Application of Fully-Fledged Methodology to Global Technology Trends Monitoring in the Information Technology Industry

Nowadays the global IT industry is undergoing fundamental transformations due to the emergence, development and spread of numerous disruptive technologies such as AI, IoT, VR and AR, clod computing, blockchain etc. These technologies are used for the creation of innovative products and services, which create new opportunities and threats for the market players as well as policy regulators when being introduced to the consumers. For this reason, the leading international organizations, national research centers, universities and research organizations, business companies and consultancy agencies conduct numerous studies dedicated to global technology trends monitoring in the IT industry in order to uncover the promising S&T directions and achieve worldwide leadership by gaining new knowledge about their future development and increasing the efficiency of R&D allocations and investments. However, most of these studies investigate only the individual technological areas by means of a limited number of quantitative and qualitative methods, rarely combined with each other. Hence, the results of these studies can not be considered as comprehensive enough, while their interpretation is available only for a certain kind of stakeholders (either business companies, or policy regulators). This study, in turn, is aimed at the development and application of fully-fledged methodology to global technology trends monitoring in the IT industry. This methodology, in contrast to the previous studies in this area, is based on a rationally combined mix of quantitative and qualitative methods organized in a systematic way. In this regard, the results of this study represent broad interpretation of 9 systematically verified global technology trends in the IT industry discovered by means of the semantic analysis and described in terms of their bibliometric and patent activity, market forecasts and future expert predictions, year of implementation and areas of application, key market players, products and services, key future events and life cycle stage, drivers and barriers, opportunities and threats. The methodology used for the purposes of this research as well as the results of the study were approved during the ISSEK research project Development of the Information Technology Industry of the Russian Federation and Actualization of the Technology Development Strategy”. This research project is aimed at the updating of the Strategy for the development of the IT industry in Russia up to 2036, which is expected to uncover to most promising directions in the global IT industry for the national stakeholders. This means that the results of this study are comprehensive enough and appropriate for further dissemination among a wide range of stakeholders.