As the world faces a wide range of critical challenges, from conflicts and climate change to population growth, countries increasingly need to harness the right technologies to leverage comparative advantages, drive economic growth, and fulfill strategic needs. National-level technology foresight is a vital tool for policy makers to identify domains of high importance or potential. This Viewpoint outlines key imperatives for countries to ensure foresight best delivers value in a pragmatic, repeatable manner.

Quantum computing is among the most hyped technology topics at the moment. It can be hard for a nonspecialist to form a balanced view about when quantum computing solutions could become mature enough to disrupt their business. Looking at the status of development today, we believe that while huge technical challenges still remain, now is the time for businesses to start preparing to avoid being left behind if and when a breakthrough occurs.

Despite the progress achieved on digitalization over the last decade, many companies are still focusing extensively on managing legacy IT systems and reducing costs. This prevents CIOs from being able to pursue the more strategic goal of achieving broader business value through IT. By taking a systematic approach to IT value creation, starting with efficiency and business alignment, CIOs can begin to drive innovation, which is the key to unlocking the full potential of IT assets. In this Viewpoint, we consider the value creation journey, focusing especially on the key elements needed to unleash IT innovation.

Accurate, comprehensive, and accessible data is central to organizational success across every industry sector. Effective data management not only enables better, more informed decision making, it optimizes processes to drive operational excellence (improving productivity by an average of 40%) and creates new data-enabled business models (increasing revenues by up to 20%). All this helps build the foundation of digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI) adoption. Any digital ambition will fail without doing the “data homework.” However, many organizations struggle to unlock the potential of data and, consequently, miss out on significant business opportunities.