Every year, our team of in-house experts predicts what will be big over the next 12 months.

In this series, we set out our case for why 2014 would be the year we were finally delivered the virtual reality experience we were promised two decades ago, the US would lose technological control of the Internet, communities would start crowdsourcing their own political representatives and we would be introduced to the concept of extreme volunteering – plus 10 more predictions spanning energy, tech, health, data, impact investment and social policy.

Read our previous predictions

You'll find all 14 predictions for 2014 below. Read our 2015 predictions, recap on our forecasts for 2012 and 2013 and find out how accurate we were with our 2014 list.