The 2026 technology wave is physical, not digital.
The Forum’s 2026 list sits in power grids, materials, water, food and medicine rather than on screens. These technologies arrive through building codes, grid tariffs and procurement calendars, which makes their timing unusually predictable.
On 23 June 2026, at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, the Forum and Frontiers released the fourteenth edition of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies report. Eight of the ten technologies on the list act directly on physical systems: power grids, mineral processing, building surfaces, water treatment, fermentation tanks and clinics.
That is a change of address. For most of the past decade, the technologies that reshaped how companies work arrived as software — bought on a licence, deployed in weeks, reversed almost as quickly. The 2026 cohort arrives through building codes, grid tariffs, procurement specifications and materials budgets. It moves more slowly, and its dates are published in advance.
The 2026 list sits in energy, materials, food and medicine
The ten are everything-to-grid energy, direct lithium extraction, passive radiative cooling materials, PFAS destruction, precision fermentation, exosome drug delivery, personalised mRNA cancer vaccines, quantum simulation for drug discovery, world models and lattice-based cryptography. Only two are software in the ordinary sense, and one of those, lattice-based cryptography, rebuilds the public-key cryptography that secures the rest.
The foreword, by Frederick Fenter of Frontiers and Jeremy Jurgens of the Forum, identifies three recurring tendencies rather than one theme. Many of these technologies are becoming more personal, designed around one patient or one context; many are becoming more distributed, producing food, energy and critical materials closer to where they are needed; and many do more with less — “cooling without power, protein without herds and chemistry without persistent waste”.
One methodological point matters here. For 2026, the expert survey used in earlier editions was replaced by an AI-based nomination workflow developed by Frontiers, which screened more than 1,200 candidate technologies across eight academic fields and thirteen industry sectors before a shortlist of twenty reached the advisory council. The list describes technologies approaching decision points; it is not a market forecast.
Physical technologies arrive on regulatory calendars, not release notes
The evidence the report assembles for commercial readiness is largely regulatory. California’s Energy Code requires cool-roof materials on most commercial and high-rise buildings, and China’s dual-carbon policy has incorporated radiative cooling into national green building standards: two of the world’s largest construction markets have written it into specification. The European Union adopted legally binding PFAS limits in drinking water in 2020, under the recast Drinking Water Directive; those limits became applicable on 12 January 2026, and regulators in the United States, Japan and Australia have moved in the same direction, which turns PFAS destruction into a procurement category. The United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology finalised its post-quantum encryption standards in 2024, and both ISO and ETSI aligned behind the same lattice-based foundation.
None of this can be subscribed to. It has to be specified — in a renovation tender, a grid contract, a supplier qualification, a procurement clause. That makes adoption a budget-cycle question, and it makes the timing legible: codes, standards and deadlines are published before they take effect.
Switzerland wrote one of the ten into law on 1 January 2026
Everything-to-grid energy — buildings, vehicles and factories acting as storage and stabilisation assets rather than passive consumers — is already Swiss law.
Article 17c of the Electricity Supply Act, in force since 1 January 2026, establishes that the flexibility arising from the management of electricity withdrawal, storage and injection belongs to the final consumer, producer or storage operator concerned, and that anyone wishing to use it may obtain access by contract. Distribution grid operators may use flexibility for grid purposes within their own supply area, and must conclude non-discriminatory contracts with holders, remuneration included.
The implementing ordinance sets the terms. Article 19b requires a flexibility contract to specify the control system, the extent of the intended use, the remuneration, the term and the notice conditions, and obliges every grid operator to publish its terms and remuneration rates yearly. Article 19c defines the guaranteed uses, which are not remunerated and may be exercised without the holder’s consent: adjusting at most 3% of the energy produced annually at the connection point, and intervening where grid security is immediately and substantially threatened.
The same date opened a second route. Local electricity communities, under Articles 17d and 17e, allow consumers, renewable producers and storage operators in the same supply area, at the same grid level and within one commune, all equipped with smart meters, to trade self-generated electricity among themselves. Article 19h of the ordinance sets the reduction on the network usage tariff for that electricity at 40%, falling to 20% where the network topology requires voltage transformation.
ElCom published the 2026 tariffs on 9 September 2025: a median household in basic supply pays 27.7 centimes per kilowatt-hour, about 4% less than in 2025, a fall of 1.3 centimes the regulator attributes to lower energy prices. Energy is the component that fell; network charges are what these rules act on.
The economics appear in materials budgets, not licence fees
Radiative cooling paints cost around six dollars per square metre, and 3M and SkyCool report energy savings of 15–20% in grocery and retail settings; the report notes that indoor temperatures can fall by 5–10°C and savings can reach up to 42% in hot, dry climates. In the United Kingdom, AssetCool’s coating lets existing power cables carry around 30% more electricity.
PFAS destruction is priced against a familiar benchmark: sending contaminated foams, sludges and resins to incineration costs 1,000 to 5,000 dollars per tonne, against about 50 dollars for ordinary municipal solid waste, while some systems now approach 99% destruction efficiency on concentrated streams.
Precision fermentation has reached shelves: Nestlé introduced a fermentation-derived whey protein isolate in 2024, and Fonterra has invested in Vivici, which makes the main whey protein using 87% less water than cattle-derived equivalents. Swiss food companies face a divergence. The Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office authorises novel foods in Switzerland, but foods produced from genetically modified organisms are treated here as genetically modified foods, whereas the European Union handles them under its novel-food regime. An ingredient cleared in the EU does not arrive in Switzerland on the same file.
Five of these decisions can be taken in the next budget round
- Ask the distribution grid operator for its published flexibility contract terms and remuneration rates; the ordinance requires it to publish them yearly. Any site with batteries, heat pumps, cold storage or a charging fleet holds flexibility the law assigns to the holder, not the utility.
- Test the site against the local electricity community criteria — same supply area, same grid level, one commune, smart metering — and price the 40% network-tariff reduction before assuming self-consumption behind a single meter is the only option.
- Move cooling into the building envelope at the next roof or façade tender, alongside the HVAC sizing decision. A coating is capital spent once; installed cooling capacity recurs as an operating cost every summer.
- Start the cryptographic inventory. The roadmap agreed by EU member states in June 2025 sets initial national transition plans, and pilots for high- and medium-risk use cases, for the end of 2026. Switzerland has no dedicated quantum-safe framework; for the financial sector, the Swiss Financial Innovation Desk at the State Secretariat for International Finance notes that FINMA expects its licensees to manage technological risk proactively, and sets out a seven-step plan beginning with governance and an inventory of affected components.
- Review inputs and waste streams for PFAS exposure: the EU drinking-water limits became applicable on 12 January 2026, and the FSVO is examining an adaptation of the Swiss maximum values.
The dates worth entering in a planning calendar are already fixed
The European post-quantum milestones fall on 31 December 2026, 2030 and 2035. In Switzerland, grid operators must report to ElCom each year on the interventions they make when grid security is immediately threatened, and the Federal Council must report annually on whether operators’ access to existing flexibility is crowding out other uses — the public record to consult before signing a long flexibility contract. The Forum publishes the list annually, which places the next edition in mid-2027.
The question this report puts to a management team is narrow. Of the three largest recurring cost positions in the business — energy, materials, waste — which now has a technological answer with a published date attached, and who inside the company owns that date?