Friday, 4 July 2025: Megatrends such as climate change, demographic shifts and technological disruptions are creating new avenues for value creation that transcend traditional industry boundaries. Amid this scenario, businesses are rapidly diversifying to capitalise on the evolving landscape. However, to navigate this transformation effectively, they require a fresh approach to identify where and how to diversify in order to seize value in motion. To support this need, PwC has developed a domain-based framework designed to guide strategic-decision making in this new era.
According to PwC India’s report, ‘Navigating the value shift’, Indian businesses can unlock USD 9.82 trillion in gross value added (GVA) by 2035 by tapping into these growth domains. Domains represent markets where businesses go beyond traditional sector boundaries to address fundamental human and industrial needs. Value within these domains is created through collaboration across ecosystems and interconnected value chains. By integrating diverse economic sectors, domains open up new avenues for growth, enabling a diverse range of companies to participate and thrive.
A brief description of each domain is provided in Diagram-1 below.
Diagram-1: The nine domains of growth
How we build:
Our need for places to live and work is growing—and changing. To meet it, industries are converging on innovative ways to build.
How we feed:
The agri-food system is at a pivot point. Feeding 10 billion people at mid-century will require a cross-sector push for innovation in the decade ahead.
How we fund and insure:
Capital is a vital catalyst for growth. How it’s deployed, managed and insured must evolve along with the industries it serves.
How we care:
As the world confronts medical challenges, the healthcare sector must provide care at scale that is effective, affordable, preventative and personalised.
How we fuel and power:
To ensure clean and reliable access for a rising population and enable industries to meet demand, the energy sector must embrace new ways of operating.
How we connect and compute:
Business collaboration increasingly runs on technology. And the businesses developing that technology must increasingly collaborate to thrive.
How we make:
To meet the world’s need for materials and industrial goods, manufacturing must reinvent itself through innovation, digitisation and automation.
How we move:
To meet customers’ needs for safe, efficient, affordable transportation, mobility players are tapping into clean tech and digital solutions.
How we govern and serve governments and businesses:
Supporting collaboration among sectors, governments and organisations can help improve well-being and advance prosperity.
“India CEOs are already responding to these shifts. In PwC's 28th Annual Global CEO Survey: India perspective published in January 2025, 40% of India CEOs stated that their companies have entered at least one new sector in the past five years, with half of them generating up to 20% of their revenue from these new ventures,” said Sanjeev Krishan, Chairperson, PwC in India. “But to sustain momentum and unlock full value, businesses must move beyond ad hoc diversification. A domain-led lens that goes beyond the sector-led approach provides a powerful way to reimagine capabilities, collaborate across ecosystems, and build future-ready business and revenue models.”
As per PwC’s study, one of the most significant domains contributing to the GVA calculus will be the ‘Make’ domain, which includes manufacturing and industrial production, amongst other sectors. The report estimates that this domain alone will expand from USD 945 billion in 2023 to nearly USD 2.7 trillion in GVA by 2035.
Consider another domain, ‘how we build.’ As technology continues to reshape the way we construct and manage built environments more efficiently, traditional sectors such as real estate, construction and building management are being complemented by innovation spaces. These include smart, sustainable buildings; building tech and data solutions; and smart city infrastructure. Together, they represent a shift towards a more efficient, intelligent and integrated approach to the ‘Build’ domain.
On the other hand, the telecommunications sector illustrates a range of cross-domain possibilities (see Diagram 2). The value pools emerging in these new growth domains represent exciting growth opportunities.
Figure 2: Domain-based growth opportunities for the telecom sector
Opportunities for the telecommunications sector
Move
Providing traffic management systems and related communications infrastructure for smart cities
Care
Disseminating information to mobile players on wearable devices and telehealth services
Feed
Providing necessary connectivity for blockchain-based authentication of provenance along food supply chains
Build
Offering real-time data and analytics from connected buildings
Fuel and Power
Linking broadband grids with energy grids
Commenting on the need for proactive reinvention, Arnab Basu, Partner and Clients & Industries Leader, PwC India added, "India’s growth ambition is closely tied to its ability to innovate across domains. We are seeing a bold push from Indian enterprises to lead in newer markets—whether through digital reinvention, advanced manufacturing or sustainable infrastructure. What’s needed now is an intentional, insight-led strategy to scale these efforts while keeping resilience and trust at the centre.”
The report introduces a structured framework to help organisations identify and pursue opportunities that lie beyond traditional sector boundaries. It outlines glidepaths and guardrails—strategic actions and risk mitigators—to help companies enter new domains with clarity and confidence. These include mapping ecosystems, bridging capability gaps, building intelligent foresight engines, and crafting clear domain entry and exit strategies.
Raghav Narsalay, Partner and Leader – Research and Insights Hub, PwC India said, “In an environment where businesses are constantly seeking clarity on where to play and how to play, our research offers both strategic direction and a framework for them to engage creatively with growth opportunities they may not have necessarily identified.”
With India's economy projected to reach USD 30 trillion by 2047, domain-based innovation could play a pivotal role in driving the nation’s inclusive, sustainable and tech-powered growth. PwC’s domain-based framework supported by glidepaths and guardrails offers a robust architecture to help organisations align their reinvention efforts with long-term national objectives and business imperatives.
Note to the editor
We used Input-Output tables to apportion sector values into domains. We aggregated the domestic and import values, as well as the sector roll-ups for the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) sectors M and N and R, S, T and U. All our tables use the 2019 version of the ISIC tables. The 2020 tables are available but carry distortions due to the impact of Covid-19 that year. More recent tables are available for selected territories, though they are inconsistent in terms of formatting, currency denomination, assumptions and sector hierarchy convention.
We made assumptions as to which domain each sector most strongly aligns with. We assigned each sector to its most appropriate domain. As a result, each domain landed with at least one ‘anchor tenant,’ which is the sector (or sectors) that most strongly represents the domain.
By assigning anchor tenants, we allocated some proportion of the total value of the sector output to that domain and let the logic of the Input-Output table quantitatively allocate the rest of the sector’s value across the other domains, based on the relationship between the anchor tenant and each sector comprising the other domains.
Indian economy forecasts were made using the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) database’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 (SSP2) associated with the climate change scenario; these were adjusted to nominal terms using inputs from the IMF and RBI for the GDP deflator, arriving at the India’s GDP value for 2035. This value, with the apportionment of sectoral values across domains, resulted in the sizes of each domain.
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