The bottom line
Digital twins move experimentation into a virtual environment where products, facilities and systems can be modeled before physical change occurs.
Why it matters
The practical value is compression: teams can test designs, operations and failure modes faster and with less physical waste. The concept is spreading beyond manufacturing into infrastructure, healthcare and complex asset management.
From the foresight archive
Jim Carroll first published this as Megatrend #4 on 2025-06-27. He revisited it one year later on 2026-08-10, using the retrospective to test the original call against what had happened since.
In that retrospective, Carroll’s own shorthand assessment was: Nailed it, and undersold two-thirds of it. I put my number on manufacturing a year ago. The infrastructure-inspection and healthcare applications turned out to be moving just as fast, or faster.
This page treats the 2025 article as the original foresight call and the 2026 article as the first evidence checkpoint. Later signals and scorecards can be attached without rewriting the historical record.