The city that abolished outdoor advertising is having second thoughts. Two decades on, the admen it banished have found their way back in. Walking around São Paulo for the first time, very little looks out of place. Certainly, there are few signs that the city has, for the past t … | Continue reading
Set the bar honestly and it can be cleared with ease. Create unrealistic expectations however, and prepare to see people left disappointed. Edith Piaf allegedly had a simple piece of advice for anyone wanting to become famous. “Use your faults, use your defects,” she is meant to … | Continue reading
Türkiye might not want to join the EU at the moment, but it would certainly like a lot more out of its current relationship with Brussels. During the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, Boris Johnson, who would later become the UK’s prime minister, made great play of the fact that T … | Continue reading
Bulgaria’s fourth-largest city will be a fabulous host of next year’s 71st Eurovision Song Contest. The many naysayers need to get a grip. Be it boycotts over Israel’s participation, smaller countries not being able to afford the hefty entry fee, rows over voting, costume malfunc … | Continue reading
Post-Brexit, millions of young Europeans want an English-taught degree. Central and Eastern Europe’s universities have been slow to compete. In the often fierce but ultimately fatuous argument over just what university degrees are ‘worthy’ (usually restricted to science and maths … | Continue reading
Building infrastructure is a game for giants. Keeping it running, especially the clean-energy grid, is where nimble start-ups now break in. As anyone who has driven over a pothole, struggled to get through airport security, seen trains delayed, or suffered a power outage will not … | Continue reading
Nadya Zhexembayeva began discussing the need for Chief Reinvention Officers in 2015. A decade on, reinvention is more relevant than ever. Nadya Zhexembayeva was 14 when she took a job selling insurance in a country that had never had any. The Soviet Union was coming apart, Almaty … | Continue reading
The Last Word: The hard test for companies is finding out whether or not they’re willing to stop pretending while they still have a choice. This week, I read a post about why start-ups fail that stopped me on two lines: ‘Long before the cash ran out, before the announcement, bef … | Continue reading
The shrinking Danube looks like drought. But draining its wetlands and floodplains left the region far less able to weather what comes next. The exceptionally low water levels of the Danube have caused major disruption across the region, dominating headlines over the past week. V … | Continue reading
Investment funds launch all the time with much fanfare and almost no money behind them. A few pull it off, the rest simply run out of road. I’ve never met Sabrina Carpenter, and I doubt very much that she is even aware of my existence. Declaring, then, that I intend to court and … | Continue reading
Each of the six Western Balkan economies has found its own tech and innovation niche, and together they add up to far more than the parts. Branko Milutinović and a handful of fellow Microsoft alumni founded Nordeus in Belgrade in 2010; their football game, Top Eleven, has since s … | Continue reading
Too many firms say too much about too little and miss the news that counts. In a hollowed-out media, the press release is overdue a rethink. “If you’ve got nothing to say, say nothing.” Not my words, but those of the inimitable Right Honourable Jim Hacker, the fictional prime min … | Continue reading
The AI governance gap in IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report. Two-thirds of the organisations in IBM’s 2026 breach study had no AI governance policy in place. Of that 68 per cent, 35 per cent reported no policy at all and 33 per cent said one remained in development. The find … | Continue reading
Immigrants increasingly back the parties that would have kept them out. The latest arrivals, it seems, are keenest to pull up the ladder. Backed by the hard-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), George Simion (pictured above) topped the first round of Romania’s re-run … | Continue reading
Too many states greet every unicorn as a national triumph. However, the louder a country cheers a start-up, the smaller it starts to sound. There’s no doubt that possessing one of the world’s smartest and most advanced systems of digital public services helped put Estonia, by no … | Continue reading
Cheap solar and a great wall of EU cash turned the bloc’s poorest member into its battery champion. Its neighbours are left buying power in. Few countries have witnessed more political upheaval in recent years than Bulgaria, which held no fewer than eight parliamentary elections … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Bogotá shows that urban resilience works only when housing, transport, water, and public spaces are redesigned together. Last week, I argued that the smartest city begins with shade. The point was not that trees are a substitute for technology, nor that every u … | Continue reading
As online users increasingly put questions to AI, not Google, publishers and businesses built on referral traffic are paying the dearest. Google became a verb in 1998 (mainly through informal use), was named the ‘most useful word’ in 2002, and was officially added to most major … | Continue reading
From catching up to shaping Europe: Five strategic resets, and a 5C Framework for winning the Second Age of Leadership in emerging Europe. For thirty years, Central and Eastern Europe’s defining ambition was to catch up with the West. That project succeeded—and, in succeeding, m … | Continue reading
Romania’s stock market is small, unfashionable and, over the past decade, the best-performing in the world. Almost no Romanians own a share. There is, of course, no such thing as free money, but investors on Romania’s stock exchange might argue that they are currently on to the n … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Urban intelligence gives us the capacity to redesign daily life before a changing, warming climate makes cities unliveable. On July 23, weather stations across Alicante province, where I had a chance to spend a couple of months this spring, recorded dew points clo … | Continue reading
A brutal July sell-off in AI chip shares has caught out many retail investors. Whether prices return to their highs is the loudest question. Mark Zuckerberg did not buy or sell a single chip, yet on July 1 his company set off the sharpest fall in semiconductor shares in years. Bl … | Continue reading
Football needs no reinvention. FIFA, the non-profit that runs it, has decided to put a fifth of its commercial heart up for sale regardless. The three-minute hydration breaks at the recent FIFA World Cup, ostensibly introduced to allow players to take on water during matches but … | Continue reading
A struggling firm reaches for artificial intelligence as it once reached for innovation. Neither saves a business the sums no longer favour. Lip-Bu Tan took charge of Intel in March 2025 and started cutting almost at once. His predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, had shed around 15,000 jo … | Continue reading
Ukrainian drones have choked Kazakhstan’s main oil route through Russia. Romania is most exposed, and Astana is now hedging each bet it has. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev picked his moment. On July 25, seated beside Vladimir Putin at a forum in the Siberian city of Omsk, Kazakhstan’s pre … | Continue reading
A record shortage of truck drivers is now throttling the world’s trade, and this time it will not fix itself when the economy turns. Umberto de Pretto, who runs the International Road Transport Union (IRU), delivered a grim tally this year: 2.9 million lorry-driving jobs standing … | Continue reading
The Last Word: One more client might buy some time, one more initiative may create some new energy, but neither is enough to save a company. Ask IT companies what is holding them back and the answer comes quickly: they need another client. One more contract will ease the pressure … | Continue reading
Europe built its export growth on being the trustworthy alternative in a suspicious world. The question the next 18 months will answer is whether the region’s compliance infrastructure can grow as fast as its order books. The US Justice and Homeland Security departments published … | Continue reading
A wave of costly failures has humbled vertical farming. Its next chapter is now being written underground, and it looks far more affordable. In July Jacob Nickles and his colleagues lowered themselves 1.1 kilometres beneath England’s North Yorkshire moors, past the dark-matter de … | Continue reading
The rush to colonise the heavens says more about the urge to flee Earth than to save it. Its real worth may lie a good deal closer to home. In April four astronauts flew around the Moon and came home, the first humans to travel that far since 1972. While Artemis II did not land, … | Continue reading
Unicorns are badges of honour for many countries, but the success of a start-up ecosystem cannot be measured by mythical creatures alone. Just six months after Cast AI, an automation platform for cloud native and AI workloads, crossed the billion-dollar mark, Lithuania has produc … | Continue reading
The Western Balkans IT sector has turned a difficult history into a key selling point. Resilienceis something clients are increasingly willing to pay for. Three World Bank economists, Sanja Madzarevic-Sujster, Richard Record, and Natasha Rovo, called their 2023 report looking at … | Continue reading
A court has freed Marine Le Pen to seek the French presidency. A victory would let a founding member corrode the European Union from within. A news cycle focused on the renewal of hostilities in the Middle East, the World Cup, the sharp fall in the value of tech stocks (particula … | Continue reading
High-speed rail sells saved minutes. Most passengers would settle for a train that turns up, runs often and meets a second train on arrival. Apostolos Tzitzikostas and Raffaele Fitto stood up in Brussels in November 2025 to launch the European Commission’s high-speed rail action … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Reinvention is the ability to turn learning into a different path. It means changing what you do, and how you create value. I read an interview with Natalia Hatalska, a futurologist, trendwatcher, researcher, and the founder and CEO of infuture.institute in Poland. … | Continue reading
Before any organisation can work in four days what it previously did in five, it needs to answer a question that most companies have never seriously asked: Where does the time actually go? The four-day working week is no longer a fringe idea. Pilots across the United Kingdom, Ice … | Continue reading
Britain promised to ban unpaid internships and has just thought better of it. The evidence says free labour buys almost no advantage at all. Jonathan Reynolds, then Britain’s business secretary, launched a call for evidence on unpaid internships in July 2025, asking how firms use … | Continue reading
A viral video from Paris this week revived the case against tethered caps. The evidence that might settle the argument arrives in July 2027. Volodymyr Zelensky reached for a bottle of water in Paris on July 14, twisted the cap, and kept twisting until it came away in his hand. He … | Continue reading
Brussels is spending billions to route Asian trade around Russia and a war-torn Iran. Much of the cargo still takes the Russian road anyway. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev landed in Brussels on June 23, met Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, and watched the European … | Continue reading
Dubai might dig a new port to skirt the Strait of Hormuz. Too soon, say the sceptics; but how soon is now, when the payoff lands decades on? When Dubai’s Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum informed his advisers in the mid-1970s that he intended to carve a deep-water port out of t … | Continue reading
Warsaw is buying more gold than any central bank on earth, through every price dip. The reasoning holds; copying it is harder than it looks. Adam Glapiński was in a buying mood. On July 9 the governor of the National Bank of Poland (NBP) told reporters that his bank had picked up … | Continue reading
Fewer Europeans are eating out and margins are thin. Their way back runs through theatre, delivery and a smaller, cheaper table than before. Guido Zöllick got his tax cut on the first day of January. The president of DEHOGA, Germany’s hotel and restaurant federation, had lobbied … | Continue reading
The Last Word: Creativity is not the ability to summon ideas out of nowhere, but to recognise a real possibility before it becomes obvious. We tend to imagine creativity as an act of production: a blank page is filled, a concept appears on a whiteboard. Or someone in a meeting sa … | Continue reading
New UNFPA data suggests young people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have not given up on children, but life keeps getting in the way. Young people across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are not turning their backs on family life. They are simply running out of road to get the … | Continue reading
Europe’s investors say the companies are ready and the capital is not. Europe has the companies. What it still lacks, investors gathered in Tallinn said in May, is homegrown capital willing to fund them at scale. That assessment came from the limited partners and fund managers wh … | Continue reading
Brussels is pouring billions into digitising Europe’s water networks, promising fewer leaks and cleaner data, even as hackers test them too. In Bytom, a mining town in southern Poland, engineers from Emitel, a broadcasting-infrastructure firm better known for television transmitt … | Continue reading
Digital government can remove the official who demands a bribe, but never the ministers who dismantle the watchdogs that might catch them. On March 19 Kyrylo Kryvolap and his colleagues at Civitta, a consultancy, published a study that had taken most of a year to complete. Commis … | Continue reading
Some ‘sovereigntists’ in the EU dream of an alternative to Brussels, but even Russia admits that BRICS cannot yet provide what they want. Aleksandar Vulin, Serbia’s then deputy prime minister, told TASS in October 2024 that citizens would have to choose, within two or three years … | Continue reading