You’ve spent a lifetime building skills, learning lessons, nurturing relationships, and developing a perspective as prescient and powerful as your personal drive. You’ve poured it all into your business. Now, you have five minutes (or less) to communicate an irresistible vision for the world and convince a panel of respected — and sometimes disrespectful — judges that you can make the vision real and make some money. How do you do it? A pitch competition is a unique moment: I have pitched in, judged, and hosted pitch competitions from Miami to Mongolia. I’m an entrepreneur and investor, and I’ve spent…

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It’s harvest day at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. As sunshine bathes the leafy university campus, scientists inside the labs work under cool fluorescent light. Clad in green protective gear, they tend meticulously to test tubes within hermetically sealed cleanrooms. The containers hold the fruits of today’s labour: mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Each cell is barely a quarter the width of a human hair but wields remarkable power. MSCs reduce inflammation, repair damaged tissue, and modulate the immune system. They can treat chronic diseases and delay ageing. They may even prevent illness before it begins. But to become a mainstay…

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Imagine drones that map disaster zones today and scout military targets tomorrow. Or seismic activity sensors built for construction that go on to detect submarines underwater. These ideas represent the promise of dual-use technologies that serve both civilian and military purposes. For the first time, the European Commission is explicitly proposing to fund them through programmes such as Horizon Europe. But as we race to embrace dual-use technologies, we face a pivotal choice: continue the old model where military applications drive innovation that civilians later adopt, or turn this paradigm on its head? Technological innovation has long followed a well-trodden…

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Roei Samuel, founder of networking platform Connectd, has been hiring at speed — 14 roles in six months. But he’s begun to wonder if candidates’ answers are genuine, even on video calls. “I can see their eyes shifting across the screen,” he says. “Then they come back with the perfect answer to a question.” The trust gap between employer and jobseeker is widening, and it’s fast becoming one of the trickiest knots in modern hiring. From ChatGPT-polished CVs to full-blown applications submitted by bots, GenAI has hit the job market hard and gone fully mainstream. For a sizable generation of…

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Elon Musk’s Optimus demo at Tesla’s We Robot event made one thing clear: when it comes to humanoids, the spotlight still belongs to the United States. Then there is Asia — with China’s rapid developments and Japan and South Korea’s deep legacy in robotics. Headlines still gravitate toward billion-dollar budgets, rapid hardware iterations, and slick simulation reels.  Behind the noise, though, another development is unfolding in Europe — quieter, but potentially far more consequential. The next chapter of humanoid robotics may be defined not by who moves first or builds the flashiest prototypes, but by who moves with the discipline…

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