A strange thing happened on the way to the leisure society.

It was once widely anticipated that the process which saw the standard working week fall from 60 to 40 hours in wealthy nations over the first half of the 20th century would continue.

As we now know, this did not happen. The official working week has not fallen significantly in several decades. Average working hours per household have increased. The effect is that many feel that life is now less leisured than in the past.

To those who have been following the space, it’s no surprise that 2018 has been a record year for venture capital investing in healthcare. With $28.8 billion raised through the end of November (and big deals like the $400 million Series C raised by Relay Therapeutics last week) startups in the sector have raised more money this year than any year before in the last 10 years that VC funding database Pitchbook has tracked investments in the space.

The year 2018 represented a pivotal point in the development of an innovation ecosystem in the heart of New Jersey as Princeton University established significant new collaborations with pioneering members of industry — all with the aim of bolstering the resources available to researchers and scientists in their quest to make new discoveries in the service of society.

As President Christopher L. Eisgruber noted in July, standing alongside New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy at Princeton Innovation Center BioLabs, “We believe that these cross-sector partnerships will foster a vibrant innovation ecosystem with the potential to generate transformative ideas, benefit the regional economy and attract top talent — outcomes that will make central New Jersey an increasingly attractive place for all who live, learn and work here.”

Image: https://www.princeton.edu

The hype may have died down a little, but 3D printing was still creating waves in manufacturing in 2018. On the important-but-boring side, manufacturing companies are using the tech for things like weight reduction and cost savings. More interestingly, architects carried out a number of experiments that pushed the artistic limits of what 3D printing can do.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

The holiday season is an especially challenging time for organizations that, at a minimum, seek to maintain status-quo levels of productivity. But as we all know, extra end-of-year obligations — from reviews to financial reporting to holiday festivities — eat into the final weeks of the year and often leave employees limping toward the finish line of a holiday break.

Competitiveness was one of Canada’s buzz words of 2018 — and not for good reason.

The past year saw a growing chorus of voices from the business community sounding the alarm on Canada’s eroding competitiveness. Pressure mounted on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to respond to the Trump administration’s cut to U.S. corporate tax rates, while warnings about regulatory uncertainty and foreign investment outflows grew louder.

It’s the use of the latest approaches to solve ancient social problems. It is entrepreneurship that involves the developing, funding and implementing of solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues.

So you identify the social problems and attain a social change by implementing the entrepreneurial principles, processes and operations to find a solution. The organisation that undertakes these ideas may be big or small.

Advancing particle physics demands we build bigger and badder particle accelerators, but every time the conversation about the next ultra-mega-super collider comes up some stick in the mud announces that it could kill us and the whole universe… But will it?

You probably fall into one or two camps on this subject. Either you’re like me and you think that smashing some protons into each other head on at near light speed is just going to create some pretty pictures and obliterated protons, or you think it’ll create some pretty pictures and obliterate the Earth.

On one hand, year-on-year improvements are what makes companies great; on the other, firms can’t control many of the factors that dictate whether, say, revenue rises or not. The efforts of one person (or even one company) can’t counter 2019’s industry trends or the broader overall economic picture.

It's difficult to predict which methods will connect with consumers most effectively in the ever-changing landscape of marketing. Just when marketers believe they understand their audience, a new technology, new behavior or even an entirely new audience alters everything.

That said, it’s practical to reflect on the past year’s patterns and pay attention to growing trends that will influence next year’s success. Here are 10 marketing trends you would be wise to keep your eye on going into 2019.

As we say goodbye to 2018, it’s time to survey our year’s accomplishments. If you are like many of us, you started the year with an unshakable commitment to your new year’s resolutions and ways to crush them. But looking back at the past year, you’re probably asking yourself what went wrong.

Currently there is no professional certification, or standardized testing, as there is for accountants and lawyers, to see if you are ready to tackle the rigors of starting a new business. In fact, some pundits argue that the best entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, actually dropped out of school early to start their businesses, implying a negative relationship to training.

In the real estate tech industry, the rich are getting richer. Much richer.

WeWork led our annual ranking of the largest venture capital funding rounds for the second straight year, thanks to a $3 billion investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Opendoor, which came in fourth, made the top four for the second time since 2016. And Compass, which placed fifth, has made the top five each year since 2016.

That the same companies keep raising the biggest funding rounds year after year is indicative of a bigger trend: more and more venture capital goes to fewer and fewer companies. And while the big players are drowning in cash, many smaller startups are struggling to survive amid a more hostile funding environment.

Image: https://therealdeal.com

Most digital strategies don’t reflect how digital is changing economic fundamentals, industry dynamics, or what it means to compete. Companies should watch out for five pitfalls.

The processing power of today’s smartphones are several thousand times greater than that of the computers that landed a man on the moon in 1969. These devices connect the majority of the human population, and they’re only ten years old.

If you had an idea for a medical device, would you know where to go at work to get help commercializing or deploying it in your organization? Most of the time, based on my experience, the answer is no.

Giffford Pinchot, who originated the term “intrapreneur”, has suggested that you rate your organization in several domains to see whether your innovation future looks bright or bleek. The elements of your organization’s innovation readiness include:

No matter how generally motivated you are, all of us have some tasks that we don’t want to do. Maybe we find them boring, pointless, draining, time consuming, annoying, or anxiety producing. So how do you get moving in these types of situations?

2018 was a big year for technology in the Pittsburgh area, here are the five biggest story lines of the year:

Uber’s departure and return to Pittsburgh roads

In the aftermath of a fatal accident involving an Uber autonomous vehicle last March in Arizona, Uber Advanced Technologies Group halted the testing of its autonomous vehicles on Pittsburgh public roads. In early July, Uber laid off about 100 autonomous vehicle operators, with the large majority in Pittsburgh, and announced it would hire about 55 people for its new, higher-qualification mission specialist position.

Image: The outside of an Uber autonomous vehicle. LIAN BUNNY - https://www.bizjournals.com

Throughout 2018, TIME’s photo editors set aside images that, amid a relentless news cycle, made us pause. By November, we had a stockpile of a few thousand pictures, culled down from the millions we had collectively seen since January. Over the course of a few weeks, and after adding in even more, we whittled that group down to 100 images that defined the year. In the days since, we knocked it down to 10 — an unranked selection that appears below.

In his classic 1923 essay, "Intelligence as the Tests Test It", Edwin Boring wrote "Intelligence is what the tests test." Almost a century of research later, we know that this definition is far too narrow. As long as a test is sufficiently cognitively complex and taps into enough diverse content, you can get a rough snapshot of a person's general cognitive ability-- and general cognitive ability predicts a wide range of important outcomes in life, including academic achievement, occupational performance, health, and longevity.

An analysis of more than 400 use cases across 19 industries and nine business functions highlights the broad use and significant economic potential of advanced AI techniques.

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a transformational technology of our digital age—and its practical application throughout the economy is growing apace. For this briefing, Notes from the AI frontier: Insights from hundreds of use cases (PDF–446KB), we mapped both traditional analytics and newer “deep learning” techniques and the problems they can solve to more than 400 specific use cases in companies and organizations.