The 2026 edition, marking its 10th anniversary, cuts through market noise to highlight converging innovation platforms that are accelerating step-function changes in productivity, capital allocation, and global growth. It’s not just a forecast; it’s a framework for understanding how these technologies are scaling from niche ventures to mainstream forces. As ARK puts it, “the future doesn’t arrive all at once. Those who recognize it early have the opportunity to Own What’s Next.”

Key Messages from Big Ideas 2026

Drawing from ARK’s research across public and private markets, the report explores 13 interconnected “Big Ideas” spanning AI, blockchain, space exploration, robotics, energy, and biology. At its core is “The Great Acceleration,” authored by the firm’s Chief Futurist Brett Winton, which positions AI as the central dynamo igniting five major innovation platforms: AI, Public Blockchains, Robotics, Energy Storage, and Multiomics. Here are the standout insights:

Technological convergence is driving exponential growth: Disruptive technologies are no longer siloed—they’re intermeshing at an unprecedented rate. The report notes that Convergence Network Strength, a metric tracking how these platforms catalyze each other, surged 35% in 2025. AI remains the key enabler, but robotics and energy storage are emerging as critical catalysts. For instance, reusable rockets could deploy AI chips in orbit to overcome earthly constraints on cloud computing, potentially boosting demand for space launches by 60x. Meanwhile, multiomics data shared via digital wallets could fuel neural networks to develop precision therapies for rare diseases. Multiomics isn’t just more data—it’s smarter, interconnected data that turns complex biology into actionable insights, much like how AI turns raw compute into intelligence.

• Unprecedented investment cycles ahead: The world is entering a massive technology investment wave, with capital expenditures as a percentage of GDP poised to rival historical booms like electrification or automobiles. ARK forecasts that innovations in AI data centers, robotaxis, and space-based compute could drive this surge, far exceeding consensus expectations. Historical parallels show how past tech shifts— from railroads to software—transformed economies, and today’s convergence could amplify that impact.
• Profound macroeconomic implications: Each platform has the potential to deliver structural boosts to global GDP. A compelling example: humanoid robots in the home. Currently, only about $2,600 of the average $68,000 in annual home upkeep contributes to GDP. A single household robot could add $62,000 per year by monetizing unpaid labor. If adopted in 80% of U.S. households over five years, this could accelerate GDP growth from 2-3% to 5-6% annually. Overall, ARK projects that capital investments in these platforms could add 1.9 percentage points to annualized real GDP growth this decade, with realized growth potentially exceeding forecasts by over 4 points as returns on invested capital soar.
• From experimentation to scale: The report delves into specific Big Ideas, such as AI Infrastructure (scaling neural networks), Bitcoin and Tokenized Assets (building a digital monetary ecosystem), Multiomics (advancing biology through data), Reusable Rockets (enabling space-based AI), and Autonomous Logistics (revolutionizing transportation). These aren’t isolated trends; their interdependence—e.g., stablecoins enabling AI agents to direct real-world resources—could redefine competitive advantages across industries.

ARK emphasizes that while these opportunities are immense, they come with uncertainties. Investors should approach with a cross-sector lens, understanding regulatory, political, and market risks. The report serves as an educational tool, not investment advice, reminding us that past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

In a world where innovation is accelerating faster than ever, ARK’s Big Ideas 2026 offers a clear-eyed view of what’s on the horizon. For those in Tasmania and beyond looking to stay ahead, it’s essential reading. You can download the full report from ARK Invest’s website to dive deeper. What are your thoughts on how these trends might shape our economic future?

The product manager—a bright, young, and refreshingly candid voice in the martech world—shared an observation, gained from many formal and informal discussions with senior executives across the world, that was not surprising and yet still shocking. Despite decades of so-called “lessons learned,” and the explosion of sophisticated sales and marketing technologies, the fundamental rift between sales and marketing teams remains stubbornly in place at all too many big and small companies.

The arguments are eerily familiar to anyone who’s been in B2B long enough:

• Marketing complains that sales doesn’t convert the leads they’ve worked so hard to generate.
• Sales counters that marketing doesn’t deliver enough high-quality leads worth pursuing.

These debates were raging decades ago. They’re still raging today.

The truth—then and now—is that neither side is entirely right or wrong. The real issue is that too many organisations treat sales and marketing as separate, even competing, functions rather than two halves of the same revenue engine.

As my new friend in martech product management highlighted, no ABM platform, no AI-powered targeting tool, no shiny piece of martech will magically bridge this divide. Technology can enable better alignment, but it can’t create it.

What’s required is genuine, consistent collaboration—not just between department heads, but all the way down to the front lines. That means:

• Talking regularly—not just at quarterly reviews, but in weekly syncs and shared planning sessions. Most do this, but few do it well.
• Agreeing on common goals—clear revenue targets, shared definitions of a qualified lead, and mutual accountability for results. Common goals are, of course, common sense, but this remains a scarce commodity.
• Embracing one unified scoreboard—so that both sales and marketing are working to the same numbers, in real time, without the selective reporting that fuels mistrust. Separate reporting and tracking processes and systems are almost guaranteed to generate friction.

Genuine collaboration is simple in concept, hard in practice, and absolutely essential. The most advanced ABM platform in the world—contact-level or otherwise—will fail in an environment where sales and marketing remain siloed. But when the two teams align on purpose, process, and performance measurement, technology becomes a force multiplier rather than a false promise.

If you’re investing in ABM, don’t just evaluate the tool. Evaluate your organisation’s willingness to collaborate—because without that fundamental commitment, you’re just buying another piece of tech for the shelf.

The YouTube channel Connecting the Dots reports that CARIAD was intended to future-proof the VW Group, but, so far, it has been an expensive disaster handicapped by institutional resistance.

In 2020 former CEO Herbert Diess established CARIAD with a significant budget, army of coders and a mandate to make VW Germany’s biggest tech company after SAP, with the software engineering smarts to digitize the core vehicle business and catch up to Tesla and the leading Chinese auto firms.

On October 14 2021 Diess even had Elon Musk appear as a “surprise guest” in an attempt to energise 200 of his most senior executives at a VW conference in Austria.

However, VW’s rigid culture and myriad internal divisions resulted in disappointing progress, duplicative efforts, financial losses, delayed vehicle launches and corporate embarrassment.

In large part because of CARIAD’s failures, Diess was exited by the VW Board in August 2022 . Porsche CEO Oliver Blume then had his remit extended to the entire group.

Blume claims to be committed to turning around CARIAD’s fortunes, refactoring the organisation’s objectives with fewer people and resources. Progress has reportedly been made, but the technical and financial challenges remain imposing.

In the Connecting the Dots YouTube video, a standout comment, from my personal perspective, is the remark by an anonymous CARIAD staffer that work-life balance was an excellent and that “weekends start at 11am on Fridays”.

However, it was also acknowledged that this is “not how you win” against Tesla and the Chinese competitors.

This was also my experience of German corporate culture during four years at Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz HQ in Stuttgart. The quickest way to make oneself unpopular was to schedule a Friday afternoon meeting.

Bain’s Fred Reichheld has returned to the Harvard Business Review, where he first introduced the NPS model in 2003, advocating for the new metric.

To calculate their earned growth rates, firms must have systems, process and people that will gather data on the costs and revenues for each customer over time and must ask all new customers why did they buy?

If the reason is a referral or recommendation, a customer is “earned”; if it’s advertising, a promotional deal, or a persuasive salesperson, the customer is “bought”.

Reichheld says “we realized that the only way to make the system work better was to develop a complementary metric that drew on accounting results”.

However, firms will not be able to credible calculate their earned growth rate unless they have their technology, people and process act together and most do not.

Reichheld acknowledges this issue, but states “it’s time to get serious about measuring (and reporting) the progress … and to recognize that improving the lives of the people we serve is the only way to win”.

Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

It’s $US 104 million Q2 2020 result again exceeded expectations and confirmed that Tesla continues to stake out its own territory as the world’s most dynamic brand with “blitzscaling” growth fueled by commanding leads in battery technology, vehicle software, solar energy, autonomous driving, data-driven insurance, collaborative social marketing and its “alien dreadnought” gigafactories.

As leading analyst Dan Ives says, it is “Tesla’s world now and everyone else is paying rent”.

Tesla’s former Quality VP Philippe Chain recently shared a great culture insight.

Chain, who has also worked at Renault and Audi, wrote: “what took a single meeting and five days at Tesla would have required a six-month-long process at Renault or Audi. It would have started with a thorough investigation going back to the source of the error, looking for the person to blame internally, investigating a possible blunder of the supplier, etc. Then, a politically delicate sequence would have unfolded to set up a series of meetings and workshops. Multiple hierarchical strata would have been involved, going up probably to the very top of the organization.

“That is the key to the Tesla Way: expedited, value-driven procedures, implemented with a maximum delegation, and a fast decision-making process in a flat structure.”

Fred also argues that our 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is a time for companies to pause and reflect on the future, “what will they stop doing? Were their old goals and aspirations enough?”

“The Net Promoter Score^® helps companies improve their human footprint by clarifying how they affect the lives they touch, of both customers and employees,” Fred says.

At least two thirds of the Fortune 500 employ a Net Promoter Score program. It is, by far, the most popular sentiment measuring tool.

Fred says companies use NPS to try to establish how well they are treating their customers and employees.

“This moment presents an opportunity for all of us and all companies to reconsider our primary purpose, to get back to core principles. The pollution of ‘habit’ and the apparently ‘urgent’ has been cleared aside.”

Yet, how many of our colleagues will agree with us and proclaim that marketing is the most important function? How many indeed? Not enough. Especially not enough of our C-level and Board-level people, those legal and financial leaders, who typically occupy those positions.

We need everyone engaged and committed, not simply compliant, if we are to deliver the best end-to-end customer experiences across our businesses, from operations, to customer service to sales, from multi-channel to omni channel.

In attempting to make this customer first vision happen, how many people will marketing have to interact with? Everyone, almost. Yet how many of those people will report to marketing? Very few.

This reality means we must generate impact without direct authority. It means we have got to be incredibly good at mobilizing. We can’t just be doing marketing, we must be leading marketing.

• Mobilising our boss
• Mobilising our colleagues
• Mobilising our team
• Mobilising ourselves

Unfortunately, doing this, generating positive momentum, is typically difficult in most traditional, hierarchical, matrix-structured, geographically distributed organisations populated by silos.

In this complicated landscape marketing is often not truly aligned with the business.

All too often there is a trust deficit, a credibility gap.

In marketing we are talking about the future, which is what we must do. However, what we have claimed about the future often has not been realized. Too often we have focused on our perceived need to build tomorrow’s brand whilst not aligning with the business around the commercial imperative to generate demand today. In contrast the people in Finance and Operations, are mostly focused on the factual present and the past.

Too often we are not talking the business language of our colleagues? What Chief Executive talks about Google analytics vanity metrics, or is genuinely interested in our augmented reality trial campaign or gets animated about our new Customer Data Platform. Maybe the CEO should get interested in the CDP, but the other stuff?

What Sales leader gets excited about MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)? Shouldn’t we be focused instead on SALs (Sales Accepted Leads), our marketing-sourced leads that the sales team is agreeing to own and progress?

And don’t we understand why customer service gets irritated by our shiny new brand campaign that promises a bright blue sky when they know the reality for too many customers is thunder, lightning & gale-force winds?

To close this trust gap we must align with the Chief Executive and the organic growth goals, that critical intersection where customer and company needs meet. Marketing must balance the inevitable tension between shareholders and stakeholders.

This means we must first close the skills gap. Marketing leaders must build a team with the best mix of creative, analytical and leadership skills – and then foster trust and excellence.

Marketing must be important to everyone, especially the Chief Executive. Marketing cannot be the discretionary operating expense budget number that is the first to be sacrificed when the EBIT target, our profit target, is threatened.

Fundamentally, we must inspire and credibly measure our impact. Profit and planet. Shareholders and stakeholders. This is how we ensure that we build a great marketing-driven, values-based, genuinely diverse company, that people want to work with not for, want to subscribe to rather than buy from. The marketing-led companies who get this right will out perform their peers, grow faster and deliver sustainable profits. And marketing will have a seat at the top table, recognized as the most important function.

McKinsey’s global C-suite survey says legacy companies are facing “a major hit on revenue and profits”. And a joint KPMG-Egon Zehnder report focused on the automotive industry describes its transformation efforts as being “painfully slow”, and limited to superficial factors such as CEOs appearing at new model launches in jeans and locating innovation divisions in hip cities such as Berlin.

These consultants would say this, of course. Surveys such as these are classic tools to illustrate issues and drum up interest in the solutions these firms offer. Nevertheless, it is hard to argue with the conclusions.

The car industry “seems to be clinging to its old ways,” according to the KPMG-Egon Zehnder researchers, who surveyed more than 500 global industry executives. “Leaders recognize the unprecedented challenge now facing them but have yet to establish the digital‐ready culture needed to meet it.”

McKinsey says digitization is having a significant negative impact on the profits of incumbents through two loop effects: digital entrants competing with incumbents through disruptive models, and incumbents responding to disruption and creating more intense competition with each other.

 “While 90% of companies indicated that they are engaged in some form of digitization, only 16% said their companies have responded with a bold strategy and at scale. Likewise, only 30% of companies are focusing on new ways to bundle demand or re-segment their market. The good news is if your company has yet to fully and adequately engage with digital disruption or has begun going down a path that is not yielding positive results, it’s not alone. Thus, leaders in most industries still have a window for putting a bold digital strategy in place. But it may not stay open long.”

The KPMG-Egon Zehnder report says that automotive “leaders clearly perceive a new force pulling the automotive industry towards unfamiliar ground – we call this force ‘digital gravity. But the industry seems to be clinging to its old ways. Our research has found that despite an awareness of the challenge facing it, the automotive industry has still not undertaken the work that will enable it to respond to this new force”.

In contrast to the old-school auto firms, Tesla is an obvious, emblematic, game-changing disruptor. You can question Elon Musk’s mercurial behavior, his history of over-promising (will the Tesla Semi happen?), the company’s debt burden, the cult-like hype from the fans, and whether the business will become a global high-volume player with a fully autonomous fleet of “robotaxis“, but Tesla is leading the electric vehicle revolution. Its legacy rivals have only recently started acknowledging that the internal combustion engine (ICE) has entered the twilight zone.

And whilst the technology story is compelling, what is also remarkable is that the holistic Tesla experience is a genuine differentiator. For example, unlike the traditional industry, prices are fixed. Influential automotive journalists who buy Tesla cars comment that they are refused discounts. Everybody pays the same in-market price (although Tesla’s pricing can shift, it is universally applied). Picture the peace of mind this statement provides, “nobody has paid less than I did”. No need to engage in the games the conventional car dealers, their financiers and distributors play, with deceptive tactics such as low-interest finance deals still common.

The Internet is awash with positive Tesla stories (and some negatives, of course). Check out this one from a fan claiming that the true cost of ownership is close to negligible, especially when compared to conventional ICE cars sold and maintained by the old-school legacy auto companies and their dealer networks who must move metal at all costs (including ethics) to stay viable. Of course, the traditional players question if Tesla can remain somewhat pure as it transitions from a premium niche actor to a volume seller. For now, however, the Tesla ownership experience is superior and a significant factor in the building of what has become an iconic global brand without mainstream advertising. As a blogger wrote:

“Tesla does not spend millions of dollars in a traditional ad campaign. They let you and I discuss it, rave about it, hate on it, or rejoice in the spirit of going electric in a Tesla, be the catalyst to a viral and brilliant marketing campaign. At the end of the day, Tesla advertising is free.”

Recently owners told Musk, via Twitter, that they wanted to be able to leave their dogs safely in their cars. So, Tesla delivered an over-the-air update that made available “dog mode”. This news has been amplified online by the Tesla fans, industry analysts and self-appointed YouTube commentators who track the company’s every move. Tesla’s simple 27-second video promoting the feature has had has several million views:

McKinsey summarizes its survey findings by explaining that “taking both the intensity of the response and the degree of integration into account, we find that barely 8% (of companies) have both responded offensively and integrated their digital strategy fully into the corporate strategy. This is a huge missed opportunity: Our analysis suggests that only a successful response that is both bold and integrated fully can yield revenue and profit trajectories that are higher post-digitization than pre-digitization”.

The KPMG-Egon Zehnder report emphasizes the need to “pursue and foster a new culture … at all levels of the organization (not IT alone) – a top-down approach alone will not work.

“Let culture play a major role throughout the organization. Without a spirit of openness, curiosity and learning, companies will struggle to create a blend of the old and the new.

“Leaders must also change their own mindset. These steps are impossible without a serving, inquisitive and humble leadership style that extends to the very top of the organization. Although strong executional direction is still needed, establishing a new culture of openness, curiosity and the power to connect is essential. The spirit of collaborative leadership must prevail – and can ultimately enable an organization to accomplish something new and better.”