What’s moving in 2023?

We often talk about “making your move” at Harvard, whether that’s a new entrant disrupting a category or an established player shifting their reputation. But you can’t make your move without understanding how the world is changing around you.

Today, we’re publishing our second annual report on the key changes in business thinking, consumer behaviour, policy debate and technology that we think will shape 2023.

A caveat: these aren’t strictly speaking “predictions” – we’ll leave those to Gartner et al. Instead, we’ve focused on five areas where the media narrative and public conversation are evolving. This is the shifting terrain which marketers and comms people will need to navigate in the year ahead:

• Economic impact – the coming recession, and its (un)anticipated consequences for business and technology
• Politicisation of technology – the continued incursion of politics into the world of technology
• Changing consumer habits – people’s evolving attitudes and behaviours when it comes to technology and work
• Innovation at the frontier – the technologies making a noise in the media and the market

Looking back to last year, the biggest change is the deteriorating economic climate. A year ago the tech sector was still riding high, fuelled by rapid pandemic era-growth and bucketloads of investor cash looking for a home. Now the talk is all about employee layoffs, funding round delays, and CEOs focusing on profitability rather than expansion.

It’s not all doom and gloom though – there’s still lots of exciting innovation happening at the frontier of the industry, as well as some fascinating developments in consumer habits and an increasingly political edge to the way the tech sector operates.

There’s a huge amount happening in the sector; we have by no means covered everything. But we do hope the report offers some food for thought, even some lively provocation, for comms and marketing teams as they enter into 2023.