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McKinsey Global Institute

May 2013

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy

The McKinsey Global Institute The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the business and economics research arm of McKinsey & Company, was established in 1990 to develop a deeper understanding of the evolving global economy. Our goal is to provide leaders in the commercial, public, and social sectors with the facts and insights on which to base management and policy decisions. MGI research combines the disciplines of economics and management, employing the analytical tools of economics with the insights of business leaders. Our “micro-to-macro” methodology examines microeconomic industry trends to better understand the broad macroeconomic forces affecting business strategy and public policy. MGI’s in-depth reports have covered more than 20 countries and 30 industries. Current research focuses on four themes: productivity and growth, the evolution of global financial markets, the economic impact of technology and innovation, and urbanization. Recent reports have assessed job creation, resource productivity, cities of the future, and the impact of the Internet. MGI is led by McKinsey & Company directors Richard Dobbs and James Manyika. Yougang Chen, Michael Chui, Susan Lund, and Jaana Remes serve as MGI principals. Project teams are led by a group of senior fellows and include consultants from McKinsey’s offices around the world. These teams draw on McKinsey’s global network of partners and industry and management experts. In addition, leading economists, including Nobel laureates, act as research advisers. The partners of McKinsey & Company fund MGI’s research; it is not commissioned by any business, government, or other institution. For further information about MGI and to download reports, please visit www.mckinsey.com/mgi.

3D-printing photo courtesy of Andy Ryan, Formlabs Copyright © McKinsey & Company 2013

McKinsey Global Institute

May 2013

Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy James Manyika Michael Chui Jacques Bughin Richard Dobbs Peter Bisson Alex Marrs

McKinsey Global Institute Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy

Preface

Technology is moving so quickly, and in so many directions, that it becomes challenging to even pay attention—we are victims of “next new thing” fatigue. Yet technology advancement continues to drive economic growth and, in some cases, unleash disruptive change. Economically disruptive technologies—like the semiconductor microchip, the Internet, or steam power in the Industrial Revolution—transform the way we live and work, enable new business models, and provide an opening for new players to upset the established order. Business leaders and policy makers need to identify potentially disruptive technologies, and carefully consider their potential, before these technologies begin to exert their disruptive powers in the economy and society. In this report, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) assesses the potential reach and scope, as well as the potential economic impact and disruption, of major rapidly advancing technology areas. Through extensive research, we sort through the noise to identify 12 technology areas with the potential for massive impact on how people live and work, and on industries and economies. We also attempt to quantif y the potential economic impact of each technology across a set of promising applications in 2025. By definition such an exercise is incomplete—technology and innovations always surprise. The potential applications we consider reflect what McKinsey experts and respected leaders in industry and academia who aided our research believe are illustrative of emerging applications over the next decade or two and provide a good indication of the size and shape of the impact that these applications could have. The combined potential economic impact by 2025 from the applications of the 12 technologies that we have sized may be denominated in the tens oftrillions of dollars per year. Some of this economic potential will end up as consumer surplus; a substantial portion of this economic potential will tranlate into new revenue that companies will capture and that will contribute to GDP growth. Other effects could include shifts in profit pools between companies and industries. Our goal in pursuing this research is not to make predictions, either about the specific applications or the specific sizes of impact. Rather we hope this report will act as a guide for leaders to use as they consider the reach and scope of impact, as well as the types of impacts that these disruptive technologies could have for the growth and performance of their organizations. We fully expect and hope others will build on and enrich this research, as we plan to do. As a companion piece to this research on disruptive technologies, we have updated prior work on business trends enabled by information technologies, which will be available for download at the MGI website (www.mckinsey.com/mgi). In any case, we believe that these technologies will have large and disruptive impact. More importantly, the results of our research show that business leaders and policy makers—and society at large—will confront change on many fronts: in the way businesses organize themselves, how jobs are defined, how we use technology to interact with the world (and with each other), and, in the case of

next-generation genomics, how we understand and manipulate living things. There will be disruptions to established norms, and there will be broad societal challenges. Nevertheless, we see considerable reason for optimism. Many technologies on the horizon offer immense opportunities. We believe that leaders can seize these opportunities, if they start preparing now. This work was led by James Manyika, an MGI director in San Francisco, and Michael Chui, an MGI principal, working closely with McKinsey directors JacquesBughin and Peter Bisson. We are particularly indebted to our team leaders—AlexMarrs, who managed the project, and JoiDanielson, who coled a portion of the research. The project team included HyungpyoChoi, ShalabhGupta, TimWegner, Angela Winkle, and SabinaWizander. GeoffreyLewis provided editorial support, Karla Arias assisted with research, and we thank the MGI production and communication staff: MarisaCarder, JuliePhilpot, GabrielaRamirez, and Rebeca Robboy. We thank McKinsey experts whose insight and guidance were critical to our work, in particular directors Matt Rogers on oil and gas exploration and recovery, Stefan Heck on renewable energy, Philip Ma on genomics, and Mona Mourshed on education and training. Roger Roberts, a principal in our Business Technology Office, provided multiple insights across various areas of technology. Katy George, a director in the NorthAmerican Operations Practice, provided expertise on manufacturing, as did Lou Rassey, a principal in the practice. Susan Lund, an MGI principal, provided insight on the changing nature of work and on energy. We were assisted by many experts in our Business Technology Office, including Steve Cheng and Brian Milch, as well as Bryan Hancock from the Public Sector Practice and Jimmy Sarakatsannis from the Social Sector Practice. We also thank Jonathan Ablett, Sree Ramaswamy, and Vivien Singer for their help on many topics. We are grateful to our external advisers Hal R. Varian, chief economist at Google and emeritus professor in the School of Information, the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley; ErikBrynjolfsson, Schussel Family professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and MartinBaily, senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program and Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economic Policy Development at the Brookings Institution. This work benefited from the insight of many technology and business thought leaders, including Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and managing partner of The Social+Capital Partnership and a former Facebook executive; Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google; and Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco. We also thank McKinsey alumni Jennifer Buechel, RobJenks, and David Mann, as well as Vivek Wadhwa, vice president of innovation and research at Singularity University; and Ann Winblad, managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. We thank David Kirkpatrick, CEO of Techonomy; and Paddy Cosgrave, founder of F.ounders. McKinsey colleagues from many practice areas gave generously of their time and expertise to guide our analyses for each technology. Dan Ewing, Ken Kajii, Christian Kraus, Richard Lee, Fredrik Lundberg, Daniel Pacthod, and Remi Said

McKinsey Global Institute Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy

were our experts in mobile Internet technology. For automation of knowledge work, we received input from Rickard Carlsson, Alex Ince-Cushman, Alex Kazaks, Nathan Marston, and Chad Wegner. Our McKinsey experts on the Internet of Things were Mike Greene, Aditi Jain, Nakul Narayan, Jeffrey Thompson, and Peter Weed. Cloud computing insights were provided by Brad Brown, Abhijit Dubey, Loralei Osborn, Naveen Sastry, KaraSprague, Irina Starikova, and Paul Willmott. Peter Groves, Craig Melrose, Murali Naidu and Jonathan Tilley provided expertise on advanced robotics. For our research on next-generation genomics, we called on Myoung Cha, NicolasDenis, Lutz Goedde, Samarth Kulkarni, Derek Neilson, Mark Patel, Roberto Paula, and Pasha Sarraf. In autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles, our experts were Nevin Carr, Matt Jochim, Gustav Lindström, Cody Newman, John Niehaus, and Benno Zerlin. For expertise on energy storage, we called on McKinsey experts JeremiahConnolly, Mark Faist, Christian Gschwandtner, Jae Jung, ColinLaw, Michael Linders, Farah Mandich, Sven Merten, John Newman, OctavianPuzderca, Ricardo Reina, and Kyungyeol Song. In 3D printing, BartekBlaicke, Tobias Geisbüsch, and Christoph Sohns provided expertise. Helen Chen, Nathan Flesher, and Matthew Veves were our experts on advanced materials. For expert insight on advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery, we relied on Abhijit Akerkar, Drew Erdmann, Bob Frei, Sara Hastings-Simon, Peter Lambert, Ellen Mo, Scott Nyquist, Dickon Pinner, Joe Quoyeser, Occo Roelofsen, WombiRose, Ed Schneider, Maria Fernanda Souto, and Antonio Volpin. In renewable energy, our experts were Ian Banks, Joris de Boer, Sonam Handa, Yunzhi Li, Jurriaan Ruys, Raman Sehgal, and Johnson Yeh. This report is part of our ongoing work about the impact of technology on the economy. Our goal is to provide the fact base and insights about important technological developments that will help business leaders and policy makers develop appropriate strategies and responses. As with all of MGI’s work, this report has not been sponsored in any way by any business, government, or other institution.

Richard Dobbs Director, McKinsey Global Institute Seoul James Manyika Director, McKinsey Global Institute San Francisco

May 2013

Connecting rate of improvement and reach today …

$5million vs. $400 Price of the fastest supercomputer in 19751 and an iPhone 4 with equal performance

230+million Knowledge workers in 2012

$2.7billion, 13years Cost and duration of the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003

300,000+ Miles driven by Google’s autonomous cars with only one accident (human error)

3x Increase in efficiency of NorthAmerican gas wells between 2007 and 2011

85% Drop in cost per watt of a solar photovoltaic cell since 2000

1

For CDC-7600, considered the world’s fastest computer from 1969 to 1975; equivalent to $32million in 2013 at an average inflation rate of 4.3percent per year since launch in 1969.

… with economic potential in 2025

2–3billion More people with access to the Internet in 2025

$5–7trillion Potential economic impact by 2025 of automation of knowledge work

$100, 1 hour Cost and time to sequence a human genome in the next decade2

1.5million Driver-caused deaths from car accidents in 2025, potentially addressable by autonomous vehicles

100–200% Potential increase in NorthAmerican oil production by 2025, driven by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling

16% Potential share of solar and wind in global electricity generation by 20253 2 3

Derek Thompson, “IBM’s killer idea: The $100 DNA-sequencing machine,” The Atlantic, November 16, 2011. Assuming continued cost declines in solar and wind technology and policy support for meeting the global environmental target of CO2 concentration lower than 450 ppm by 2050.

McKinsey Global Institute Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy

Contents

Executive summary

1

Introduction: Understanding the impact of technologies

23

1.

29

Mobile Internet

2. Automation of knowledgework

40

3. The Internet of Things

51

4. Cloud technology

61

5. Advanced robotics

68

6. Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles

78

7.

86

Next-generation genomics

8. Energy storage

95

9. 3D printing

105

10. Advanced materials

114

11. Advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery

125

12. Renewable energy

136

Conclusion

148

Bibliography

152

Disruptive technologies at a glance: Word cloud of report contents1

1

www.wordle.net; McKinsey Global Institute analysis.

McKinsey Global Institute Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy

Executive summary

The parade of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs is relentless and is unfolding on many fronts. Almost any advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of “next big things” grows ever longer. Yet some technologies do in fact have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, rearrange value pools, and lead to entirely new products and services. Business leaders can’t wait until evolving technologies are having these effects to determine which developments are truly big things. They need to understand how the competitive advantages on which they have based strategy might erode or be enhanced a decade from now by emerging technologies—how technologies might bring them new customers or force them to defend their existing bases or inspire them to invent new strategies. Policy makers and societies need to prepare for future technology, too. To do this well, they will need a clear understanding of how technology might shape the global economy and society over the coming decade. They will need to decide how to invest in new forms of education and infrastructure, and figure out how disruptive economic change will affect comparative advantages. Governments will need to create an environment in which citizens can continue to prosper, even as emerging technologies disrupt their lives. Lawmakers and regulators will be challenged to learn how to manage new biological capabilities and protect the rights and privacy of citizens. Many forces can bring about large-scale changes in economies and societies— demographic shifts, labor force expansion, urbanization, or new patterns in capital formation, for example. But since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, technology has had a unique role in powering growth and transforming economies. Technology represents new ways of doing things, and, once mastered, creates lasting change, which businesses and cultures do not “unlearn.” Adopted technology becomes embodied in capital, whether physical or human, and it allows economies to create more value with less input. At the same time, technology often disrupts, supplanting older ways of doing things and rendering old skills and organizational approaches irrelevant. These economically disruptive technologies are the focus of our report.1 We view technology both in terms of potential economic impact and capacity to disrupt, because we believe these effects go hand-in-hand and because both are of critical importance to leaders. As the early 20th-century economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, the most significant advances in economies are often accompanied by a process of “creative destruction,” which shifts profit pools, rearranges industry structures, and replaces incumbent businesses. This process is often driven by technological innovation in the hands of entrepreneurs. Schumpeter describes how the Illinois Central railroad’s high-speed freight 1

Recent reports by the McKinsey Global Institute have analyzed how changes in labor forces, global financial markets, and infrastructure investment will shape economies and influence growth in comingyears. See, for example, The world at work: Jobs, pay, and skills for 3.5billion people, McKinsey Global Institute, June 2012.

1

2

service enabled the growth of cities yet disrupted established agricultural businesses. In the recent past, chemical-based photography—a technology that dominated for more than a century and continued to evolve—was routed by digital technology in less than 20years. Today the print media industry is in a life-and-death struggle to remain relevant in a world of instant, online news and entertainment. Some economists question whether technology can still deliver the kind of wide-ranging, profound impact that the introduction of the automobile or the semiconductor chip had, and point to data showing slowing productivity growth in the UnitedStates and the UnitedKingdom—often early adopters of new technology—as evidence. While we agree that significant challenges lie ahead, we also see considerable reason for optimism about the potential for new and emerging technologies to raise productivity and provide widespread benefits across economies. Achieving the full potential of promising technologies while addressing their challenges and risks will require ef fective leadership, but the potential is vast. As technology continues to transform our world, business leaders, policy makers, and citizens must look ahead and plan. Today, we see many rapidly evolving, potentially transformative technologies on the horizon—spanning information technologies, biological sciences, material science, energy, and other fields. The McKinsey Global Institute set out to identify which of these technologies could have massive, economically disruptive impact between now and 2025. We also sought to understand how these technologies could change our world and how leaders of businesses and other institutions should respond. Our goal is not to predict the future, but rather to use a structured analysis to sort through the technologies with the potential to transform and disrupt in the next decade or two, and to assess potential impact based on what we can know today, and put these promising technologies in a useful perspective. We offer this work as a guide for leaders to anticipate the coming opportunities and changes.

IDENTIFYING THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT MATTER The noise about the next big thing can make it difficult to identif y which technologies truly matter. Here we attempt to sort through the many claims to identify the technologies that have the greatest potential to drive substantial econo...