Dissecting global trends: An example from Italy

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To ride the waves of change successfully, executives must apply a fine-grained approach when they act on megatrends.
To show what that approach looks like in practice, we analyzed the market impact that one important trend—aging populations in developed economies—will have in Italy. We found that health care and some other industries will grow more quickly than they did before, while the impact on others will be negative. The growth prospects for subindustries and product categories within the health care sector vary a good deal.
Capturing the opportunities to capitalize on aging and other megatrends will therefore force companies to develop specific insights into microtrends before making strategic growth decisions and allocating resources.

More from these authors
This article is adapted from Granularity of Growth: Making Choices That Drive Enduring Company Performance, a book by McKinsey's Patrick Viguerie, Sven Smit, and Mehrdad Baghai. These Quarterly articles are also based on their research:

The granularity of growth
The do-or-die struggle for growth

This article contains the following exhibits:

Exhibit 1: A granular analysis breaks down market information into levels of increasingly finer detail.
Exhibit 2: At the level of industry groups and individual industries, it’s clear that the impact of aging varies across the Italian economy.

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