McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2023

The McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2023 is available for download at no charge. Visit https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-top-trends-in-tech to download your copy.

Reading the McKinsey report is so worth your time, for so many reasons. But because the overarching theme of the Desulfurization Blog (www.desulf.blogspot.com ) is to help you enhance your online research effectiveness, I want to focus on the authors’ description of the research methodology they used to prepare the report.

You might find it a useful design for your own investigations.

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McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2023
Research methodology
To assess the development of each technology trend, our team collected data on five tangible measures of activity: search engine queries, news publications, patents, research publications, and investment. For each measure, we used a defined set of data sources to find occurrences of keywords associated with each of the 15 trends, screened those occurrences for valid mentions of activity, and indexed the resulting numbers of mentions on a 0–1 scoring scale that is relative to the trends studied. The innovation score combines the patents and research scores; the interest score combines the news and search scores. (While we recognize that an interest score can be inflated by deliberate efforts to stimulate news and search activity, we believe that each score fairly reflects the extent of discussion and debate about a given trend.) Investment measures the flows of funding from the capital markets into companies linked with the trend. Data sources for the scores include the following:
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Patents. Data on patent filings are sourced from Google Patents.
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Research. Data on research publications are sourced from the Lens (www.lens.org ).
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News. Data on news publications are sourced from Factiva.
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Searches. Data on search engine queries are sourced from Google Trends.
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Investment. Data on private-market and public-market capital raises are sourced from PitchBook.
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Talent demand. Number of job postings is sourced from McKinsey’s proprietary Organizational Data Platform, which stores licensed, de-identified data on professional profiles and job postings. Data is drawn primarily from English-speaking countries.

In addition, we updated the selection and definition of trends from last year’s study to reflect the evolution of technology trends:
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The generative-AI trend was added since last year’s study.
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We adjusted the definitions of electrification and renewables (previously called future of clean energy) and climate technologies beyond electrification and renewables (previously called future of sustainable consumption).
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Data sources were updated. This year, we included only closed deals in PitchBook
data, which revised downward the investment numbers for 2018–22. For future of
space technologies investments, we used research from McKinsey’s Aerospace &
Defense Practice.
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SUGGESTION: Consider adapting the McKinsey research methodology to enhance your particular research objectives. And, of course, you might want to contact McKinsey directly to help with that research.

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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Americas (https://americas.aramco.com/ ), Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

Follow Jean’s blog at: http://desulf.blogspot.com/ for continuing tips on effective online research
Email Jean at jstoneheart@gmail.com with questions on research, training, or anything else