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BMW is making costly car wraps a thing of the past and turning your vehicle into a giant mood ring.

Courtesy of BMW

On Thursday at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show, the luxury car brand unveiled its new i Vision Dee concept car, a first-of-its-kind vehicle that can change color, display graphics, and even respond to human emotions, through what the company says is “emotionally intelligent” technology and a unique material called E Ink, commonly found in e-readers.

According to a press release from BMW, the i Vision Dee, which stands for “Digital Emotional Experience,” can display 32 colors inside and outside of the vehicle through 240 individual E Ink panels spanning the body of the entire vessel, including the wheels.

The car’s design allows for the graphics and multimedia to be displayed seamlessly throughout the body’s E Ink panels. It also features graphics of nine different facial expressions that can appear on the car’s grille and depict various emotions like amazement and joy.

The car uses sensors to interact with its environment, like opening the door for someone as they approach the car, and the built-in interactive technology reacts to human emotions in order to anticipate the driver’s needs with navigation and music suggestions.

“We are showcasing what is possible when hardware and software merge,” said BMW Group chairman of the Board of Management, Oliver Zipse, in a keynote speech per a press release from the brand. “In this way, we are able to exploit the full potential of digitalization to transform the car into an intelligent companion.”

Although the i Vision Dee is the first of its kind to offer consumers a rainbow of color options, BMW first debuted its color-changing technology with BMW iX Flow featuring E Ink at CES 2022, however, the model could only change to various shades of gray.

Image credit: Courtesy of BMW

The design also includes a Head-Up-Display, which shows information to the driver in their line of sight, and uses a “Mix Reality Slider” that forgoes a traditional permanent dashboard and instead displays a projection interactable through surface sensors you control with a swipe of your finger.

While BMW has yet to share when these color-changing cars will be on the market, they do plan to put the windshield and dashboard features into production by 2025.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Image Credit: Bobby Fisher; Hair & Makeup: Imogen Marrone; Clothing: Dim Mak Collection

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Most people heard noise. Steve Aoki heard music.

It was just, in his words, “intentionally abrasive” music.

What’s the difference between noise and intentionally abrasive? This was back in the 1990s, when Steve Aoki was a kid growing up in the California punk and hardcore music scene. Bands were playing loud, cacophonous stuff. His parents called it “devil’s music.” But Aoki was intrigued, because although this music turned most people off, it also drew a community together. It wasn’t just garbage; it was a barrier to entry, and an appealing puzzle. “It didn’t fit with the world, and that was what spoke to me,” Aoki says. “You have to climb through the noise to find the gem.”

In one way or another, that mindset has guided Aoki through a singular career. He is ever curious about the opportunity that others are overlooking, because it might seem too small or weird or noisy. Then, he says, he “brings that noise out from the corner and into the masses, and builds a community around it.”

He is, for example, among the world’s most famous DJs — the rare artist to transcend the club scene and achieve mainstream awareness. But he’s also a savvy entrepreneur who absorbed brand-building lessons from his father, the founder of the successful restaurant chain Benihana. Aoki is a celebrated music producer, creator of the record label Dim Mak, as well as a clothing line called Dim Mak Collection that has partnered with the likes of Adult Swim and DC Comics — and he was recently named the “chief music officer” of Orangetheory Fitness (which means he sets the tone for the company’s workout classes worldwide).

Related: Web3 Is About More Than Tech, Thanks to Its Inclusivity

Lately, he has also thrown himself headfirst into the world of Web3, and has become one of its most vocal, prominent, and successful advocates. Because these days, if you want to talk about the future of business and technology, there is no better synopsis of Web3 than “you have to climb through the noise to find the gem.”

Surely you’ve heard of Web3 — but it is so new, and often so abstract, that the average entrepreneur may puzzle over how (or if) it’s actually going to be useful. So let’s back up to explain.

The current internet is known as “Web2,” and is defined by intermediaries: You buy things through Amazon, you reach others through TikTok. If you play the game Fortnite, you can buy a weapon for your character in the game, but you only “own” that weapon inside the game’s universe. It cannot be moved somewhere else, and Epic, the maker of Fortnite, could make it disappear at any time. Web3 promises something different: A universe where everyone who surfs the web can own their digital assets, where individuals (and companies) can easily connect and exchange things with each other without intermediaries, and where every transaction is trackable.

“Web3 is all based on the idea that when we go in, we own it,” Aoki says. “Who’s going to want to play in a world where they don’t own stuff?”

That sounds interesting, but what does it practically mean? Admittedly, this depends on who you ask.

Critics will say we are very, very far away from making Web3 useful to the average business. Indeed, Web3 doesn’t really even exist yet. The bones are there, thanks to existing blockchain technology (more on that later), but the refined visual layer we’re used to in Web2 (i.e., websites to surf and things consumers can engage with) has yet to arrive and make it a fully operable ecosystem. For now, it’s mostly a lot of big talk and splashy projects — something a celebrity like Aoki can capitalize on, but most people can’t.

But if Web3’s many evangelists (Aoki included) are correct, we are only seeing the beginning — where, yes, it may seem ridiculous that someone can sell ownership of a wacky piece of digital art called a non-fungible token (NFT) for millions of dollars (and Aoki’s sold many pricey NFTs), but the future won’t just be a playground for the most famous entrepreneurs. Instead, Web3 is set to become an increasingly accessible tool. It’s a trajectory that most new technology follows. Before the bicycle was the bicycle, for example, it was the “dandy horse,” an expensive plaything exclusively for the rich. Then the technology behind its manufacturing improved, the cost went down, and anyone could use it to ride to work.

What will Web3-for-everyone look like? Because we cannot actually see Web3 in its future form, we will instead work with the best of what we’ve got — Steve Aoki — and use his insights to draw a line to the average entrepreneur.

Related: Time to Reinvent: 5 Tips for Boosting Creativity and Innovation

This is Aoki’s Web3 ecosystem in a nutshell: His first NFT collection, Dream Catcher, generated $4.4 million when it was released in March 2021 and set a record on Nifty Gateway, the NFT auction site where it debuted, with a piece selling for $888,000. He’s since parlayed his own IP — like a comic book collaboration — into more fast-selling NFT collections. He’s teamed up with Sotheby’s and Lamborghini on Web3 projects and has become a brand ambassador for sports betting company DraftKing’s Web3 endeavors. He’s folded much of this work into his own personal Web3 ecosystem, A0K1VERSE, to which members hold a “Passport” that gains them access to special events, opportunities, and products curated by Aoki. He’s done all this (and more) in less than two years.

What does that have to do with you? Aoki has ideas. So does his longtime manager, Matt Colon. And so does Chris Liquin, senior vice president of strategy at Vayner3, a Web3 consulting firm belonging to entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk (who isn’t known to be involved in Aoki’s Web3 pursuits but is working daily with entrepreneurs as they find opportunity in this space). Here, all three of them weigh in on where the average entrepreneur can uncover Web3’s most immediate value.

Image Credit: Bobby Fisher

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Lesson 1: Enter with caution.

If you wanted to build a website in the 1990s, you often needed to know some HTML. Now, of course, you don’t — services like Squarespace and Wix offer a beautiful, simple layer between you and a website’s underlying code. You can think of today’s Web3 space as the ’90s all over again: To engage, you need to know some details.

Aoki admits he only “understands the broad strokes” of this world, like the basics of what a blockchain network is. (That’s the core technology that fuels Web3; it’s often described as a public ledger, where every transaction is permanently recorded and available for everyone to see.) While he focuses on the tangible human connections that Web3 can create — things like community-and loyalty-building, which we’ll discuss later — he relies on his manager Colon to assess the technical details.

Related: Here’s a Beginner’s Guide to Crypto, NFTs, and the Metaverse

That’s wise, says Vayner3’s Liquin. Because learning which marketplaces and Web3 platforms make the most sense for your business requires seeking out both information and expertise. “Doing the research is number one,” Liquin says. “Every blockchain or tech partner will pitch you a new, cool solution, and there’s just so much noise in this space.” If you want to engage, you need enough basic knowledge to filter that noise.

Where to start? Liquin recommends Twitter, which is where Web3 aficionados converge most readily to discuss the ecosystem. You can follow and join their conversations. Aoki recommends partnering with someone who’s immersed in it, which, he cautions, may not be someone with traditional tech or business world bona fides. The ideal Web3 resume might look more like a list of blockchain conferences attended and Web3 projects contributed to than a series of impressive companies someone has worked for. “A 21-year-old kid might be way more advanced,” Aoki says, than someone who’s spent 20 years at Web2 powerhouses like Meta and Google. “I’d be way more comfortable with this kid that’s hungry for this information,” he says, than the longtime tech veteran.

If that’s too much investment, you can join any number of entry-level communities that are designed to help. Media entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg hosts one called HUG. Investor Brit Morin has another called BFF.

Image Credit: Bobby Fisher

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Lesson 2: It’s all about “smart contracts.”

After learning the Web3 basics from trusted developer partners, Aoki dove in headfirst. In March 2021, he minted his very first collection of NFTs — just as many other celebrities have done, with reportedly staggering profits. Aoki’s team claims they earned $3.3 million in the first five minutes of release. (Although, even in a world dedicated to transparency, NFT profits are hard to confirm: Many people have been accused of secretly buying their own NFTs, or coordinating with others to buy NFTs, as a means of driving up the cost and claiming large profits — which is not to say Aoki did any of that.)

The NFT marketplace was on fire in 2021 and has significantly cooled since. Critics say it was a bubble, and woe to those who spent millions on digital art that will one day be worthless. But Web3 experts say that’s fine, because NFTs as we know them were never the point. They were only the most visible usage of the technology that powers the NFTs, which has much wider and more practical potential uses.

Those things are called “smart contracts.”

These contracts store the ownership history of a digital item, signify its uniqueness, and allow owners to set a price for that item and sell it to someone else. Most importantly, these contracts can be programmed to automatically carry out actions given certain inputs, and those actions are all recorded and viewable on the blockchain.

What does that mean? For NFT sales, they enable the transfer of ownership: Once the buyer sends the right amount of cryptocurrency to the seller, the transaction takes place and is forever viewable for others to see.

Related: Technology Is Already Disrupting Our Lives. What Will the Future Look Like?

But smart contracts can do much more than facilitate sales, which is why many startups are currently exploring how to turn them into a standard business tool. For instance, smart contracts could provide a level of transparency for businesses hoping to inspire trust among consumers. Say a company wants to crowdfund for a specific aspect of its business, or donate profits to a charitable organization. These are both important ways to engage a community — users like being a part of the creation of new products, and are more apt to support businesses that share their values and meaningfully act on them. But right now, consumers must take a business at its word. Was the money invested properly? Was it donated as promised? Nobody knows…but a smart contract can solve that.

“The community can all agree that, yes, this mission has been fulfilled, or yes, these funds have gone to a charitable cause we approve,” says Liquin, “and then the money is released. These smart contracts can hold that money in a kind of escrow, and then deploy it towards those causes.”

Smart contracts can also offer transparency in other areas of consumer concern, like supply chains. These days, consumers are attuned to the sustainability of companies’ practices, and companies can use smart contracts to record and make public their supplies’ origins and shipping journeys. “Smart contracts can demonstrate the authenticity of luxury goods, or the clean, ethical sourcing of raw materials through a full supply chain into the final product,” Liquin says.

They can even alert business owners when something goes wrong in the shipping process, like in the case of a smart contract coded to detect if the temperature of a crate filled with perishable items gets too high or too low. If something’s wrong, the contract might ensure the business saves its money. Or, they could improve employee loyalty at a company: Smart contracts can be programmed to trigger bonus payments to employees who meet certain goals, or to increase transparency about salaries across large sets of workers. Yes, these things can all be done manually now, but Web3 evangelists argue that smart contracts make things more efficient and trustworthy.

Image Credit: Bobby Fisher

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Lesson 3: The secondary market awaits!

Artists have a problem: They often cannot sell their work directly to consumers. It’s just too difficult, which is why art galleries and record labels exist — helping facilitate distribution and sales, and then taking a cut of the profits. If an artist makes something unique, they might be able to sell it to a fan once…but if it becomes extremely valuable, and the item gets resold for a profit, the original artist never profits again.

For this reason, Web3 has been especially appealing to artists like Aoki. It gives them more control over what is sold, and more ways to profit off of what is resold.

Aoki experimented with this in 2021, when he became an equity partner and cofounder in a company called MetaZoo. It makes trading cards, Pokémon-style, that feature mythical creatures, which immediately excited Aoki. “It literally was an instantaneous — ‘Wow, this is a goldmine IP,'” he says. In April, according to Aoki and his team, MetaZoo sold more than $2 million worth of skateboard decks with its logo on them in just 14 minutes. Aoki even sold MetaZoo cards with CDs of his album, HiROQUEST: Genesis, in September, precipitating the sale of more than 27,000 CDs.

Related: If You Have No Clue What Web3 Is, You’re Not Alone. Here’s a Breakdown of the Future of the Internet.

No one gets that excited about CDs these days, but Aoki knows why people see value in them: “The reason why people are obsessed with getting these products, like the skateboard decks, is that they’re selling for like $60 when we launched it, and they’re selling on the secondary market for $200, $300,” Aoki says. “In the last 16 months, we’ve already grossed over $50 million in revenue. It’s my Beats by Dre.”

Most entrepreneurs can’t rely on their personal cachet to sell out a “Beats by Dre”-level NFT collection, of course. But Web3 smart contracts, which can be preprogrammed to give royalties to whoever originally created an asset, could open a world of new possibilities. That’s because these NFTs can be paired with things that customers might want to resell — whether that’s a car or a comic book.

They can also be paired to things that already have real-world value, but that just weren’t as easy to execute before. For example, consider Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Dinner Deer” NFT. It is an amateurish digital doodle that seems worthless until you read what its ownership entails: There are 10 Dinner Deers, and everyone who owns one can join a 90-minute dinner with Vaynerchuk. He’s hosting one every year for three years. The NFT, therefore, is a ticket to sit down with one of the most in-demand entrepreneurs in the world — something that has inherent value, regardless of Web3. But the NFT element makes it easy for owners to resell the ticket, which will go up and down in value.

Image Credit: Ethan Miller | Getty Images

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Lesson 4: Build a community.

Selling products is one thing — but as any entrepreneur knows, and as Aoki has learned in the music world, community is everything. That’s why, after his success with the MetaZoo NFTs, Aoki started thinking: “We already have this substantial, healthy secondary community that supports the ecosystem of MetaZoo,” Aoki says. So how could he bring them together?

His answer: We’re going to create tokens that give them early access to products. The tokens, which are a kind of digital currency, would be the rewards for people’s loyalty: They could collect them, trade them, and then spend them on special benefits. Aoki says it worked; not only did future product releases sell out quickly, but he could see these collectors talking and trading among themselves, as they bonded into an online community of fans.

When evangelists talk about the power of Web3 technology, this is a theme they always come back to: It facilitates community. Of course, you don’t need Web3 to build a community — there are endless ways to do that already. So what’s better about Web3?

Advocates often describe a kind of technologically-backed psychology: Sure, someone could be part of some Facebook group now, but that membership doesn’t have tangible value. When people have something like a digital token, and that token can be resold, it gives people a feeling of ownership. It’s like owning company stock — except that stock also gains them access to special company events. That, in turn, makes them feel like they’re part of a special club.

These things all exist and could be done using current platforms, but Web3 combines a lot of these functions in one simple piece of technology. Plus, today’s Web3 early adopters are really into interacting with others who are part of their communities, often using communication tools like Discord to stay in regular contact. People like Aoki are betting that, as more people engage in Web3, they’ll become similarly engaged.

Related: Why an Entrepreneur’s Ability to Innovate Will Make (or Break) Future Success

That’s why Aoki wanted to focus on building a community that was truly his. So in February 2022, he launched what he calls A0K1VERSE. Futuristic as it sounds, you don’t need to enter some virtual space to find it: People can just go to the website a0k1verse.xyz. (Dot-xyz has become the Web3 community’s extension of choice; many other companies in the space also use it.) There, they can buy a “Passport” that gains them access to what is essentially a Web3-enabled fan club full of perks. The way he sees it, A0K1VERSE Passport holders “aren’t fans. They’re members in our group that are really interested in the whole network of the IP, or the company, Steve Aoki.”

Just like any tech build today, Web3 projects are made with third-party partnerships. In Aoki’s case, a company called Manifold powers the Passport, and his virtual events for Passport-holders are hosted in metaverse platforms like The Sandbox. These companies are part of an ecosystem of third-party Web3 programs that are rising to work with brands — not just celebrities.

“If you’re building a product, any entrepreneur knows that you need as much customer feedback as possible,” Liquin says. “These programs could let you give access — not to yourself as the entrepreneur — but to new features that you’re considering rolling out.” One of the more high-profile ones, for example, is a company called Try Your Best, founded by former Outdoor Voices leader Ty Haney. Its pitch to consumers: “Become a member to cocreate with the brands you love.” In short, the company creates spaces for a brand’s fans to meet, engage, earn tokens, and share feedback.

“As that brand grows, as those products improve, and as you as a user keep using those products, you now have this vested stake,” Liquin says. “It’s not ownership, or a security, but it is an asset that links you directly to this company and their goals. That alignment of incentives is really powerful for loyalty.”

Image Credit: Bobby Fisher

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Lesson 5: Embrace loyalty programs and utility tokens.

Why would someone keep coming back to the A0K1VERSE? Aoki’s answer: Because the more they engage (and spend), the more access they get via “Credits,” of which there are 25,000 total in supply — either purchasable by fans or given away through various promotions. Aoki sent Credits to people who’d purchased an NFT from him prior to A0K1VERSE. He also built bridges to other NFT communities — like collectors of NFTs by the DJ 3LAU, who Aoki has worked with on multiple projects — so that those fans could enjoy status in his world too.

Aoki sells the remaining Credits for $130, although the price fluctuates, same as any digital asset. One credit gets you things like previews of his unreleased music and access to his exclusive A0K1VERSE chatroom. Four credits include perks like “guestlist privileges on select Steve Aoki live performances.” And the top rank, at 1,024 credits, allows you to record a song with Aoki himself. So far a few people have reached that level, but no songs have been recorded…yet.

Related: 6 Ways to Leverage Technology to Rock Your Digital Relevance

In addition to being a community, Aoki sees all this as a richly enabled loyalty program — which is another thing Web3 evangelists often tout. This technology, they say, makes loyalty programs richer and more interesting.

Of course, just like before, there are plenty of non-Web3 loyalty options today: Companies like Belly facilitate them for small businesses, and large businesses from Starbucks to Hilton built and manage their own. But a crop of Web3 startups claims that “the future of memberships will be powered by NFTs,” as the website for the loyalty company Hang says. (Hang, which announced a $16 million Series A round this year, has already run programs for big brands including Budweiser and Pinkberry.) They argue that Web3-based assets like NFTs make loyalty programs more dynamic, exciting, and profitable.

The programs can also become more efficient, thanks to the nature of smart contracts. For example, Aoki recently wanted to add a perk for his A0K1VERSE fans: access to an exclusive Halloween event. It was easy, says Colon: It was just a matter of telling people, “I got your contract code. All your community members are already included, don’t worry,” says Colon. “Twenty-five hundred people [from A0K1VERSE] are now automatically able to purchase tickets.”

Image Credit: Bobby Fisher

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So, when’s all of this coming?

Despite Aoki’s enthusiasm for Web3, he and Colon admit: It’s not transforming their lives just yet. “Somewhere between 10% to 20% of [Steve’s] business is Web3-based,” Colon says. Live touring remains Aoki’s bread and butter, with brand partnerships coming in as a “relatively distant second.” He hasn’t lost sight of either of those revenue streams, though, by diving into Web3. “We’ve gotten to a great place where the three feed each other,” Colon says.

For example, A0K1VERSE grants token-holding members tickets to live shows and products created with Aoki’s brand partners. Most of those brand partners are collaborating on Web3 products with Aoki, which he can in turn promote at his live shows, where A0K1VERSE members get special access and fuel the hype.

Web3 could prove to be transformative. Or it could prove to be a lot of hype about nothing — just an incredibly complicated way of doing things we’re already doing perfectly well. When it’s this early, it’s hard to say. But as more startups begin offering Web3-based services, it will become easier and easier to engage with them — and, if you’re like Aoki and enjoy being able to “climb through the noise to find the gem,” there’s plenty of noise to climb through.

“We are literally creating our own culture and community, and building our own narrative and ecosystem,” Aoki says. It reminds him a lot of those early days in the hardcore music scene. Except this time, he’s excited for others to hear the music too.

Related: How to Tap Into Innovation, the Most Essential Part of Your Entrepreneurial Journey

The Nobel Prize committees have announced the winners of this year’s prestigious awards, and each recipient is a trailblazer in their respective field.

The winners are chosen by committees in Sweden and Norway that select six individuals who have excelled in physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, economic science, literature and peace work. Traditionally, the committees announce one winner each day in Stockholm and Oslo during the first full week of October, and an in-person ceremony follows at a later date. However, this will be the first year since the start of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic that the winners will receive their medals and diplomas (not to mention 10 million Swedish kronor, or $900,000) in Stockholm in December. The winners from the past two years have been invited to join as well.

The Nobel Prize winners have been announced each October since the awards’ inception in 1901. The awards are considered the most prestigious in the world and are given to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.”

Keep scrolling to meet the 2022 Nobel Prize laureates.

Physiology or medicine: Dr. Svante Pääbo

Dr. Svante Pääbo won the 2022 Nobel Prize for his discoveries in human evolution.

The Sweden-based geneticist produced a full Neanderthal genome by extracting genetic material from 40,000-year-old bones, marking a groundbreaking milestone in ancient DNA studies.

Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo – this year’s #NobelPrize laureate in physiology or medicine – accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. pic.twitter.com/XO64ysoWnw

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2022

Related: The Scientists Whose Research Led to Everything We Know About Sleep Just Won the Nobel Prize in Medicine

Physics: Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger

Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger’s work in quantum technology landed them the second Nobel Prize announced in 2022.

Although Aspect is from France, Clauser hales from the U.S., and Zeilinger is from Austria, the three separately performed “groundbreaking experiments” using entangled quantum states that behaved as one unit even after being separated. “Their results have cleared the way for new technology,” the committee stated.

Chemistry: Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless

The Nobel Prize for chemistry went to another trio, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry,” the committee stated.

Together, they created a functional form of chemistry, click chemistry, which is a “straightforward route” to building molecular functions. Dr. Bertozzi “took click chemistry to a new level” and started utilizing it in living organisms.

Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman chemist to be awarded the prize, while Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be awarded two Nobel Prizes.

The #NobelPrize in Chemistry 2022 is about making difficult processes easier. Click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions have taken chemistry into the era of functionalism. pic.twitter.com/hsNEBHDZ2U

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 5, 2022

Literature: Annie Ernaux

French novelist Annie Ernaux took home the Nobel Prize in literature as the 17th woman to win the award since 1901. The author, who is 82, has been writing autobiographical stories about feminism and the human experience for more than 50 years.

This year’s #NobelPrize laureate in literature Annie Ernaux has said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes for social inequality. For this purpose she uses language as “a knife”, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination. pic.twitter.com/TQm6rxjvMp

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2022

In her writing, 2022 #NobelPrize laureate in literature Annie Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. She has written over thirty literary works.

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2022

Peace work: Ales Bialiatski, human rights organizations Center for Civil Liberties and Memorial

The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize is shared by three recipients: Belarus-based human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties and Russian human rights organization Memorial.

Bialiatski is the founder of Belarus human rights organization Viasna, or Spring, which was born in 1996 in response to authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko, per CNN. The longtime advocate was arrested in 2020 after participating in protests against Lukashenko. According to the Nobel committee, Bialiatski is still detained without trial, but “despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr. Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus.”

The Center for Civil Liberties has been working tirelessly since Russia invaded Ukraine to “identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population” and is playing a key role in “holding the guilty parties accountable for their crimes,” the committee stated.

The third recipient, Memorial, was founded in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union to expose abuse and injustice. It was shut down by a Russian court in December 2021 for violating Russia’s “foreign agent” law.

Related: Celebrate Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Win With These 20 Inspiring Quotes

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Economics: Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2022 was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises,” the Nobel Prize committee announced on Monday.

Bernanke was the chair of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, per ABC News, while Diamond and Dybvig work as professors at The University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis, respectively.

The work for which Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig are being recognised has been crucial to subsequent research that has enhanced our understanding of banks, bank regulation, banking crises and how financial crises should be managed.#NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/4drJwZ0yF9

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 10, 2022

By studying the history of American economics, particularly the Great Depression of the 1930s, they improved how we understand the role of banks during times of hardship and the bank’s impact on societal functions.

“The laureates’ insights have improved our ability to avoid both serious crises and expensive bailouts,” Tore Ellingsen, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a press release.

Usually, founders travel to meet investors in coastal cities. But in 2014, Steve Case and his team of investors began an annual bus tour, traveling to meet founders where they lived. It was the next step in a longstanding goal of Case’s; following his work as chairman and CEO of America Online, he’d founded an investment firm called Revolution, with an eye toward empowering entrepreneurs across the country — not just in clusters like Silicon Valley and New York. The bus tour, complete with a pitch competition, targeted places like Detroit, Chattanooga, and more.

Courtesy of Steve Case

“It was not clear what we’d find when we hit the road and rolled into town,” Case writes in his new book The Rise of the Rest, which shares the same name as the bus tour. But after more than eight years, over 11,000 miles of travel, and 40-plus city visits, Case is passionate about what they encountered: He describes a country full of thriving (or on-the-cusp) entrepreneurial ecosystems, and a radical shift in how and where companies are grown. Here, he explains why he believes the greatest innovations will now come from all over.

Related: “There’s Often No Right Answer”: A Famous Economist Explains the Smartest Way to Tackle Life’s “Wild Problems”

You make a bold prediction in the book. You write, “Over the next decade, a majority of the iconic startup companies, the ones that create tens of thousands of jobs and end up being worth billions of dollars will not be in Silicon Valley, but all across the country.” Why do you feel so confident about that?

Because we’ve seen it firsthand. If you look back 250 years ago, America itself was a startup. The country then led the way in the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution and the Digital Revolution. And that enabled us to become the leading economic power in the world. That happened all across the country. That’s the history. It’s really more in the last several decades, when innovation became about software and coding, that Silicon Valley became where most of the money is, and so people left different parts of the country to go there.

That’s started to shift over the last decade or so. In a number of cities, momentum has built around startup communities, clustering people together, attracting more capital, slowing the brain drain of people leaving, accelerating the boomerang of people returning, and having these breakout tent-pole company successes. Then with a pandemic — obviously, it’s a tragedy in many respects, but one of the silver linings was that it led people to rethink their lives a little bit. It led to an unbundling of where you work and where you live and how you work and how you live. It broke the lock that Silicon Valley had on the innovation economy. Today, it’s really dozens of cities, not just a few, that are rising.

I’ve heard many people say that next wave of innovation will be in “boring” — but foundationally important — industries like, say, insurance or healthcare or transportation. There’s already a lot of expertise in these subjects outside of, say, Silicon Valley, right?

The sectors that you mentioned, you could call them boring — but I call them the largest industries in the world and some of the most important aspects of our lives. How do we get around? What do we eat? How do we stay healthy? Healthcare alone is around one-sixth of the economy. That’s where the puck is moving. That’s where the innovation will be in this next wave of the Internet. And there are certain cities where that domain expertise really advantages the startups in those places.

For instance, we’re seeing a lot of companies in the healthcare space move to where the big research hospitals are — building on that expertise, that legacy understanding of these businesses, which is going to become increasingly important. Because healthcare is not about the technology. It’s not about the software. That’s the table stakes. The real value is created by building partnerships with a lot of different organizations and hospitals, health plans, and others so they will adopt and integrate your technology. That requires the ability to form trust, and often that will come from the entrepreneurs in these cities that really understand those industries and are living side by side with some of the key partners that could really catapult their companies to greatness.

Related: Why an Entrepreneur’s Ability to Innovate Will Make (or Break) Future Success

Right, because particularly in specialized industries, people want to feel like they’re understood.

When we were in Chattanooga, we found a company called FreightWaves that built a data platform for the trucking and logistics industry. Well, I didn’t know this until we were there, but some of the biggest trucking companies in the country are headquartered in Chattanooga. Or, we invested in a company in Northwest Arkansas called AcreTrader that’s basically a platform to find investors to invest in farmland. The founder was in San Francisco but decided to move to Arkansas because they were trying to get farmers on the platform — and if you want to be credible and trusted in that industry, it’s better to be where there is a culture around farming.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Steve Case

Many small cities are trying to build entrepreneurial ecosystems, which you describe as a wheel with seven spokes — startups, investors, universities, government, corporations, startup support organizations, and local media. But what’s required for all of this to truly succeed?

The first step is slowing that brain drain. Capital is a key part of that. But there’s some other, subtler aspects. You need to have a community. You’re seeing the creation of neighborhoods within a lot of cities where entrepreneurs tend to cluster, because it is helpful to bounce ideas off each other. It’s also important for local leaders to really spotlight and celebrate entrepreneurs.

We encourage entrepreneurs to focus on building their company, but also to figure out ways to drive more connectivity with more people in the community. That then helps maximize the likelihood of some of these companies being successful — creating those breakout successes that attract more capital and more talent.

Related: How Growing Businesses Can Prioritize Community Involvement

What’s your advice for an entrepreneur who lives in a small city, and wants to help build their local ecosystem?

First of all, believe in yourself and your community. Entrepreneurship is about seeing the world in a different view, but it’s important to recognize that entrepreneurship is a team sport. So who else should be on your team to help take that idea and give it life? Then, recognize that it’s not just about you and your team and your company — you’re part of a broader community, so how do you make it easier for all the boats to rise?

Right now, the country is divided in part based on opportunity. A lot of people feel left out, left behind. How do we create a sense in their cities, in their communities, that they’re on the move and there really is hope and possibility?

This article is excerpted from the new book Build for Tomorrow.

We are in a moment of great change, and that change has surely come for you. Perhaps you’ve been forced to adapt to the unpredictable. Or you’ve pivoted. Or released a new product or service. I’m going to guess that, in some way, you feel like these changes have been equal parts success and failure — that something is working very well, but you aren’t fully happy or satisfied. Maybe a small wellspring of panic is brewing.

Why?

I’ll tell you my theory: It’s because you’re 99% there. And that last 1% hurts the most.

This is like hiking a mountain with a pebble in your shoe: It doesn’t really matter if your legs are strong enough to conquer the incline, or if your shoes grip the earth tightly enough, because if the tiniest, most infinitesimal part of that rock formation ends up underneath your heel, it can bring you to a halt. You must stop, take off your shoe, and locate that tiny part.

Related: Why Struggle Is a Good Thing, Even If We Never Want It

Sometimes, the most impactful part of a journey is also the smallest part.

So how can you locate it? And how can you make it better?

To start, you need to understand what I call the “99% There” problem. It’s time to back up.

Image Credit: Nicolás Ortega

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When Miley Cyrus twerked at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, prudes were aghast. “We’re on a moral downward spiral,” conservative radio host Laura Ingraham told her listeners at the time. “What you’re hearing is the end of the culture.” But in truth, Ingraham was just echoing a centuries-old complaint: A new dance reaches mainstream culture, and traditionalists use it as a stand-in for everything they find objectionable about their own fading relevance. It famously happened with jazz and rock and roll — but the mother of all dance scandals, and arguably the very first true dance-inspired crisis, was the waltz.

In the early 1800s, European society was absolutely scandalized by the waltz. London’s The Times, for example, called it an “obscene display” for “prostitutes and adulteresses.” The British Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote a nearly 2,000-word poem about how much he hated the dance. A society man named Theodore Hook — who, on a completely unrelated note, is credited as the inventor of the picture postcard — despised the waltz so much that he got into a duel over it with a waltz-loving military general. They each shot once and called it a day.

Antiwaltzers at the time talked a lot about how unhealthy the dance was, and how the human body wasn’t made to endure all that spinning. A 19th-century doctor claimed that habitual dancing would take years off your life — calculating that the average life span for a waltzer was 37 years for a man, and 25 years for a woman. In one way, this was nothing new: Victorian-era doctors had also warned that novels might make women infertile, and in the 1800s, doctors warned of a medical condition called “bicycle face” — a permanent disfigurement caused by the strain of attempting to keep the bicycle balanced.

But intriguingly, the doctors of the late 1800s were correct about the waltz: It actually was bad for people’s health.

The doctors were just wrong about why.

Doctors noted that after waltzing, some people fell ill. “Dancers were reported to have developed bronchitis and even pneumonia after waltzing. This led some doctors to blame the dance itself as the cause,” says Mark Knowles, author of the book The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances, who is on the faculty of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Therefore, doctors believed, the dance itself was the problem. Our bodies were not built to withstand that much spinning and touching.

Related: Would You Rather Change or Let Your Business Die?

But here’s what those doctors didn’t consider, according to Knowles: The dance happened in a ballroom with no ventilation, because buildings back then weren’t designed for good airflow. Things were even worse in the winter, when windows and doors were closed. Candles or gas lights would illuminate the room, which poured noxious chemicals into the air. The floor was sometimes lined with a big piece of linen called a “crash cloth,” which enabled dancers to glide more easily — but when dancers traversed them, their feet released lint from the cloth that filled the air with minute linen particles. When these were inhaled, they could cause serious problems in the lungs. And on top of all that, proper women’s attire at the time called for petticoats, which could be heavy, and tightly laced corsets that made breathing difficult.

In short, the pure act of waltzing was perfectly healthy. It was 99% there. But many things around the waltz were insane and deadly. That 1% needed to be solved before the waltz was 100% enjoyable.

Now let’s fast-forward a few centuries and look at a modern cause for safety concern: electric scooters. If you’ve visited a major city recently, you’ve surely seen these things. They’re made by companies such as Lime and Bird, and the first time you come upon one, you think it’s a mistake.

Here’s this little device, left unaccompanied on a sidewalk, available to anyone. But that’s its most compelling feature. To locate a Lime scooter, for example, just open Lime’s app and it’ll show you where all available scooters are on a map. When you approach one and scan its QR code, the wheels unlock. Just turn the handle and zip away, fueled by an electric-powered engine that can move between 15 and 20 miles per hour. In New York City, for example, you’ll be charged one dollar to unlock the scooter and then 30 cents per minute. When you’re done, just leave it at a bike rack or a sidewalk “furniture zone.” Someone else will find it soon.

The scooters started appearing in cities around 2017 and were welcomed with hostility. The Philadelphia Inquirer summed it up in this headline: “Electric Scooters Have Brought Chaos and Outrage in Cities Across the Country.” People treated these devices as a wildly new intrusion onto city streets — which, historically speaking, they are not. The first motorized scooters hit the streets around 1916, and were a largely welcome addition. That year, The [New York City] Sun said scooters have “the disposition of a bronco and the guile of an eel,” which is a lastingly accurate description. But times are different. In 1916, roads were awash in people, commerce, and every newfangled machine on wheels. Today roads are almost entirely reserved for cars. Which means scooters don’t feel like they belong.

Soon after the scooters were introduced in American cities in 2017, the narrative turned to safety: Scooters, many people said, were too dangerous. Cities started threatening to ban them. This, too, has a long history. In 1880, bicycles were banned from Central Park because the park commissioners thought they were a dangerous nuisance.

And yet, just like with doctors and the waltz, there is unfortunate truth to the safety concerns about electric scooters: People have crashed and even died while riding them (although multiple studies have found them to be no more dangerous than other transportation modes). So in one way, people’s safety concerns seem reasonable: They see people being harmed on the scooters, and conclude that the scooter is the problem.

But what if the scooter is not the problem? And what if the problem is actually quite solvable?

Lime dug into its data on accidents in the U.S., seeking to understand what is happening. It looked at incident reports related to all rides for one calendar year, starting on March 1, 2019, which consisted of roughly 38 million scooter trips. It found that 99.985% of trips involved no safety incidents. Of the trips with incidents, 93% of them were minor scrapes or cuts that required no medical attention. This left 0.0011% of all trips assessed that required medical attention, hospitalization, or worse.

Lime then dug into that group, seeking patterns. It found that less-experienced riders made up the majority of these reported accidents, and 36% of incidents occurred during a rider’s first five trips. With this insight, Lime launched a course program called First Ride in cities around the world. That way, people could take their first rides in controlled environments, and therefore safely move through the window when most serious accidents occur.

Now let’s step back and look at these two very different situations — the waltz and the scooter. Both brought changes to people’s culture and environment, and both were first adopted by young people. Both were believed to cause bodily harm, and those concerns were validated by real people who experienced real harm. As a result, both were targeted for elimination: People of the 1800s wanted to stop the waltz entirely, and people of the late 2010s aimed to take scooters off the streets.

Related: Why an Entrepreneur’s Ability to Innovate Will Make (or Break) Future Success

But after a closer examination, the waltz and the scooter are found to be statistically healthy activities. They are not inherently dangerous. Instead, the problem existed around the waltz and the scooter. It had to do with the environment that the waltz and scooter were experienced in — the 1% problem in 99% greatness.

Those problems were solvable and would result in broader adoption of change. The waltz would transition from a scandalous dance for kids into a classic dance for all. The scooter would go from a terrifying new obstacle to a common option for urban transportation.

These two stories helped me identify the “99% There” problem. If we want to find the real opportunity in something new and potentially scary, we cannot focus on the new thing itself. We must look in the margins around that new thing — making adjustments in the places where nobody else is looking, so that we transform something from “new and scary” into “can’t live without.”

And how can we do that in our own lives?

To find out, I decided to ask someone who transformed millions of small businesses and reshaped the way commerce happens. His name is Jim McKelvey, and he’s the cofounder of Square.

I asked him what he thought of my theory. “It’s good, perhaps great,” he replied, but “it depends on if someone can use this for a competitive advantage or not.”

Then he explained, with two words, how to do exactly that.

Image Credit: Nicolás Ortega

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First, here’s what you need to know about McKelvey. In 2009, he partnered with a friend named Jack Dorsey to introduce a tiny object called the Square Reader. It’s that roughly inch-long credit card reader that plugs into a handheld device, such as an iPhone or iPad, and transforms it into a digital cash register. This sounds small and simple, but it was transformative. Many small businesses couldn’t accept credit cards before this; the process was simply too cumbersome and expensive for them. But now everything from food trucks to farmers’ market stands could take a card. Business has fundamentally changed because of it.

Maybe you’ve swiped your card through a Square Reader and thought: That’s so easy! Competitors in the payments industry saw it and thought: That’s so easy to knock off! Then they tried — and often failed. “People thought the secret to Square’s success was building a card reader that plugged into the headset jack,” McKelvey told me, “but really it was the other 14 things in our innovation stack.”

Related: 10 Truths for Making Change Successful

An “innovation stack” is a model that defines the different types of possible innovations within an organization, and a way of thinking about building new things. The idea is that innovations are stacked on top of one another, each working in tandem to support the other. (It’s also the title of McKelvey’s book, The Innovation Stack.) A credit card reader, for example, isn’t very useful without figuring out how to lower the processing fees for small businesses (which is the reason so many entrepreneurs didn’t take credit cards), or without completely new and innovative relationships with credit card companies. Square addressed all that. Square’s competitors did not. “As a result,” McKelvey says, “most of our potential competitors headed down a dead-end path designing hardware while the real opportunity lay elsewhere.”

To McKelvey, this is a fundamental lesson that goes beyond business. It’s about remembering that what you see isn’t all there is. Or, to keep with the theme of my theory, you can’t confuse the 99% for 100%. “The reasons things look easy is often ignorance,” he told me. “Watching a master chef poach an egg makes it look easy. Only after you have a kitchen full of gelatinous slime will you appreciate how difficult the process truly is. I’ve watched entire companies get funded based on an assumption that something is easy that is actually difficult. Humans love to think they understand.”

Given all that, I asked McKelvey how a person can identify something new and then truly maximize it. How can they get to 100% themselves?

“Doing one thing causes another problem, but often in a surprising way,” he said. To illustrate his point, he reframed the stories of the scooter and waltzing that I had also shared with him: “People assume dancing is unsafe, but really it’s the ballrooms. People assume the scooters are unsafe, but really it’s the riders. Look for that phrase but really and you will find a competitive advantage.”

Look earlier in this article and you’ll see that McKelvey used that exact phrase when describing Square. Here it is again: “People thought the secret to Square’s success was building a card reader that plugged into the headset jack,” he said, “but really it was the other 14 things in our innovation stack.”

When McKelvey meets with innovators, he loves asking them this: “Tell me something nobody else knows about your innovation stack.” It’s a kind of quiz. If someone has created something truly new, and understands its exact purpose in the world and how it’s measurably different and better than everything else, then they will have dozens of answers to this question. “Posers spit platitudes, while real entrepreneurs know firsthand why things happen in nonobvious ways,” McKelvey said.

His advice to anyone trying to answer that question, or to just find the value in new things: “Look for the but reallys,” he says.

Related: 4 Lessons 2020 Taught Us About Adaptability in the Workplace

These simple words may in fact be the difference between adapting and truly thriving. Want to get to a place where you truly, fully appreciate something new, and maximize the opportunity in changing times? Make a list of but reallys. Write down at least three of them, at which point you’ll have thought so deeply about the subject that you’ll probably have many more. Challenge yourself to recognize not just what this new experience is good for, or what its potential is, but what it might be missing as well.

Imagine saying to yourself: I may be dissatisfied with my job, but really I’m being pushed to better identify what I love and how to pursue it. I may need to move to a different city, but really I’m now finding a place that fulfills needs I didn’t have before. I may have just taken on a terrifying new project, but really I’m learning a skill set that will be valuable later.

Once you know your but really, you can foster it. You can solve the small problems, which in turn can solve the big ones.

We must innovate inside the margins of our own lives. We are 99% there. That can be a problem, or it can be an opportunity: It means there’s only 1% left to go.

→ This article is excerpted from Build for Tomorrow copyright © 2022 by Jason Feifer. Used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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