Business and commerce articles from across Nature Portfolio

During urban stressors such as floods, rising information demands spur citizen-created tools that partly meet data needs but engender information scattering — the dispersion of situational-awareness data across multiple platforms — that undermines community safety. We examine this challenge and pose strategies to overcome it in the future.

Health technologies are typically judged by their technical maturity rather than their ability to improve patient care. As a result, many innovations achieve technological success but fail to reach routine clinical use. Here, we propose clinical translation readiness levels to assess whether health technologies are truly ready for adoption, implementation and patient benefit.

Fibrosis is a major cause of organ dysfunction and mortality, yet current therapies rarely reverse established disease. Biomaterials offer new opportunities to locally modulate tissue-specific repair environments and guide healing away from scar formation and toward regeneration.

Debt-for-food swaps have been presented as instruments that can simultaneously mobilize additional resources for food security and alleviate debt distress in countries with heavy debt burdens. A recently announced large-scale swap deal between Kenya and the US International Development Finance Corporation provides an opportunity to assess the future potential of such instruments and to identify key considerations for maximizing their effectiveness.

Design failures often result not from technical flaws but from a lack of consideration into how, why and by whom a technology will be used. Human-centred design prioritizes collaboration with user communities to develop adoptable technologies, ultimately saving time and resources.

Identifying future winning energy technologies is increasingly important as governments design green industrial policy. By evaluating technology characteristics, policymakers can strategically pick winning technologies that deliver both global cost-competitiveness and domestic economic payoffs.