What will you drive in ten years? Probably a plane

A new report by the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters has outlined some surprising predictions for how the world will look in 2025 with their "The World in 2025: 10 Predictions of Innovation."

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - In the study, researchers identified the top 10 emerging scientific areas based on an analysis of popular topics using Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

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They took global patent data in the Derwent World Patents Index to identify the top 10 patent fields with the highest number of inventions containing a priority date of 2012 and beyond.

These areas with the highest level of commercial and scientific research interest were then reviewed to identify innovation hot spots which could lead to tomorrow's biggest breakthroughs.

"While we do not purport to own a crystal ball, we do have the next best thing: citations to scientific literature and patent content," said the president of Thomson Reuters IP and Science, Basil Moftah.

"BY analyzing current research and development activity and commercial pipelines, we are shining a spotlight on some of the mot exciting developments that will emerge over the next decade."

The biggest problem was narrowing the potential inventions to ten.

"The main debate around the room was deciding what the ten would be," he said. "There's a lot of investment going on in science and technology around the world, as always there is a broad range and field of research going on in universities and institutions."

One of the ten predictions was that solar power would become the world's largest energy source by 2025. According to a highly-cited scientific research paper, the process of harvesting and converting energy from the sun is becoming much more advanced.

But Moftah is focused on another of the predictions. "Personally the DNA mapping one was probably the most tangible, in my opinion, and the one that's the most promising."

"In ten years time it will become routine for DNA mapping through birth," he continued.

How many of these predictions come true remains to be seen, but Moftah is certain the list will provoke debate.

"Our purpose is to provoke some debate among the research community, the world at large, by showing them what is really happening and sometimes it is slightly opaque in research and science communities," he added. "So we hope that this really drives the debate."

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