We recently made public a side project that we have been pursuing at STRTGY since its inception: the systematic collection of strategic trends that the world’s top companies publish each year to inform the market of their technological advances or upcoming trends.
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For us and our clients, it means saving hundreds of hours of research and turning this database into an evolved and up-to-date R&D laboratory at no cost.
As of today (April 2025), the collection has 478 strategic reports in 22 production sectors distributed as follows
- 192 reports produced in 2025
- 246 reports produced in 2024
- 40 reports produced in 2024
For 2025 reports, strategic insights can be quickly accessed in a format that is readable and, most importantly, immediately usable by you and your team to ride trends before the competition does.
How to collect gold in this mine
There are two approaches; let’s start with the least effective one.
Approach #1 – Carcare in its own field
The easiest way is to use the search function to look for your industry or something related to your work.
For example, a quick search for “travel” or “food” returns 5 and 3 results, respectively. Here are the screenshots.
Inside you can find information like this:
- the trend explained in very few lines
- a quick application tip.
There are 1,000+ strategy suggestions available throughout the archive!
These are sparks of creativity that, if included in the right presentation or the next marketing brief, can make all the difference when you need to quickly generate strategic options that are not simply creative but rooted in the real world with accurate and authoritative references.
Imagine what can come up by typing “finance,” “legal,” or just “ux”!
Approach #2 – Interdisciplinary collisions.
A few days ago I participated in a short call in which an entrepreneur in the Virtual Reality and 3D software development sector, dissatisfied with the results he had obtained with the first approach, asked me for help in understanding how to use this library to evolve his Strategy. A search for 3D, AR or VR returns no results (yet): hence the idea for this short guide.
Let us start with the fact that innovation rarely emerges from such linear paths within isolated fields of knowledge. On the contrary, it frequently springs from points of intersection or creative “collisions” where seemingly distant disciplines meet and generate novel and often revolutionary results.
10 questions to find hidden opportunities
Want interesting answers? Start with challenging questions.
Here are 10 questions that Qualified Coaches MAKE PROGRESS® learn to ask precisely to open up unexplored and very powerful scenarios:
- What is the behavior of my customers? What do they buy, read, drink, eat? Where do they meet? Are there any trends in those areas that I can exploit?
- What category of customers have I never thought to offer my product to? What are the consumer trends in that category?
- How can I combine two seemingly distant disciplines? Architecture + Mathematics? Engineering + Biochemistry? Economics + Neuroscience? UX + Music?
- What trends are emerging in other industries that could help me innovate in mine?
- What innovative technologies from other industries might make my product or service obsolete?
- Could my product be useful in solving a problem in another area?
- How would my product/service behave if I put it in a completely different context from its usual use?
- If I imagine my company being acquired by a company working in another industry, what ideas or resources could be integrated to create something totally new?
- What emerging trends in society, even distant from my industry, could radically change the behavior of my customers?
- What great recent innovation could be combined with my product or service to generate a radically new solution?
These power-questions will force you to use the Trend Library like a true expert!
Let’s return to our case. The core business of that entrepreneur who asked me for help is in building Virtual Tours for luxury properties. Here are some reports, which through this approach, could accelerate the development of an innovative growth strategy.
How do my clients behave? I would read this.
Can I offer my products to other industries? What if I used my technology to create 3D maps of nuclear power plants, submarines, or strategic defense? I would read this.
How are people’s buying habits changing because of AI? I would read this.
3 strategic concepts to know today to innovate faster
Interdisciplinary Innovation
It means combining ideas and methods from different disciplines to solve difficult problems. It is not simply a matter of bringing different knowledge together, but of crossing the boundaries that normally separate different fields. When people with different skills work together, sharing languages, methods and points of view, they can find new solutions to problems that one discipline alone would fail to address.
Cross-Pollination (Cross-Pollination)
It is when ideas, techniques or experiences from one field are applied in another, generating new ideas and innovative solutions. It works just like pollination between different plants: combining knowledge from distant backgrounds allows you to create something original and often better. This exchange happens easily when people with different experiences and skills collaborate with each other.
Technological convergence
It consists of combining different technologies, disciplines or ways of working to create something new and more powerful. A simple example is VOIP (calling over the Internet), which combines telephony and Internet data into one technology. This concept also applies when different worlds, such as scientific research and industry, work together to address important problems.
New Trends added in April 2025: AI, UX, Business Model
The STRTGY Trends Library is constantly being updated. Here’s what’s new.
- The Future 100: 2025. VML Intelligence identifies 100 key trends in 10 sectors, including culture, technology, travel, brands, food & beverage, beauty, retail, luxury, health, and innovation. It analyzes changes in consumer behavior and preferences, technological advances and emerging social trends. The report highlights the growing importance of experiences, personalization and emotional connection in consumer engagement. It also explores the rise of AI, the metaverse, and the growing focus on wellness and longevity.
- State of Software 2025. Analysis of 14 million CircleCI workflows, focusing on four key software deployment metrics: duration, throughput, success rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR). The report examines these metrics by company size, team size, and industry, providing benchmarks for elite performance, demonstrating how optimizing these metrics translates into business value.
- The state of UX. The report identifies key strategic trends affecting the UX field, such as the growing influence of AI, the prioritization of business needs over user-centered design, and the evolving role of designers. Understanding these trends is crucial for UX professionals to adapt their skills and strategies, and for organizations to effectively leverage design in a changing digital landscape. Change also affects community events, the prevalence of organizational politics over quality, and the nature of online professional engagement-important considerations for UX career development.
- Business in 2025. Four key trends that are expected to redefine business in 2025: Looplife (AI-driven circularity), Sensescaping (personalized sensory experiences for self-discovery), Worthwise (redefining value creation and exchange), and Humanifesto (embracing authenticity and imperfection in the AI era). He provides real-world examples of brands implementing these trends in various industries, including retail, food and beverage, and consumer technology.
- Superagency in the Workplace. This McKinsey report examines AI adoption in the workplace, based on a survey of 3,613 employees and 238 executives. It explores technological advances in AI, employee and leader perceptions, the need for speed and security, the importance of ambitious goals, and non-technological factors influencing AI implementation. The study also analyzed the economic potential of AI across functions and sectors.
- The State of AI. A global survey, also by McKinsey from 2024 on AI reveals that organizations are restructuring to capture value from generative AI (gen AI). Larger companies are leading the way, redesigning workflows, assigning senior executives to oversee AI governance, and mitigating risks associated with generative AI (e.g., inaccuracy, cybersecurity, intellectual property infringement). While most respondents report that their organizations are using AI in at least one function and the use of generative AI is rapidly expanding, the overall impact on the bottom line is still limited.
Top Contributor of the Month
- Debora Bottà, Design Manager / Author of “User eXperience Design,” Hoepli
- Andrea Macri, Consultant OKR Coach MAKE PROGRESS®
- Marco Arciglio, Chair of peer-advisory board
Did you find an interesting report? Share it with the community.
Strategy is for the curious
Looking to the future, it is reasonable to predict that the importance of an interdisciplinary approach will only increase. The grand challenges facing humanity-from the climate crisis to artificial intelligence, from resource management to inequality-are increasingly interconnected.
Innovating and growing already requires new skills: being able to think across disciplinary boundaries, draw on heterogeneous knowledge, and collaborate in teams that integrate different perspectives. The most significant innovations will come not from a single area of expertise, but from these fertile intersections. Those who can cultivate them will be ahead of the game.
Beyond tools, beyond data, we need a culture that rewards curiosity, that empowers exploration, that does not judge deviations but observes them with interest. Because even in the most structured processes, it is the attitude with which one approaches knowledge that makes the difference. It is not enough to access new information, but to train oneself every day to look at it with new eyes.
You’re in the right place to get started: access all the trends and receive updates for life.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
Antonio
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