Trend Updates

It has been seven years since Navi Radjou, in an impressive Ted Talk, presented Frugal Innovation as a solution to many of our problems. The author of "Frugal Innovation: How To Do Better With Less" coined the term and has popularised it worldwide. Now that we are in the middle of a climate crisis and a pandemic, his ideas are more relevant than ever, as he will demonstrate at the 18th European Trend Day on 9 March 2022.

Whether it's e-commerce retailers, shops, brands, advertisers, everyone is currently insecure, says tech analyst Benedict Evans. How unbundling is creating new business models and what the next tech trend is, Evans explains here in a video interview from the GDI Retail Summit.

Javier Goyeneche makes clothes out of plastic waste through his label Ecoalf. He says: "Instead of asking ourselves which earth we are leaving to our children, we should be concerned about which children we are leaving to the earth." Watch the whole video interview from the GDI Retail Summit here.

The last 18 month have undoubtedly left their mark on retail. But which trends have emerged as a result? And will they remain with us? How has the pandemic changed corporate culture and management concepts? What are the consequences for the West's relations with China? These and other questions were the focus of the International Retail Summit 2021. A summary.

With every passing day, behavioural data will increasingly become the linchpin of medicine. This data will form the basis for the development of new, personalised treatments. It can also be used to create new tools to control and manage individual health.

Max Premium Burgers was already considered a pioneer in climate and environmental awareness before the coronavirus crisis. After all, the chain’s food has been climate-positive since 2018. At the European Foodservice Summit 2021, CEO Richard Bergfors will show how his family business became a sustainability role model.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of complements. Without them, the willingness to pay for many products and services would be far lower, sometimes even zero. In a video and soon at the GDI, Harvard economist Felix Oberholzer-Gee will elaborate on a few simple rules managers need, to focus their resources on selected ideas.

In December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Francesco Farinetti opened Green Pea, the world's first completely sustainable shopping centre, in Turin. Here, and at the GDI Retail Summit in September, he explained how shopping and sustainability can go together.

What makes a country’s armed forces reject robot missions as inhumane? Why do we feel compassion for vacuum cleaners, and how are robots designed to elicit these emotions? Answers were provided by MIT researcher Kate Darling in a Ted Talk and at the GDI Retail Summit on 9 and 10 September 2021.

“We don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition,” writes tech thought leader and GDI speaker Benedict Evans in a blog post.