Bags made out of fungi. Concrete walls lined with moss. An alternative to milk fat that makes plant-based protein taste creamy. We might just start hearing more about these innovations in 2022, says Maurits Burgering, program director at the Thematic Technology Transfer Program – Circular Technology (TTT-CT). One of the TTT programs was initiated by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency.

Image: https://innovationorigins.com

Each year Radical Innovation invites bold thinkers to submit groundbreaking innovations that will change and enhance the future of the travel and hospitality industries.

For the second year in a row, Radical Innovation was a virtual event, as necessitated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the 2021 contest attracted an unprecedented array of talent from around the world, as hundreds of submissions were considered from more than 55 countries.

Image: https://www.myinspiredesign.com

Thu, December 30, 2021, 11:00 AM·2 min read Attendees can demo the solution at Booth#9937

SAN MATEO, Calif., Dec. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DeepBrain AI's video synthesis solutions, a CES 2022 Innovation Awards Winner, leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence to quickly create lifelike human-based AI avatars that inform, solve and guide users through thousands of possible scenarios and real time interactions. Our AI avatars are uniquely developed from real people, using their real voices, physical appearances, gestures and regional dialects.

2021 was a strange and difficult year, a pandemic sequel which saw the Covid virus mutate and bring with it more changes to the world as we knew it. Boston's innovators found ways to persevere through that challenge, pivot themselves to succeed despite it, and in some cases make our new world a better place. Here were five of the biggest innovation stories reported by BostInno this past year.

Image: Motif scientists in conversation. Motif FoodWorks

I’m often surprised when you as an aspiring entrepreneur, looking for investors, tell me your solution is so innovative that you don’t have to worry about differentiating it from competitors, and customers will flock to it without a real marketing campaign. Unfortunately, what I see in this Internet age is information overload, and new product differentiation is harder than ever before.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

TuSimple claims it successfully completed an 80-mile nighttime run on Interstate 10 in Arizona with no driver in the cab — the first to reach the goal in the U.S. among many competitors working on robot-driven trucks.

San Diego-based TuSimple (NASDAQ: TSP) kept secret the timing of the first driverless pilot, announcing Wednesday that the upfitted Class 8 truck left a large rail yard in Tucson, Arizona, on Dec. 22 and covered surface streets and highways for an hour and 20 minutes before safely arriving at a high-volume distribution center in the Phoenix metro area. 

Image: TuSimple completed an 80-mile trip from Tucson, Arizona, to Phoenix on Dec. 22 without any human in the cab., the first full autonomous run in the U.S. (Photo: TuSimple)

As we bid 2021 farewell (and, just like 2020, good riddance), we know we’ll have at least one hangover into 2022: The global pandemic, now a toddler at nearly 2 years old.

And, like most rambunctious 2-year-olds, it’s acting up, and we need to do something about it. When the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, make sure it’s only the one in Times Square, and not that too-familiar COVID-19 orb with its menacing spikes of protein.

Image: https://hartfordhealthcare.org

Now is the time to start making plans for celebrating the end of 2021. For most people, this year was not quite as bad as 2020, when we were all blindsided by the pandemic and a wave of new cyberattacks. But then again, being better than 2020 is a pretty low bar. I think most of us are hopeful (once again) that the New Year will be a better one for everybody.

It was a crowded year for companies entering public markets, with 980 businesses going public in 2021—more than double the number that did so in 2020. The most successful of these debuts shine a light on the strengths of the global economy.

Asian businesses remain on the rise, all while combating a rocky regulatory environment. Companies that focus on delivering products to consumers at ever growing speeds continue to attract the dollars of global investors. Businesses that develop technologies to combat the climate crisis—like electric vehicles and renewable energy—and to capture the attention of consumers—like social media—have captivated global markets.

Investment into biotech and health care boomed during the pandemic as thousands of venture capital firms turned their attention to breakthrough artificial intelligence, cancer-detection technology, mental health treatments, digital doctor visits, diagnostics and more. 

But two of those investment firms have emerged as major leaders, not only in the number of biotech funding rounds led, but also in overall dollars invested into the industry. Boston-based RA Capital Management and New York-based OrbiMed ranked first and second, respectively, on the two lists compiled using Crunchbase data. 

Image: https://news.crunchbase.com

Sustainability has become even more important over the last few years, with many growing organisations having set their own targets to reduce carbon emissions because it is the ethical thing to do. 

SAP has a Chasing Zero strategy to create a sustainable future through zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality. SAP is set to achieve carbon neutrality by 2023, two years ahead of its original schedule.

Decision makers from 197 countries are negotiating a deal at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, United Kingdom. So far, the US and the EU have announced a global partnership to reduce methane gas emissions by 2030. There are more than 40 nations that are committed to moving away from coal. Sadly, the world's biggest users, like China and the US, haven't signed up for this.

Doha: Transforming businesses to the next level with Extended Reality (XR) which includes Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR) and other immersive technologies that merge the physical and virtual worlds, is a priority in the region for an advanced knowledge-based economy. It is imperative to empower digital innovation and transform the way people work and interact with the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through end-to-end digital transformation of their value chain, said an official during a virtual event.

We have always been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, since, in addition to giving us enough energy to start our day, it helps our brain to function better.

Dr. Randall Wright, a neurologist at Houston Methodist Hospital , explains that breakfast is the time of day when we have the opportunity to fill our bodies with foods that give us a high-octane boost, providing energy, cognition and clarity to the brain for hours.

In the early 1990s the auto industry unveiled an innovation in car manufacturing: the airbag . By October 2001, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that airbags had saved more than 7,500 lives. But these first airbags also killed 195 people during this period, mostly children and women under 1.70 meters. The force of the airbag impact on small bodies was brutal and until then this data was unknown.

When you start a business, you’re opening yourself up to challenges you never dreamed possible before. And it’s a lot more than monitoring inventory and launching marketing and making sure paperwork gets done.

Somewhere along the way, very involved sales or delivery or collections issues will arise. Or you could be faced with the biggest problem an entrepreneur has to solve, a dispute between people.

Apple (AAPL) is the only real potential rival to Tesla's (TSLA) autonomous tech deployment potential.

Tesla has built a second-to-none system for autonomous driving through the hundreds of thousands of vehicles they have out there on the road analyzing and gathering information in a human-style collection of data system, and as a result I believe that they are miles ahead of any potential competition in the area by Alphabet's Google's Waymo (GOOG) (GOOGL) and the likes.

As 2021 draws to a close, MobiHealthNews consults experts across the EMEA region to find out their vision for the year ahead in digital health.

Filippo Falaschi, senior consultant, digital health and med tech investment management firm Spex Capital

There’s no doubt the pandemic served as a major catalyst in the development and adoption of digital health technologies at speed and scale. Investment figures and deal counts in 2021 have dwarfed those from previous years and, with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.5%, the industry is now projected to reach nearly $650 billion (€574.2) by 2026. While the question of how and when COVID-19 will finally be overcome remains, what is certain is that growing investment interest in health tech will continue at full speed not just in 2022, but for the remainder of the decade and beyond. 

Depending on the breaks, 2022 could be a very eventful year for new tech products and even whole new tech categories. From gaming to electric vehicles to mixed reality wearables, next year’s releases could even begin a shift in the way we view tech’s role in personal and business life.

I’ve taken my best shot at rounding up the most significant and anticipated of those releases. It’s admittedly a mixed bag. Some products have already been announced, and—barring disaster—will be delivered next year. Others are still in the rumor stage, but have a reasonable shot of making it to market. Others are straight-up longshots. But some segment of them will indeed show up.

Image: Rivian, Panic, Rawpixel (watch, phone, and VR)

After a rare pandemic-related dip in 2020, global carbon emissions bounced back with a vengeance. Climate disasters seemed relentless over the summer, from flooding in Western Europe and China to wildfires in Siberia and the American West. And although world leaders made some headway at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, their new emission-reduction commitments aren’t nearly enough to get the world back on track.

“Big things have small beginnings.” That line from Lawrence of Arabia may be a good way of characterizing the coming year in tech. Tech that will be very important to the future will begin graduating from R&D labs and enter the marketplace. More self-driving automobiles will traverse the roadways. Augmented reality glasses may even start showing up in public. The U.S. government is likely to begin regulating Big Tech in such areas as antitrust and privacy. The industry will continue talking about, and in some cases even building for, the metaverse. And some of the foundational technologies underpinning Web3 may begin to take hold.