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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsThe World Economic Forum’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 highlights ten developing technologies across energy, materials, health and computing. They range from buildings that can support the electricity grid to new approaches to drug delivery and cryptography. The selection points to possible broad effects—not guaranteed transformations: the technologies differ in maturity, and their eventual reach will depend on technical progress, investment, regulation and how they are deployed.
What the 2026 list does—and does not—claim
Published on 23 June 2026 with Frontiers, the World Economic Forum (WEF) report selects technologies for their novelty, development progress and potential impact. It is a curated selection, not a ranking of every important innovation in 2026, and it does not put all ten at the same stage of development. As Frontiers CEO Frederick Fenter and WEF Managing Director Jeremy Jurgens write in the preface, “The technologies we bring forward are chosen for their novelty, development progress and potential impact.”
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The WEF frames the selection as unfinished stories. A promising application is not the same as widespread adoption, and the report says outcomes will depend on decisions by governments, businesses and research institutions. The entries below distinguish what the WEF describes from what remains uncertain.
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| Technology | Potential impact described by the WEF | What could shape wider adoption |
|---|---|---|
| Everything-to-grid energy | Buildings, vehicles and devices could operate as active grid resources, storing electricity and returning it when needed. That could make distributed energy storage part of grid management. | Coordination among grid-connected resources, battery chemistry and workable compensation models are among the challenges the WEF identifies. |
| Direct lithium extraction | Processes can recover lithium from brine in hours rather than months. The WEF describes lower land and water demands than conventional evaporation ponds and points to early industrial operations in Argentina and California. | Whether extraction can be integrated effectively with refining, including in combined hubs, remains an open scaling question. |
| Passive radiative cooling materials | Materials can release heat through the atmospheric window into space, cooling surfaces without using electricity. Potential forms include paints, films, roof tiles and fabrics. | The WEF points to the need for standardized testing and integration with building systems before wider use. |
| PFAS destruction | Supercritical water, electrochemical treatment and UV photocatalysis are among the approaches that target the carbon–fluorine bond in PFAS. The WEF reports commercial-scale operations treating municipal groundwater and industrial waste streams. | Broader deployment could depend on mandates, liability rules and the availability of treatment infrastructure. |
| Precision fermentation | Programmed microbes can produce proteins, fats and other molecules without relying on conventional livestock or growing conditions. The WEF says companies are supplying fermentation-derived dairy and egg proteins to major brands. | Scaling depends on capital, regulatory alignment and how the transition affects agricultural livelihoods. |
| Exosome drug delivery | The WEF includes this technology in its ten selections, but its summary does not provide enough detail to establish a specific mechanism, clinical status or efficacy. | Those details cannot be assessed from the summary alone. |
| Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines | The WEF’s preface describes a vaccine synthesized from an individual patient’s tumour to teach the immune system to recognize cancer cells it previously missed. | The selection does not establish approved availability, cure rates or general clinical effectiveness. |
| Quantum simulation for drug discovery | The WEF names this as an emerging technology but its summary does not establish commercial readiness or demonstrated drug-discovery outcomes. | Claims about practical results or readiness require evidence beyond the summary. |
| World models | These models learn how physical environments behave from multimodal data, with the aim of helping AI systems reason about unfamiliar situations. The WEF cites NVIDIA Cosmos and Stanford climate-simulation research as early examples. | For consequential uses, the WEF calls for accountability, auditing and testing assumptions. |
| Lattice-based cryptography | The WEF includes lattice-based cryptography in its list, but its summary does not provide implementation details or establish adoption status. | The summary does not verify that any particular product or system has transitioned to it. |
Three patterns connect otherwise different technologies
The WEF identifies personalization, distribution and doing more with less as recurring tendencies across the selection. They are useful ways to read the list, not properties shared by every technology.
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- More personal: The report’s example is a cancer vaccine synthesized using an individual patient’s tumour. The promise is a more tailored approach; the example alone does not establish clinical benefit or broad availability.
- More distributed: Grid-connected buildings, vehicles and devices could contribute resources across a network rather than leaving all balancing to centralized infrastructure. The WEF also uses the idea of production closer to users as part of its wider framing.
- More with less: The report points to surface cooling that does not consume electricity and microbes producing dairy proteins with a fraction of the land, water and emissions associated with conventional dairy production. These are examples in the WEF’s framing, not proof that the approaches have already displaced incumbent systems at scale.
Energy innovation is active, but activity is not deployment
The International Energy Agency’s State of Energy Innovation 2026 offers context for the energy-related entries, but its figures cover energy innovation, not the health, materials or computing technologies in the WEF list. The IEA reports more than 150 significant energy innovation highlights in 2025 and 50 upgrades in technology readiness levels among the emerging energy technologies it follows. It also records more than 80 new energy innovation policies in 2025, alongside over 60 initiatives under existing policies across 32 countries and jurisdictions. More than 320 new energy start-ups raised first funding in 2025.
Those indicators describe research, policy and startup activity—not proof of broad market adoption. The same IEA report notes that its 2030 renewables deployment forecast was downgraded by 5% in 2025. It estimates global public energy research and development spending at USD 55 billion in 2025, while energy-technology startup venture investment stood at USD 27 billion that year, down for a third consecutive year. The picture is therefore mixed: innovation continues, but investment shifts and deployment forecasts can still move in an unfavorable direction.
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How to judge whether an emerging technology will matter broadly
A useful comparison is not simply “which one sounds most futuristic?” The ten entries address different problems, and the WEF summary does not provide a common performance measure for comparing them. Instead, consider:
- What is the intended benefit? Look for a specific change—such as recovering lithium from brine or cooling a surface without electricity—rather than treating the label “emerging technology” as evidence of impact.
- How far has it progressed? Distinguish a research example, an early industrial operation and a commercial-scale treatment operation. These are different kinds of evidence and do not establish equal maturity across the list.
- What does scaling require? The WEF identifies concrete conditions including infrastructure, coordination, investment, regulatory alignment and standardized testing. A technology’s real-world reach may depend as much on those conditions as on its core technical idea.
- What might be displaced or affected? A resource-saving process can still have consequences for incumbent industries and livelihoods. The WEF explicitly raises agricultural livelihoods in connection with precision fermentation.
- What evidence supports the claimed benefit? For technologies where the summary gives little detail—exosome drug delivery, quantum simulation for drug discovery and lattice-based cryptography—it is not possible to infer clinical performance, commercial readiness or adoption from inclusion on the list alone.
The takeaway
The WEF’s 2026 selection is best read as a map of possibilities and scaling questions, not a forecast that ten technologies will transform society within the year. Its breadth is itself notable: potential changes to energy systems, materials, food production, medicine and computing appear side by side, while the conditions for success vary sharply. The IEA’s energy figures reinforce the distinction between momentum in innovation and deployment in the world outside the lab.
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