Maybe this stake is more prominent in start-up environments, where new ideas surface every day and the opportunity for growth is potentially wider. Philosophies like "Build fast, fail fast" are at the core of an agile mindset, helping us determine whether an idea is viable in the early stages or whether a pivot is necessary to achieve the desired numbers and experience.
True innovation lives where deep technical insight meets ignored, convention-bound assumptions. There's a kind of arbitrage in innovation that's easy to miss because it doesn't look like arbitrage at all. It lives in the gap between what physics allows and what institutions assume is possible. The reason it persists is that exploiting it requires developing genuine expertise in domains where most have neither the background nor the patience.
Twenty years ago, as the top digital and innovation executive for Citi's credit card business, I led the team that spent months building what looked like a brilliant partnership. We'd found a startup with a disruptive payments platform-one that became the forerunner of what has become a new payment type used by millions of consumers today. The deal: strategic investment in exchange for access to the startup's codebase as a sandbox for innovation pilots. No more waiting in the legacy systems queue. Just rapid prototyping with leading-edge developers.
History's geniuses tend to be a little quirky, and for a good reason: You can't create something innovative if you're constantly thinking inside the box. The same goes for products. Oftentimes, it's the weird stuff that ends up solving problems you didn't know could be fixed. These kooky things are selling out on Amazon because they're pure genius - and once you've tried them yourself, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them.
Most people tend to think safety and danger are opposites. But it's more useful to think of them as dance partners. Safety gives us solid footing; danger gives us movement. The emotional sweet spot between the two-where you feel safe but challenged enough to discover something new-is something I call Safe Danger. I base entire team-building and community-building workshops around moments of safe danger.
But rather than feeling daunted, consider this: the competition keeps you on your toes, pushing you to innovate and improve. You'll need to take a proactive approach to survive, staying focused on what sets your business apart and understanding what your customers truly need. Complacency is a sure way to be left behind.
Every year when we look back at all the games that dropped, trends reveal themselves. For 2025, you might boil it down to a year of innovation. Yes, there were many big, anticipated games that overdelivered. But, from Donkey Kong Bonanza to Death Stranding 2, no two looked alike. The further you go, the more creativity you see. From a co-op storytelling game like no other in Split Fiction to the mysterious and completely unique puzzlers in Blue Prince .
For Jan Gilg, SAP's co-chief revenue officer and head of the Americas market and the global Business Suite, thriving within today's economic climate and technology imperatives isn't about avoiding disruption. It's about using the agility those challenges cultivate to drive innovation. That can start with understanding what's proprietary about your business versus what's a process most businesses rely on. Gilg refers to this as "standardizing where you don't differentiate." In other words, automating standard processes that don't create value.
The guidelines advocate using existing legal frameworks like the Information Technology Act and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act to handle emerging risks such as deepfakes and unauthorized data use. "India's AI governance adopts a balanced, agile and flexible approach that promotes innovation and safety," Amal Mohanty, AI policy expert and one of the lead authors of the guidelines, told DW. He said India's approach is different to the rules charted by the EU, China and the US. "Unlike the EU's detailed AI Act that imposes strict, rule-based obligations based on risk classification, ours favors self-regulation and voluntary measures," he said. "This allows developers more freedom to innovate while managing AI risks responsibly."
Negotiation is one of the most consequential yet misunderstood leadership skills. It shapes deals, partnerships, and careers, yet even seasoned professionals still debate what truly defines a good negotiator. Remigiusz Smolinski is a professor at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. He is the founder of The Negotiation Challenge and cofounder of Discurso.AI. His research explores negotiation, leadership, and innovation.
In November, The Boston Globe's fifth annual Globe Summit will bring together researchers, entrepreneurs, executives, politicians, and change-makers from New England and beyond in conversations led by Globe journalists focused on this year's theme, "Revolutionary Ideas." The Globe Summit takes place Tuesday, Nov. 18, and Wednesday, Nov. 19, at the House of Blues in Boston, with the first day's programming focused on health care and leadership, followed on day 2 by discussions on innovation, community, and commerce.
The global challenges of today, from climate-fuelled floods, droughts and heatwaves to food insecurity and health disparities, are felt intensely in Africa. To tackle those, universities on the continent must strengthen their research and innovation capacity. On average, African countries spend around 0.5% of their gross domestic product on research and development. That's less than one-quarter of the global average of 2.7%.
Patent applications are a key indicator of a country's innovative capacity. A high volume of filings indicates effective research and development (R&D) activity, economic competitiveness, and a forward-looking approach to growth and productivity. Patent application filings don't actually record nationality or immigration background. But using a unique methodology, which assigns inventors' first names to one of 24 language areas, the IW patent database claims to be able to track "the region of origin" of inventors with a high degree of accuracy.
The 2025 Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to three researchers who have shown how technological and scientific innovation, coupled to market competition, drive economic growth. One half of the prize goes to economic-historian Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the other half is split between the economic theorists Philippe Aghion of the Collège de France and the London School of Economics and Peter Howitt of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "I can't find the words to express what I feel," Aghion said. He says he will use the money for research in his laboratory at the Collège de France.
If you're building the future in frontier technologies like AI, you could base yourself anywhere. So the real question is where. The answer today points north-to Stockholm. The European Commission recently declared Stockholm as Europe's most innovative region. Ahead of Copenhagen, London, and Zurich, the Swedish capital took the top spot. Not just overall, but on a range of individual indicators, from lifelong learning and share of tech specialists employed to cross-border scientific publications, collaboration between SMEs, patent filings, and trademarks.
We address critical topics such as the recent shake-ups at the USPTO, the controversial "patent tax" proposal, how despite the fact that the USPTO is user-fee funded it is being swept up in broader Trump Administration efforts to downsize the federal government, what the word "innovation" really means, how businesses use intellectual property assets, the importance of predictable IP assets, the challenges of effective patent valuation, international collaboration and education to support small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), and much more.
