Innovation drives progress by turning ideas into solutions that improve lives, boost efficiency, and create new opportunities. It’s not just about technology - it’s about rethinking processes, products, and systems to solve problems in smarter ways, ones that have a significant impact on society.
They can categorise as incremental, revolutionary, or even radical. Here we take a look at a few of global management consultancy firm McKinsey's top innovation picks that are changing the world and who's making moves within that space lately.
Electric vehicles
The transition from combustion engines to battery-powered electric vehicles (EV) is reshaping multiple sectors, including transportation and the resources industry.
That's driving progress in adjacent areas like energy storage and city mobility - while highlighting our need to cut carbon emissions.
Because producing EVs demands entirely different expertise compared to conventional car manufacturing, the auto sector has faced major upheaval.
Emerging automakers have redefined the industry with fresh business models, supply chains, and service solutions. EVs have fast-tracked advancements in autonomous driving and digital vehicle integration too.
Value:
- >50,000 Number of patents related to electric vehicles approved annually, on average, between 2020 and 2024
- 2-3x projected growth in EV demand (including battery, plug-in hybrid, and range extender EVs) between 2024 and 2030
Having overtaken Tesla for global EV sales, Chinese carmaker BYD is cracking into every market on earth and just reported a >100% increase in net profit for Q1 2025 to US$1.26 billion.
Unlike many other automakers, BYD produces its own batteries (including its Blade Batteries), semiconductors, and motors - reducing costs and supply chain risks, which are at the top of government to-do lists around the world.
Find out more: Mission Critical: US energy trade and supply chain fears
GLP-1 agonists
The arrival of GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) agonists has been hailed as a major advancement in public health.
Originally designed for type 2 diabetes, these drugs can also lead to significant weight loss - around 15-20% for patients.
By reducing reliance on obesity treatments, surgical interventions, and intensive late-stage care, people could dramatically cut healthcare costs.
If it becomes widely adopted, the ability to suppress appetite may inadvertently reshape dietary trends, thus influencing the food and beverage sectors.
Value:
- >$100 billion projected global sales of GLP-1 drugs by 2029
- 4–5% of U.S. population projected to be taking GLP-1 drugs by 2030
The anti-obesity drugs market is expected to grow from US$12.8 billion in 2024 to US$104.9 billion by 2035, at a CAGR of 21.1%.
Novo Nordisk's Ozempic is able to significantly reduce appetite and food intake could potentially lead to decreased demand for processed foods and sugary drinks.
CRISPR
The gene-editing breakthrough that earned CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry is driving innovations across biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.
CRISPR, paired with genetic and trait-based insights, lets researchers precisely modify DNA.
These modifications can unlock groundbreaking medical treatments for people while boosting crop resilience and productivity, and applied to synthetic biology - it could revolutionise industries like manufacturing and environmental cleanup.
Value:
- >8,000 Number of CRISPR-related patents approved annually between 2020 and 2024 - 17% growth since 2015
- 16–20% Projected CAGR in the market over the next 5 years
Namesake business CRISPR Therapeutics is currently the only company in the space that's advanced past clinical-stage development with its Casgevy sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia treatments.
Transformer AI models (sequence to sequence models)
The term ‘transformer models’ may not ring a bell, but generative AI likely would.
Transformer models, a type of neural network designed to understand context and meaning, serve as the backbone of large language models (LLMs) and are fundamental to generative AI and its applications.
Experts predict that transformer-based AI could drive up to $4.4 trillion in productivity improvements - particularly in customer operations, marketing & sales, software engineering, and R&D.
Value:
- 65% of surveyed respondents report that their organisations are regularly using generative AI
- US$356 billion projected gen AI market size by 2030, up from $63 billion today
Leaders of the pack include OpenAI's GPT - with its groundreaking release of ChatGPT - Google's T5 and Meta's BART (to name a few) that are widely used for tasks like machine translation, text summarisation, dialogue systems, and more - which we use almost every day without knowing it.
There's also companies like Perplexity AI, Inflection AI and Mistral AI in competition.
