| Frederick Fenter Chief Executive Officer, Frontiers

| Jeremy Jurgens Managing Director, World Economic Forum

Every year, a small number of scientific advances reach the point where they are ready to change the world. The Top 10 Emerging Technologies report, now in its 14th edition, is how we find and share them. The technologies we bring forward are chosen for their novelty, development progress and potential impact. Above all, they are chosen for the signals that suggest they are approaching the moment when decisions made by governments, industry and research institutions will meaningfully shape how they arrive in the world.

This year’s edition arrives at a time of deep uncertainty. Systems have grown more fragile, and resilience has become a priority across sectors and regions. The question of what technology can offer in response is one worth sitting with, because each of the 10 technologies featured this year is extraordinary. A cancer vaccine can now be synthesized from a patient’s own tumour, teaching the immune system to recognize cells it had previously missed. A coating has been developed that emits heat directly into space, cooling a surface without consuming any electricity. Microbes given new genetic instructions are now producing the same proteins as a dairy cow, using a fraction of the land, water and emissions. Each tells its own story, and each is worth the reader’s time on its own.

Looking across the 10 as a group, three things stand out. Many of these technologies are becoming more personal, designed around one patient or one context rather than a standardized whole. Many are becoming more distributed, producing food, energy and critical materials closer to where they are needed. A third tendency is that many of these technologies do more with less, producing cooling without power, protein without herds and chemistry without persistent waste. These are not the defining qualities of every technology in the report, but they are tendencies that recur, and they say something about where the frontier is moving.

Each technology in this report is presented in two parts: an overview of what the technology is today, and a strategic outlook, developed with the Dubai Future Foundation, that imagines the world it could bring into view.

The technologies in this report are, by design, not finished stories. We are grateful to the advisory council members and to the many researchers whose expertise shaped this year’s selection. What happens next with each of these technologies depends on the choices being made now, including by readers like you.