What We're Reading

There’s been plenty of chatter about what consumers want from wearables and what they’ll use them for, such as mobile payments and health and fitness tracking. Based on recent research, wearable devices are also set to change the business world.

In a March 2015 study by Salesforce.com, nearly eight in 10 US enterprise wearable adopters agreed that wearables would reshape their companies’ future success. More than three-quarters of users had already seen improvement in their business performance due to wearables, and 86% of adopters intended to increase spending over the next 12 months.

Enterprises were most interested in using wearables to track workplace productivity, but beyond that, improving the customer experience thanks to real-time access to customer data, business analytics and alerts, and customer instruction and coaching were all top use cases.

Salesforce noted that professionals viewed wearables devices as a huge opportunity for data collection—but they’re a long way off fr

Over the past 50 years, the global economy expanded sixfold as the world’s population and per capita income each grew at unprecedented speed. The global population more than doubled while average per capita income almost tripled to about $13,000 at 2012 purchasing power parity. However, there are significant doubts that this growth bonanza will continue in the long term given that the demographic tailwinds of the past half century are now waning.  Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty.  Yet without significantly boosting the one engine the world economy still has—productivity growth—this period may prove to be a historic anomaly. 

Unless we can dramatically improve productivity, the next half century will look very different. The rapid expansion of the past five decades will be seen as an aberration of history, and the world economy will slide back toward its relatively sluggish long-term growth rate.

Over this time, two factors powered exceptionally fast GDP growth