Referring to his work within the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, Tim says:

While we discussed Emerging Technologies in terms of nanotechnologies, synthetic biology, and geoenginering, we still lacked a real sense of how Emerging Technologies could be defined. To some the phrase meant Twitter, while to others it meant computational chemistry.

At this year's meeting, we finally assembled enough brain power to come up with a draft definition saying that Emerging Technologies are ones that:

• arise from new knowledge, or the innovative application of existing knowledge;
  
• lead to the rapid development of new capabilities;
  
• are projected to have significant systemic and long-lasting economic, social and political impacts;
  
• create new opportunities for and challenges to addressing global issues; and
  
• have the potential to disrupt or create entire industries.

Although the definition is still a little wordy, it does capture the essence of the discussion.

For technologies to be -emerging' there needs to be some kind of acceleration taking place, or some huge government funding effort, massive market pull, or some other factor that sets them apart from all of the other technologies that are chugging along quite nicely but not going anywhere fast. It's not perfect, but it is a start.

What do you think? Is that a useful definition? How does it compare to what you think of when you hear the phrase 'emerging technologies'?