The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released the 14th edition of its report identifying the scientific advances that are set to have an impact on economies and society within the next three to five years.
The Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 report covers innovations spanning energy, health and critical resources, and is produced in collaboration with scientific publisher Frontiers. Technologies are selected based on their novelty, maturity and potential impact, while the work is supported with input from leading scientists, technologists and innovation leaders in order to list the scientific advances "approaching the moment when they are ready to change the world".
The report said three trends stood out in terms of the list. These technologies are becoming more personal, designed around one patient or one context, rather than as a standard. Many are becoming more distributed, producing food, energy and critical materials closer to where they are needed, while 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.
Taking the top position, in the 2026 report is “Everything-to-grid”, where buildings, vehicles and devices move from being passive consumers of electricity to storing and returning power. The report says that new battery chemistries, smarter coordination software and updated compensation models are making this technology a reality. The main challenge the report asserts is “whether these distributed assets develop into a shared resilience system or remain fragmented across competing interests.”
Direct lithium extraction, where brine is processed directly to recover lithium in just a few hours rather than months, comes in second place. This process does not need the land or water that comes from using conventional evaporation ponds, with the technology having been proven in Argentina and in California, US. The report says that the strategic question is whether the technology can open up lithium extraction and refining hubs in locations that have been excluded from the lithium supply chain.
Passive radiative cooling materials, which allow surfaces to cool below ambient temperatures without consuming any electricity, is third on the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 report. Already included in building codes, the materials are embedded into paints, films, rooftiles and fabrics. “Wider adoption depends on standardised testing, integration into green building rating systems and sustained regulatory momentum,” the report says.
Technologies to destroy PFAS, were fourth on the list. These technologies break the carbon–fluorine bond at the heart of forever chemicals through supercritical water, electrochemical treatment and UV photocatalysis. Commercial-scale operations are now running for both municipal groundwater contamination and industrial waste streams. Turning this technical capability into widespread deployment requires verified destruction mandates, harmonised liability frameworks and investment in localised treatment infrastructure, the report says.
The fifth technology on the list is precision fermentation. This technology programs microbes to produce proteins, fats and other molecules at industrial scale, independent of the land, climate and livestock that conventional agriculture requires. The report says that companies are already supplying fermentation-derived dairy and egg proteins to major food brands globally. But whether this technology shifts food security from being dependent on geography to being dependent on infrastructure will depend on capital access, regulatory harmonisation and how the transition affects agricultural livelihoods.
Exosome drug delivery, where the body’s exosomes are engineered to carry therapeutics across biological barriers, including the blood brain barrier, sits at sixth place in the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 report. The report says that more than 200 clinical trials have been launched since 2022 using exosome drug delivery for the treatment of cancer, neurological disease and long-term effects of covid-19. The primary bottleneck for this technology, the report says are: “Manufacturing scale, quality control and regulatory frameworks.”
Also covering health, personalised mRNA cancer vaccines is seventh on the list. These vaccines are synthesised from a patient’s own tumour mutations, training the immune system to recognise and respond to cells it had previously missed. The report says that trials in pancreatic cancer and melanoma have “produced results significant enough to to advance into phase three studies.” But the report cautions: “Whether these vaccines become a standard of care or remain a privilege of well-resourced health systems depends on cost, manufacturing capacity and equitable access to sequencing infrastructure.”
Supporting drug discovery quantum simulation models are on the list of technologies at number eight. This technology models molecular behaviour directly from physical principles allowing scientists to predict how drug candidates fold, bind and interact to level not possible with classical computing. The report says that that the quantum drug discovery market has roughly doubled in value in five years, with major pharmaceutical partnerships now generating early deployment data. But shared validation standards and regulatory frameworks for simulation-derived evidence are the critical prerequisites for the field to move from partnership to pipeline, the report adds.
The application of world models, where the underlying dynamics of physical environments from multimodal data, enable AI systems to reason on situations they have never directly encountered, is the ninth technology listed in the report. The report says the first wave of this technology has been used by NVIDIA's Cosmos platform and Stanford research applied to climate simulation. “As these systems move from controlled environments into consequential operational settings, governance frameworks for accountability, audit and assumption-testing must keep pace with adoption,” the report says.
The tenth technology, lattice-based cryptography, encodes information inside high-dimensional geometric structures that are computationally intractable for both classical and quantum machines to reverse. “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalised its post-quantum encryption standards in 2024, and the EU, the National Security Agency (NSA) and SWIFT have all set deadlines for transition. The task now is migrating critical systems before quantum computers are capable of decrypting the encrypted data already being harvested today,” the report says.
Further reading:
- Quantum technology is reaching a commercial tipping point for chemicals and pharma
- 10 innovations that could transform chemistry
- 25 deep tech innovations that could shape the future
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