certainly weigh.

An interesting figure is the 75 % of people who intend to make significant changes to their lives in 2022. A figure that goes hand in hand with the Great Resignation, the mass layoffs in Western countries, one of the positive legacies of the pandemic is in fact represented by the awareness of many of the need for a different balance between life and work.

The Fears: climate change, wars, IT Chaos, asteroids and aliens.

At the same time, however, the survey also reveals fears making this optimism rationally fragile. Fears are a more interesting indicator from this point of view because they reflect part of the collective unconscious.

In the first place fear begins to be that of climate change, in this the last two years have helped to create much more awareness on the subject and it can be said that beyond the calm with which governments are acting, now the markets have also begun to give space to ecological transition activities. There is significant concern about the use of atomic weapons in local conflicts with the worsening of foreign policy between the Western bloc and the Sino-Russian bloc and countries such as Iran and North Korea.

In second place is the fear of hacker attacks that could cause shutdown of IT services (a 2021 full of attacks certainly contributes to this fear with cryptolocker to government agencies and service companies) in fourth place instead we find a growing threat or that relating to a artificial intelligence out of control that creates chaos in the IT world, a hypothesis that in some cases is not far from reality.

The last two fears legitimize the fact that after a global pandemic many people now expect everything from an asteroid on a collision course with the earth (like in the film Don't Look Up I was talking about in the last newsletter, we hope that in this case the ending is different), the arrival of the aliens (for which NASA is somehow starting to prepare us, a sign that something is moving on the upper floors?).

Fears indicate the fragility of optimism but also the fact that we are no longer afraid of the pandemic, a signal that we are finally leaving it behind and from this point of view, beyond the momentary moment of emergency, the prospects for 2022 are better.

Digital Innovation Trends in 2022

However, the last two years have been a very strong boost for digital innovation, so let's see what to expect among the growing trends in 2022.

By now, the activity of forecasting the future has also infected brands, Pinterest and Instagram have in fact published documents that help us make our way through next year's trends. Here you find the Pinterest Predicts and the Instagram Trend Report.

They are very useful documents for those who need to set up a social and communication strategy, but also to understand how the customer experience and market and customer orientation will change.

Let's go now to see specifically the trends regarding theDigital Innovation.

Metaverse

The Metaverse or rather its beginning was the most important novelty of last year in the panorama of Digital Innovation. At the moment, however, despite the many projects that are emerging, we are just at the foundations of the construction of this new universe.

That it is a trend only at the beginning is confirmed by the fact that one of the first news of this 2022 was the opening of H&M of his first shop in the metaverse (here more), probably the next to enter the market after luxury brands and clothing will be the organizers of events such as fairs, congresses and shows.

However, 2022 will probably be the year in which we will see many realities arise and some players will begin to emerge. If you are interested in work in the metaverse I point out the large amount of job positions opened by Meta in Italy and in general throughout Europe here on Linkedin. For more details on the Multiverse I refer you to the episode of the Newsletter that I dedicated to him last month.

NFTs

NFTs were the trend of the moment in 2021 will mass use take place in 2022? Instagram is working on its own adoption of NFTs and this promises to bring to the general public the opportunity to purchase one-of-a-kind digital pieces certified via Blockchain.

The use of NFTs may also find alternative uses in other sectors such as DeFi (Decentralized Finance). We will deepen this topic in one of the next episodes of the Newsletter, don't miss it, but in the meantime, if you want to understand where to start from, I would like to point out this article I wrote for Minnovo.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is much more than a trend, it will be one of the greatest inventions in human history if not the greatest, but currently its use is very limited, 2022 will lead to the massive adoption of many artificial intelligence-based tools which will thus enter more and more into our lives.

I recommended an example of these tools to you in one of the past newsletters, Rytr allows you to create copy content thanks to a very insightful AI capable of changing tone of voice and content format.

No Codes

The No Code world is one of the most interesting landscapes in the world of Digital Innovation, I talked about it extensively during an interview with one of the founders of Ncode (if you want to recover it you can find it here). During 2022, more and more companies will implement the use of No Code tools in their offices to create business applications, from websites to e-commerce, from apps to process automation and much more.

The No Code reduces development time and costs and has a very fast learning curve, 2022 will definitely be his year.

By the way, hold on tight in the coming weeks I will announce my new project in this area, which I am conceiving as yet another means to give value to those who follow this Newsletter.

Web3

Web3 is the enrichment of the current web infrastructure with the addition of the Blockchain. The dream is to decentralize the power of the tech giants on the web by creating services that use the Blockchain to provide services. Nice but do you want a concrete example? Filecoins! Filecoins it's a kind of Dropbox of the blockchain, which allows everyone to save content to the cloud. However, the Filecoin cloud is not based in the data centers owned by some giant in the sector, but in the hard drives of all the computers connected to this blockchain.

Instead of rely on a private company to save your photographs, you can take advantage of the free memory of the thousands of computers connected to the Filecoin blockchain, through which it is always possible to check which hard drives our data is saved on, monitor movements and automatically reclaim everything that belongs to us (more details are here). Those who rent the space on their computer's hard disk through Filecoin obtain in exchange a proportional amount of the connected cryptocurrency, called Fil, which can then be sold on traditional cryptocurrency trading platforms.

Another crucial aspect of some Web3 realities is to offer users the right to vote on the decisions they concern the management of the platform itself, usually with a weight proportional to the activity carried out or the cryptocurrencies held. A colossus like is going in the same direction Reddit and the developments make it possible to be very interesting given the community it can involve, is it finally a fundamental passage from the era of platforms to the decentralized one? 2022 will surely give us more information on this.

Omnichannel and Importance of the Customer Journey

Omnichannel is a trend that is reconfirming itself, in fact the massive use of digital has brought out the need to structure the customer experience there customer journey taking into account that the customer must have one unique experience in all its interactions with the brand, without loss of information, regardless of the communication channel or the touchpoints where the conversion of customers takes place within the sales funnels.

One of the subtrends to watch is the Customer Self Service, in fact, after an initial adoption by supermarkets, other shops will also adopt an automatic checkout system, Zara is already experimenting with it in some of its stores in Spain.

Social Selling

For Social Selling we mean the invasion of the world e-commerce in the social sphere, which has already started with shops on Instagram and Facebook, will probably continue on TikTok, a small preview and example of this trend was given to us by TikTok itself which launched the experiment in the field of food delivery TikTok Kitchen i.e. the 2.0 evolution of the kitchen with a view (here is an article by The Verge on the subject). For now it will be an experiment precisely, but it will be significant of what the buying experience will be in the coming years.

WebSecurity

Robotics

Robotics is destined to enter more and more companies, especially manufacturing ones. Companies like Universal Robotics develop solutions with robotic arms for multiple uses. Another big development will come from drones both in the civil sphere (let's think of delivery deliveries where the figure of the rider is a problem), and in the military sphere (and here the way countries make war is already changing). Even the use of robots such as those of Pudu Robotics (of which I leave you the video above of his presentation at CES in Las Vegas these days) will also land in the Horeca sector going to support or partially replace the waiters and hotel staff.

Finally the development of humanoid robots is increasingly fascinating and disturbing, are we close to the encounter between an artificial body and a universal artificial intelligence? 2022 will tell us. This topic also deserves further study in the coming weeks, in fact I'm working on a surprise.

2022 a year of growth and evolution

In short, 2022 promises to be a great year of growth and transformation and will see the development of all the seeds of change sown in these two years of the pandemic. Innovation and change will touch our lives in several points, and this is an excellent reason to continue following this Newsletter.

If you liked this episode share it and help me grow this project. Thank you so much and I wish you that this year starts on the right foot!