The occasional series of good readings from around the web returns. It usually appears when the week’s readings have been good and should be shared. The themes are strategy, technology, investment and regulation, but sometimes they just cannot be separated. This week’s readings are mostly about predictions.
G Steven Burrill predicts what’s to come in Biotech in 2009, and also evaluates his predictions for 2008.
ReadWriteWeb makes predictions for the Web and web-centric businesses.
The NVCA survey of VCs suggests that in 2009, life sciences and cleantech have the highest potential for stability and growth. For more, download the survey results here (pdf).
On predicting regulatory futures, I did not come across any provocative or inspiring readings. If you did, do share them in comments. Thanks.
My own view is that while governments would like to regulate the banking sector more tightly, regulators will need time to get up to speed with the sector’s innovations. So financial services regulation reform won’t be anytime soon. As budgets get tighter, healthcare provisioning and regulation will be in a tight spot. However health problems will see an increase in the tough economic times. So I predict that health related regulation will not get any more stringent than they are. Sectors such as retail won’t see any new regulation although governments may be forced to mandate apprenticeship or retraining schemes to employ the huge, low skilled retail staff that gets redundancy as retail chains clean house.