Slovak public has recently experienced number of front-page stories about patients, who were refused payment for innovative highly expensive drugs by health insurance companies. Stories, which attracted a lot of emotions and stirred the public and which are vanguard of much bigger future troubles in public healthcare.
Slovakia is a small country. It cannot afford to be uneducated. Still, the country has been sinking in the PISA rankings that measure “smartness” by comparing results of educational systems. Many small countries rank ahead of Slovakia.
Scooters are nowadays one of the best means of transport in the city. Unfortunately, not all Poles like this frenzy, so some users fall victim to aggression from pedestrians, with scooters from sharing companies being destroyed.
Over the past 10 years, the Bulgarian economy has changed dramatically. The manufacturing sector is gradually shifting towards higher value added production. The number of employed in traditional industries, for instance the clothing industry and furniture manufacturing, has dropped significantly.
There are clear reasons why Silicon Valley or Shenzhen are synonymous with high technologies – they are the place where entrepreneurs and businesses in this field have created their ecosystem, and accordingly attract those who want to break into the industry.
INESS organized the international conference “Do Regulations Kill Inovation? on June 19, 2018, focusing directly on the sharing economy, its potential for the future, and regulatory environment issues. The conference was attended by over 100 participants.
Germany’s greatest innovations are found not on the autobahn, but on the country’s fields and farms: self-driving high-tech tractors, milking robots, and feeding machines are already standard equipment for many farmers. Smart Farming is the future of agriculture.
AI and robotics are termed “disruptive technologies”, which sounds somewhat dangerous and fraught with risk. But according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology, disruptive technologies are simply “innovations which replace a successful, existing technology, product or service or oust it from the market”.
An example of innovation is a standardized cargo container. Today, there are more than 20 million of these containers around the globe and we move practically everything in them. This innovation from the late sixties completely changed the world.
Equally promising is that many politicians have clearly understood what clever solutions are: connecting the already existing services, using of the current state of knowledge, putting pressure on solutions implemented through open online platforms, encouraging interactions with citizens, among others.
