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Home Insights Lab Trends 2026
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The Path to Inspiration in 2026

Your guide to driving impact in a complex world

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Navigate Complexity. Inspire Action. Deliver Measurable Outcomes.

2026 isn’t a year for incremental change, it’s a year for bold reinvention. Economic caution, governance-heavy decision-making, and shifting expectations have created a landscape where traditional approaches no longer deliver. Organisations need strategies that cut through complexity and activate performance.

Our latest Trend Report: The Path to Inspiration in 2026 explores how businesses can move beyond resilience to reinvention, designing experiences that are intelligent, intentional, and deeply human.

A woman wearing a VR headset stands against a blue and pink gradient background. Text discusses strategic responses in content planning, listing expert partnerships, production teams, and video specialists as key considerations.
A business strategy infographic showing Recognition as a driver of business outcomes at the center, surrounded by six outcomes: performance, learning, innovation, culture, wellbeing, and career milestones, with supporting text on the left.
A strategy document titled Strategic response: Design for impact features text, colorful geometric graphics, and a bar chart comparing market uptick percentages between DACH and Anglo-Saxon countries, with DACH scoring higher.

What you’ll learn:

This report draws on insights from behavioural science, emerging technologies, and real-world client success stories to help you:

  • Reignite channel loyalty and sales momentum in a hesitant market.
  • Rethink employee recognition and incentives as a driver of measurable business outcomes – not just engagement.
  • Reimagine live events as purposeful, experience-led platforms that deliver ROI and ROE.

What’s inside the report:

1. Designing the Future, Not Just Responding to It
Understand why 2026 demands bold reinvention and how organisations can lead with clarity, creativity, and courage.

2. Channel Incentives and Loyalty: Driving Growth in a Hesitant Market
Discover how adaptive, human-centred programmes can accelerate partner performance, reduce friction, and create shared investment models that build trust and advocacy.

3. Employee Recognition and Incentives: From Engagement to Impact
Learn why recognition is no longer a “nice to have” and how integrated ecosystems and predictive AI are transforming recognition into a strategic engine for culture and performance.

4. Live Events: Communicating with Impact in a Cost-Conscious World
Explore how to design events that deliver purpose, personalisation, and measurable outcomes, even in a climate of rising costs and sustained expectations.

In a world where decision-making is slower, budgets are tighter, and expectations are higher, the path to progress lies in doing better, not more.

This report gives you the tools to design strategies that inspire action, foster belonging, and deliver measurable outcomes.

Download the full report now and discover how to turn complexity into clarity, and inspiration into impact.

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Thought Leadership

Learn from the best. BIW thought leaders bring you a deeper look at the business of inspiration.

  • Colorful radial mosaic pattern with square tiles spreading outward; top right features an orange corner with BI WORLDWIDE logo. Bottom text reads, “The Path to Inspiration: Trends for 2026 and beyond.”.

    Insights Lab

    Trends 2026

    Our latest Trend Report: The Path to Inspiration in 2026 explores how businesses can move beyond resilience to reinvention, designing experiences that are intelligent, intentional, and deeply human.

  • A vibrant red pawn stands prominently in the foreground. Behind it are blurred beige pawns on the left side against a dark background, while the right side transitions to a yellow background. The image has a diagonal split effect.

    Article

    Personalising Channel Loyalty

    When it comes to loyalty programmes, personalisation is key. The more personalised, the greater the outcomes. Both engagement and business results benefit at higher rates. Because of that, we start thinking about personalisation right from the beginning, during programme design.

  • Three yellow paper airplanes fly to the right on a blue and gray background, each leaving a dotted yellow trail behind them.

    Article

    Overcoming obstacles to sales incentive design

    There are many obstacles BI WORLDWIDE has observed when designing effective contests for sales organisations. Read this blog for eight challenges you may face as well as solutions to make your contests drive the results you’re looking for.

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A vibrant red pawn stands prominently in the foreground. Behind it are blurred beige pawns on the left side against a dark background, while the right side transitions to a yellow background. The image has a diagonal split effect.

Article

Personalising Channel Loyalty

When it comes to loyalty programmes, personalisation is key. The more personalised, the greater the outcomes. Both engagement and business results benefit at higher rates. Because of that, we start thinking about personalisation right from the beginning, during programme design.

Three yellow paper airplanes fly to the right on a blue and gray background, each leaving a dotted yellow trail behind them.

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Overcoming obstacles to sales incentive design

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How recognition programmes can help solve the middle manager disengagement crisis

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