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More and more devices are becoming part of the ‘smart home’ concept. No longer limited to TVs or tablets, they now also include laundry machines, vacuum cleaners and even refrigerators. New ways to communicate with household appliances connected to the Internet are currently being brought to us by voice assistants. Now all that it takes to turn on the TV or switch between channels is a single voice command. A group of secondary-school students from Poland have decided to try and merge the ‘smart home’ concept with voice controllability. ‘DAREK’, the project they’re working on, is addressed to disabled users to help them move around the house. Using voice control, not only will they be able to open the door or roll the blinds down but even stock up the fridge.

Medicine is one of the fields recording the fastest technological development. Virtual reality unravels new possibilities, enabling the performance of telemedical procedures and advanced training courses without experimenting on actual patients. Physicians specialising in plastic dermatology and clinical dermatology will soon have an opportunity to undergo training using a VR simulator. The equipment is to ensure a high level of realism thanks to double immersion. The market launch of the simulator is planned for 2020.

Inventiveness is not the exclusive domain of start-ups or large corporations - more and more frequently, innovative projects are devised even by secondary school students. They construct equipment and design applications not only for fun – often, they are inspired by higher objectives, such as removing barriers. It is upper-secondary school students who invented such objects as a smart GPS vest which recognises objects in the way of a visually impaired person, a Braille reader with a speech synthesizer, or an inductive loop for people with hearing impairment. An increasing number of brilliant inventions in the service of mankind are introduced by the youngest generations.

The Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Technology is planning to create a technological campus to cluster all Polish cybersecurity specialists in one place. This autumn, the project’s operator is going to be selected. The business accelerator is based on solutions applied in Israel and its role is to reinforce Poland's security and attract investors from the IT sector to our country.

More than 80 percent of investment in the development of Polish start-ups is state-funded. The reason for this is the still underdeveloped private-funds market. The Polish market for high-risk start-ups is slowly catching up with the world in professionalism. About 10-20 percent of venture-capital funds in Poland can already be considered as top-performing funds. However, the percentage of those that aren’t working well is still too high.

“In Poland there is a need for providing financing not only to small start-ups but also to larger projects, which require the involvement of greater sums of money,” said Krzysztof Domarecki, Founder of the Fidiasz investment fund. According to one of the richest Poles and the man behind the success of the Selena group, investors should apply more stringent criteria to the projects they support. One should search for the first Polish unicorn among fintech or e-commerce companies; however, in the longer term, it can also be found in industry or biotechnology.

Piracy is on the decline, but in Poland still nearly half of all the software in use is illegal. Private users use pirated software, as well as music and films from illegal sources, even more frequently, being oblivious of the associated risks. Combating piracy has many forms, which include tightening up the anti-piracy regulations. The examples of imposing greater restrictions show that piracy is growing even more quickly.

Publico24 has created a model for the digital distribution of the press, based on subscriptions, resembling Netflix. Thanks to small transmitters installed in public places, readers with an app installed on their mobile phones can have unlimited access to their favourite papers or individual articles The service is free for readers, and the subscription cost is covered by businesspeople or owners of venues, for whom this is an opportunity to expand their range of services. The company is already working on providing access to the digital press for individual users based on monthly subscriptions.

The ferrofluid flywheel will be used for controlling satellites. The invention by Polish scientists will facilitate research measurements on the near-Earth orbit. The scientists from the AGH are working on the design of a satellite orientation control system which will make it possible, for instance, to take more precise satellite images. The new system will be tested on the KRAKsat satellite, which will be launched into the near-Earth orbit in November 2018. The space industry is considered one of the most promising sectors in the world. In 30 years its private section will reach almost 3 trillion dollars.

A company from Poland might just know how to improve air quality in cities. Green stops are to clean the air we breathe in while waiting for a tram or bus to arrive. The first stops are to be constructed within three months after an investor is found. Each year, air pollution brings death to several million people.

Medicine lags behind the evolution of super-bacteria resistant to many types of drugs. As reported by the WHO, every year these bacteria kill 700,000 people – by 2050, this might be 10 million. Polish scientists want to prevent that by introducing a high-precision diagnostic system to develop complete bacterial resistance profiles.

Globally, there are nearly 5 billion tonnes of plastic waste left unused. A partial solution to the problem could come in the form of a plastic-to-fuel technology. Plastic waste can become a source of fuel as effective as petrol and diesel fuel. A unique technology for its conversion has been developed by a Polish company. As required by a draft EU Directive, large-scale recipients will now have to use biofuels as well, which includes fuels made from plastic.

The earnings of women working in the same positions as men are lower, they are less willing to start their own companies and less often perform managerial roles. This is a global problem faced by the largest world economies. In Poland, despite the fact that managerial positions are in 40% occupied by women, their earnings are much lower than those of men. Together with the spreading popularity and significance of start-ups, it is easier for women to enter the labour market and find their way to sectors which previously were considered to be typically male. This is facilitated by the numerous competitions organised for women’s start-ups and a growing number of women performing the roles of business angels.

Work on the PCR/ONE system is to be completed by 2020 to ensure the fastest detection of bacteria and viruses in the world. The system will be able to carry out an automatic analysis of the genetic material obtained from bacterial and viral pathogens. It will aim in particular at detecting Staphylococcus aureus, which causes, among other things, pneumonia, myocarditis, meningitis and phlebitis.

A number of space missions are planned for 2020s with the aim to explore the Earth's nearest environment. One of them is LOOP. Over the next five years the European Space Agency will be sending the first probe into space to land on the surface of Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars. Polish scientists are also part of the LOOP project. Their task will be to design the lander’s foot which will touch the planetoid's surface.