The sharing economy, popularized by the likes of Airbnb and Uber, has enjoyed remarkably rapid growth over the last five years and looks set to scale new heights over the next decade. Some projections put the sector’s revenues at $335 billion globally by 2025, and the scope for further widening its geographic reach remains huge. But as with any fast-expanding sector, governments, regulators, and industry incumbents are taking greater interest, and the growth pains are becoming louder.

In some ways, 2015 was the year of the gig economy, with the scale and diversity of the freelance workforce not just expanding, but attracting more mainstream notice as well. By our own recent estimates here at Upwork, some 54 million Americans are now freelancers.

Still, that's just the most noticeable trend among several that will reshape the nature of work in the next five years. In fact, shifts in technology, connectivity, and the expectations of both employers and employees are on track to bring about bigger changes than the freelance economy can on its own. Here are four.

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In the two years since we launched College for America (CfA) at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), one question we are often asked is how our competency-based college stacks up against traditional postsecondary programs. Why? CfA has a business-to-business model, meaning, we partner with employers—from Anthem to Goodwill to some of the country’s largest hospitals and healthcare systems—to make college available for workers whose lack of postsecondary credentials is holding back their careers and their companies’ productivity. Students earn their degrees online by completing projects that showcase what they know and can do as well as what they have learned through the curriculum.

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Is a ring the key to a calm mind?

It's easy to feel overwhelmed with all the information coming at us, and the introduction of wearables and other connected devices has done little to help with all the mind-cluttering.

We spoke with Niina Venho, the CEO of Moodmetric, a smart ring that hopes to help users learn how to manage these overload stressors. She explains that the key to a more peaceful life is to track emotional levels, learn to calm the mind, and keep tabs of our emotional past.

In the two years since we launched College for America (CfA) at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), one question we are often asked is how our competency-based college stacks up against traditional postsecondary programs. Why? CfA has a business-to-business model, meaning, we partner with employers—from Anthem to Goodwill to some of the country’s largest hospitals and healthcare systems—to make college available for workers whose lack of postsecondary credentials is holding back their careers and their companies’ productivity. Students earn their degrees online by completing projects that showcase what they know and can do as well as what they have learned through the curriculum.

Digital capabilities, adoption, and usage are evolving at a supercharged pace. While most users scramble just to keep up with the relentless rate of innovation, the sectors, companies, and individuals on the digital frontier continue to push the boundaries of technology use—and to capture disproportionate gains as a result.

Josh Kopelman and his woes pile into the drop top and say what’s up hello to all the First Round portfolio companies.

That’s the premise of this year’s holiday video from Philly’s big-time venture capital firm. The always-silly annual tradition even features a few local startups. See if you can spot them:

Image: Josh Kopelman (right) running through West Philly with his woes. (Screenshot via YouTube)

International development debates of the last four decades have ascribed ever greater importance to intellectual property rights (IPRs). There has also been a significant effort on the part of the U.S. to encourage its trade partners to introduce and enforce patent law modeled after American intellectual property law. Aside from a discussion on the impact of patents on innovation, there are some important consequences of international harmonization regarding the obduracy of the terms of trade agreements.

I’ve had the privilege to invest one way or another in about 20 SaaS companies — half as a VC, half as an individual / advisor / angel.   It’s a pretty solid group and I’ve learned a lot from it.

One experience that confuses a lot of founders is when it really starts to take off — I mean, when it’s really now clearly good — and they still get “No”s from VCs.  They understand why they got “No”s in the early, pre-traction days, and even, in the early-ish days when they had a handful of customers but wasn’t really taking off yet (my favorite time to invest).

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Steve Jobs said that 20 years ago, but it wasn’t until decades later with the rise of the Internet and massive success of companies like Google, Facebook and Uber, that coding truly became “cool”. Today, seemingly everyone wants to learn how to code. The increased interest in obtaining basic engineering skills is great for innovation and the economy. However, as more sales and marketing pros are learning the basics of coding, more engineers need to learn the basics of sales, especially if they are building a startup. Here’s why:

Does management thinking still matter? Is there anything new left to say?

As editor of Harvard Business Review, I ask myself these questions all the time. (I also asked them when I was executive editor of strategy+business from 2005 to 2008.) The challenge is that there just aren't that many truly new ideas in the world. Many of the most compelling management insights remain timeless, from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s turn-of-the-20th-century thinking on what we now call “productivity” to Michael Porter’s five competitive forces that shape strategy, first developed in 1979. And yet, the global output of white papers, blogs, books, and newspaper and magazine articles on management and leadership seems to be at an all-time high. (I blame the explosion of “thought leadership” as a tool for personal and corporate branding, which has generated a lot more noise than signal.)

In many ways, editing a quarterly magazine is a high-wire act. Four times a year, you place your intellectual bets in a highly public manner. Latch onto a trend before it becomes common, and you look like a genius. Run a story a few months after a fad has crested, and you look like a laggard.

Google has joined the ranks of Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars in launching an accelerator, something that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from the technology giant. The program is built on the company’s Launchpad initiative and is a long-term engagement with select startups from around the world to give them the best resources, access to great mentors, and help accelerating their product.

Capital Midwest Fund has raised nearly $30 million from 32 investors for a third venture capital fund, according to a document filed with federal securities regulators.

The Wauwatosa firm is trying to raise as much as $150 million, the filing said. The document was signed by Daniel Einhorn, a principal of the firm. Other principals are Stephen Einhorn, who is Daniel's father, and Alvin Vitangcol.

The short answer is probably not.

This has nothing to do with you or your business.  It has to do with statistics.  The last time anyone counted, the rate of new business incorporation in the U.S. is about 565,000 incorporations per month. The rate of institutional venture capital fundings according to the PWC Money Tree survey was 4,430 in 2014.  Taken together that means institutional venture capital firms financed 0.06% of news businesses last year.

And speaking of numbers, here a simple seven point test to help you decide if you should try to run the gauntlet.

Calling all soon-to-be college students and undergrads with time left to transfer: Your choice of school might affect how much investment capital you’ll get if you start a business. The first-ever University Entrepreneurship Report, published by information services firm CB Insights, found that in the last four years, more Stanford and Harvard alumni got VC and angel money for their companies than students from other top schools.

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In our contemporary offices and always-busy lives, alone time can be difficult to come by. But successful creative thinkers share a need for solitude. They make a practice of turning away from the distractions of daily life to give their minds space to reflect, make new connections, and find meaning.

Great thinkers and leaders throughout history — from Virginia Woolf to Marcel Proust to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak — have lauded the importance of having a metaphorical room of one’s own.

Entrepreneurship is a journey, and it seems like everyone goes through it a little bit differently. Some move through the process fast, stumbling into success in a matter of weeks after executing a brilliant idea. Others move slowly, spending decades of their lives perfecting the art. Some go to college for years getting a master’s level education in business, and others get started before they finish high school.

For years, I operated under the implicit assumption that my labor was worth whatever my employer said it was worth, and I should count myself fortunate that it was not valued less. Perhaps my humility stemmed from a warped sense of solidarity with what I viewed as “real” labor — the forests and factories that had for so long employed my closest kin, until the former were clearcut and the latter were outsourced. I was raised in a world in which dirty, dangerous, exhausting jobs were plentiful, and good ones — like my parents had for most of my young life — were rare stones, to be jealously hoarded. So if my workplace had air conditioning, what right did I have to complain about my inability to pay my electric bill at home?

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“Crowdfunding,” which generally refers to the practice of gathering online contributions for a project from a large group of financial backers, began primarily as a way for artists and other creative types to raise funds for their endeavors, and it has now become a popular way to raise capital in a broad range of fields.