About the report

Next-generation connectivity is an Economist Intelligence Unit research programme, commissioned by Osborne Clarke. In this report The Economist Intelligence Unit looks at businesses’ anticipation of, readiness for and adoption of next-generation internet connectivity.

To do this, we surveyed 550 senior executives with familiarity of their business’ connectivity strategies in April-May 2018. The survey focused on executives from five sectors: digital business; energy and utilities; financial services; real estate and infrastructure; and transport and automotive. Half of the respondents are either members of their companies’ boards or hold C-level positions, and, furthermore, half are from organisations with global annual revenue exceeding US$500m. Respondents were drawn from Belgium, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US, in equal numbers.

About this report

The Economist Intelligence Unit supplemented survey results with in-depth interviews. We would like to thank all survey respondents, as well as the following
executives, for their time and insights:

• Giles Fearnley, managing director First Bus, FirstGroup
• Stefano Gastaut, CEO, Vodafone IoT
• Paul Gudonis, president, Inmarsat Enterprise, Inmarsat
• Guido Jouret, chief digital officer, ABB
• Kapil Mahajan, chief information officer (CIO), Safexpress
• Soili Makinen, CIO, Cargotec
• William Newton, president and managing director (EMEA), WiredScore
• Deborah Sherry, chief commercial officer, GE Digital Europe
• Jeff Travers, head of IoT, Ericsson
• Tomer Tzach, CEO, CropX

The paper was written by Jessica Twentyman and edited by Jeremy Kingsley.