The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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| Aviation and car companies are looking to move away from fossil fuels and create carbon-neutral versions of airplanes and vehicles. These will demand safe, energy-dense, lightweight technologies. That is where structural battery composite (SBC) technology comes in.
SBCs represent a monumental leap in materials science - melding the robust mechanical integrity of advanced composites with integrated rechargable energy storage. Instead of being encased in a separate housing SBCs become the housing - serving dual functions. This duality could radically alter the way airplanes, drones, flying cars, electric vehicles, robots and consumer electronics are built, powered and perform.
SBCs are one of the ten emerging technologies in 2025 named in a June report by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with scientific publisher Frontiers. The Innovator is publishing a series of independently reported in-depth articles on the 2025 emerging trends in its FutureScope section, under a collaboration agreement with Frontiers.
In the future, SBCs could enable all rigid vehicle body panels to similarly store energy. Airbus is already experimenting with SBCs for use in aircraft, notes the Forum report.
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- I N T E R V I E W O F T H E W E E K - |
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Who: Professor Katherine Daniell, PhD, is the current Director of the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics in the College of Systems and Society. Trained in engineering, arts and public policy, her work bridges multiple domains including multi-level governance, leadership, artificial intelligence, politics and cultures of innovation, and international science and technology cooperation. She was a speaker at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of The New Champions in Tianjin, China in June.
Topic: Leading through complexity
Quote: "Leading through complexity, with continuous technology and other disruptions, requires different sets of leaders in boardrooms and running organizations. It’s no longer about being the smartest, or most empathetic person in the room, but finding people to lead who can develop collective systems awareness and agility."
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- S T A R T U P O F T H E W E E K - |
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| Arsenale Bioyards aims to transform biomanufacturing with a proprietary end-to-end platform that integrates advanced hardware, AI-driven software, and precision fermentation. The Italian startup, which wants to bridge the gap between lab-scale innovation and industrial-scale production, plans to first target cosmetics and high-end foods with bio-based alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-derived products.
The company, which was recently named a 2025 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer and a winner of a Norrsken Foundation Impact 100 award, says its approach will drastically reduce costs while also significantly shortening the timeline for industrial-scale adoption of sustainable products.
“Our mission is to make biomanufacturing economically viable, bringing down the cost and time by one order of magnitude,” says CEO and co-founder Massimo Portincaso. “We want to do what Henry Bessemer did in 1856 when he reduced the cost of producing steel from 40 pounds per ton to 6 pounds per ton.”
Through process and engineering innovation that slashed the cost Bessemer turned steel into the ubiquitous material of the industrial revolution. Arsenale Bioyards says it believes a 90% cost reduction will trigger a Bessemer moment for precision fermentation. |
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- N U M B E R O F T H E W E E K - |
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| For the first time in 40 years Europe has developed a new Central Processing Unit (CPU), part of a plan to to help ensure the future of Europe’s technological sovereignty, independence, and competitiveness. SiPearl's Rhea1 is being billed as the most complex processor ever designed on the Continent. The French startup's chip - which will compete with similar products made by U.S. chip companies Intel and AMD - is aiming at HPC(3) workloads- its initial target market - and AI inference workloads. It is targeting AI gigafactories being built in Europe as well as enterprise customers. With 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores, Rhea1 is composed of more than 61 billion transistors. Several weeks ago, it was handed off to the world’s leading independent foundry, TSMC in Taïwan, for start of manufacturing. SiPearl said high bandwidth in-package memory and energy-efficiency with an unrivaled byte-per-flop ratio, are key differentiators. Rhea1 will equip the CPU cluster of JUPITER, the first European exascale supercomputer which is operated by Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. It will also be a key component of iconic European collaborative projects such as Aero, OpenCUBE, HIGHER and Riser to promote the emergence of a sovereign European Cloud, and Excellerat, MAX, ODISSEE, and Plasma-PEPSC to run simulation applications in strategic fields such as engineering, materials, dark matter and plasma. SiPearl announced the closing of its €130 million Series A financing round this week.
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| OpenAi is set to release a browser in the coming weeks to rival Google Chrome. It aims to use AI to fundamentally change how consumers browse the Web.
A code of practice designed to help thousands of companies comply with the European Union's landmark AI rules will focus on transparency, copyright, safety and security. The guidance, will apply from Aug. 2 but will only be enforced a year later.
Four people under 21 have been arrested as part of a police investigation into cyberattacks that disrupted the operations of UK retailers Marks & Spencer, opens new tab, the Co-op and Harrods. April's ransomware atttack on M&S forced it to suspend online clothing shopping for nearly seven weeks and cost it about 300 million pounds in operating profit. , |
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The Innovator's Editor-in-Chief Will Be Speaking At The Following Events:
EIC Scaling Club Ambition Forum, Riga, Latvia, September 3 |
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