Trends of the future

During the last ERA Convention, on 15 and 16 May in Madrid, two sessions of workshops were scheduled to allow the delegates to attend more than one workshop. Those workshops were organised by four ERA Committees / Working Groups: the Technical, Promotion and Sustainability Committees and the Future Group.

The members of the Future Group invited convention participants to review a few trends that had been identified as influential in the rental business, and more particularly trends that would inform the development of rental branches or depots over the coming years. In total, eight trends were discussed at the workshop: Platform Economy, AI Robotics, Personalised Pricing, Leased Standard of Living, Big Data, Augmented Reality, Circular Economy and Industry Disruptors. At the end of the discussion, the workshop participants were asked to assess the trends in terms of how disruptive they will be and if they will impact the rental branch of the future in the short, medium or long term.

The outputs collected in this workshop will be used by the Future Group to continue its work on the Futures Platform, an online tool that visualises and categorises the trends. The result will be a snapshot of what the Future Group thinks the industry will be facing within a given time horizon.

The Future Group is open to all young managers (less than 40 years old) of European equipment rental companies (including non-members of the ERA). If your company is interested in sending a young manager to the Future Group, please contact the ERA team, at [email protected].